Still Burning

By Gerald Stern b. 1925 Gerald Stern

Me trying to understand say whence

say whither, say what, say me with a pencil walking,

say reading the dictionary, say learning medieval

Latin, reading Spengler, reading Whitehead,

William James I loved him, swimming breaststroke

and thinking for an hour, how did I get here?

Or thinking in line, say the 69 streetcar

or 68 or 67 Swissvale,

that would take me elsewhere, me with a textbook

reading the pre-Socratics, so badly written,

whoever the author was, me on the floor of

the lighted stacks sitting cross-legged,

walking afterwards through the park or sometimes

running across the bridges and up the hills,

sitting down in our tiny diningroom,

burning in a certain way, still burning.

Source: American Sonnets (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2002)

Biography

Gerald Stern has been called an “American original,” “a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary,” and, by his friend Stanley Kunitz, “the wilderness in American poetry.” Over dozens of books, and decades of teaching and activism, Stern has emerged as one of America’s most celebrated and irascible poets. “If I could choose one poem of mine to explain my stance,” Stern told Contemporary Poets, “it would be ‘The One Thing in . . .

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