A Look Into Gerald Stern's Galaxy Love

David Kirby, at the New York Times, wonders why writers write. Is it out of trauma or jealousy, or simply because of one's proximity to a window with a view? As Kirby notes: [...] most writers I know are simply people who put down their cereal bowl from time to time and look out the window and say to themselves something along the lines of, 'Gee, I wonder how all this would look if I moved this here and put that there.'" And that, dear reader, his how one might best approach the poetry of Gerald Stern, who at the age of 92 has published his most recent collection, Galaxy Love. Kirby considers Stern's prolific early years and then turns to his more recent efforts.

Add to that the fact that Stern is enormously prolific — those early poems alone amount to nearly 550 pages, where the entire collected work of his contemporary Jack Gilbert runs to fewer than 400 — and it’s little wonder that Stern isn’t identified with a single iconic poem like Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” or James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” or Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy.”

No, what you get instead from Stern is no single poem standing statuesque in the quad but energy, motion, appetite. Many of the early poems are built around propulsive lines, ones that begin “it is,” “we will,” “I want,” “you should,” over and over, but the poems in his latest book, “Galaxy Love,” no longer do that. At this point in his life (Stern turned 92 in February), the poet has settled into a serenity reminiscent of his old master Whitman. The poem “Decades,” for example, ends, “I loved to watch men working, I loved to sit / and eat with them, and see them smoke and listen / to them talk, they were my first prophets.”

Yet the appetite’s still on duty. Thus there is in this new book a poem called “Ravenous,” in which Stern traces the word back to its roots when he says, “I’m a hungry — and curious — raven.” And there’s a poem called “Gelato,” in which a couple of young fans visit the poet to talk poetry, pausing to sample the creamy Italian treat of the title (“and since we were poets we went by the names, / instead of the tastes and colors”). It’s safe to say that, no matter how his poems have changed over time, appetite for the world and all its riches is the driving force of Stern’s career, from his earliest books through this one.

Head to NYT to savor the rest.