By: Jeremy Wang-Iverson
Poetry always seemed to me to be a dead man’s game.
To the layman, contemporary poets are about as well known as contemporary marble sculptors, and perhaps as a result of this, poets read in school have been gone long enough to be canonized.
I struggled through the high school poetry text, which ruined any appreciation you might have for a poem by asking idiotic questions like “Can you suggest any reason why the poet did not write lines two to four and six to eight of each stanza as one line each?”
Furthermore, many adolescent writers flex their first creative muscles with poetry to the most horrific ends:
“Beauty is an image, and you are an image to me.
Love is a feeling, and that feeling I feel for you.“
Yes, poetry was used (and abused) to express the most profound emotions by my most profound peers. I didn’t mind high school, but it certainly didn’t give me any reason to respect the literary genre, which often forsakes good English sentences for the nuances of the language and the beauty of words, both admirable goals, just not in fashion these days.
But before meeting Gerald Stern — winner of the National Book Award, the New Jersey poet laureate and Lambertville resident — I had to put to rest my violent dislike of poetry. The process began before I even knew of Mr. Stern — a course in Whitman and Dickinson fortunately gave me enough of an appreciation for the nuances of language and the beauty of words so I could do more with a poem than suggest reasons why poets write lines two to four and six to eight of each stanza as one line each.
Secondly, I brushed up on my Whitman —the 19th-century American master to whom Mr. Stern is often compared.
Finally, and most importantly in the cleansing process, I read many of Mr. Stern’s poems aloud to my dog, who I’ve found always has been appreciative of the nuances of language and the beauty of words.
I was still a little weary walking to his doorstep, carrying “This Time” — the winner of the 1998 National Book Award — and “Last Blue,” his latest work respectively. I knocked and was called back to the porch where he and his muse, Anne Marie, to whom “Last Blue” is dedicated, were eating bagels and drinking coffee.
I whipped out the two books and a notebook, and with minimal questions, he was off.
Mr. Stern was born in Pittsburgh in 1925, the son of a couple who had just emigrated from Eastern Europe. He headed east for college, then spent his 20s living in Paris and New York. He return to his native Pennsylvania when he was about 30, and took a teaching assignment at Temple University.
Since then, he’s lived many of his years in a town near Easton, Pa., and has taught as many universities, including Columbia, New York University and Sarah Lawrence College. He retired in 1995, at which time he was living in Iowa City, teaching at the famed Writers Workshop.
When he decided to come back East, he searched up and down the Delaware, before finding his house in Lambertville.
Mr. Stern is a prolific poet, publishing a book about every three years and not believing in writer’s block. He had a pad of paper and pen tucked into his shirt pocket and said he writes anywhere, from his porch to the McDonald’s, where he’d also get a cup of coffee for 35 cents, the senior citizens’ discount.
He touches on about as many themes as there are poems, which led the Southern Review to compare him to Whitman, but the comparisons wasn’t quite exact.
“We might like to think of Gerald Stern as our quintessentially Whitmanian American poet, but he is far too literate, too world, to seem typically American. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think of him as a post-nuclear, multicultural Whitman for the millennium — the US’s one and only truly global poet.”
While writing on the most worldly of topics, he writes on local ones, too. He has a poem about the Shad Festival and “Snowdrop,” which recounts a walk he took along the canal behind his house.
“We were sharing an umbrella between the four of us,” Mr. Stern said. “I made it a symbol for culture and civilizations, distinct from nature.”
Today, many artists will seek refuge in academia, an option which wasn’t open to Mr. Stern nor one he would have taken anyway. Universities weren’t actively seeking artists as they do today, but he wouldn’t have wanted to follow the now beaten path to tenure anyhow.
Though always an intellectual — his poems are scattered with scholarly allusions — he rejects and disdains the politics of academia and always saw teaching as something to do as long as it was on his terms.
The only option was to make it as a writer, Mr. Stern said. He “made it” with the publishing of “Lucky Life” in 1977, succeeding late in life after spending years as a starving artist, working as anything from a gas station attendant to social worker.
In “Paris,” Mr. Stern recounts his days as an expatriate, “ketchup/with beans, seven pounds of lamb for a dollar,/bread eight cents a loaf.” He said he recently learned to appreciate and accept comfort.
The ambition was to have time to live a kind of life where you could write — if a consequence of that was discomfort, so be it, Mr. Stern said. His latest honor — one to add to the National Book Award, the Lamont Prize, a Guggenheim — was being named last month New Jersey’s first poet laureate.
Today (June 15), he’s getting his picture taken with the governor, and he’ll set the precedent for the position during his two-year term, giving large readings and working closely with other New Jersey poets.
