What other poet
is on his knees in the frozen clay with a spade
and a silver fork, fighting the old maples,
scattering handfuls of gypsum and moss, still worshipping?
Gerald Stern –“Making the Light Come”
Listen to Stern read “Torn Coat,” form his new collections: Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018 (W.W. Norton, 2020):
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/152229/torn-coat
We continue the celebration of Gerald Stern’s 95th birthday (February 22), with a few poems inspired by—and dedicated to — him.
Toi Derricotte
Thoughts on Jerry Stern’s 95th birthday
I’m reading the
poem by Jerry in the new
New Yorker & right as I
read the last lines about the dead
warbler singing—
“and he sang from time to time, dead or not,
a ‘rising trill,’ as the book says,
in the upper levels where the worms are.”
the noon bells of the cathedral
bong out in agreement! As if they want
it banged into my head:
The poems are always
with you. Lines like that
visit every day—comforting—
your wise, funny,
loving truths. But when they
put on their coats
to leave,
I hold tight & weep.
Jeff Friedman
The Long Heat Wave
for Gerald Stern
Give me back the long heat wave, the sweat dripping
from eyelashes, the stained blouses, the black windows,
the spiders dangling from their silver bridges,
the wasps lighting on the branches of the cedar bushes
as they waited for me to make a dash for the screen door.
Give me back Herman Meltzer, our upstairs neighbor,
who forged his last check with a flourish before the police
took him away in his checked pajamas, handcuffed.
Give me back Hanna Gorelick in her red satin robe,
her hair in rollers; and Cathy Cowser naked in front of the window;
and “A Day in the Life” with its scratches and pops,
John Lennon singing “I read the news today, oh boy…”;
and my thick brown hair—every morning
I brushed it down so hard my scalp stung, but the curls
sprung up before I left the bathroom mirror;
and my father warning the butcher at Sherman’s Deli
not to trim off too much fat from the corned beef.
And give me back Barbie Silverman’s long smooth legs
in her black short shorts, the Santa Maria rising from
the bottom of the river, the goddess undressing in the eye of the Arch
as the rabbis chanted to the brown muddy water.
Give me back the blue butterflies streaming
through the emptiness above the tall white sycamores,
the speckled blackbirds shitting on the Handshears’
new Oldsmobile, no matter where they parked.
Give me back my mother balancing her checkbook at the kitchen table—
“Everyone in Israel is beautiful,” she says; and
my father in his shorts, thumbing through
a thumb-size version of The New Testament and
marking in red the passages he would use to make his sales pitch to the goyim,
raising his fist to the TV tube every time he hears
another special report—“But is it good for the Jews?”—
and my sister with her thick black hair,
waiting by the silent phone for a date to call.
Give me back the burning red coils in the sky, the plague of locusts,
God railing into the wind, the dark news that floats through the windows,
the spark of light at the beginning of our world.
Kimiko Hahn: Birthday ode to Jerry
Ode to the Line "oh God of mercy, oh wild God"
You, capping some kind of unhinged sonnet (shops/pots, Philco/Bolero,
tie/automatic eye/1945); after list upon list (in fact, like a ship's listing);
you from a tiny room with knives flashing and red with laughter;
you from the scribbled ballpoint of a deity–I don't believe in God
but you I believe in, what with your 1945 ungodly
farting, screaming, dancing immigrant knowledge that
prompts me to ask of myself what could possibly
be my raging I have never seen X the way I did Y–?
(Note: the line is from "The Dancing" by Gerald Stern)
Jonas Holdeman
Stern Sonnet
for Jerry
I’ll bet you didn’t know Gerald Stern was born
on February 22, 1925, that his father’s real
last name was Dohlgypyat and if you did, I’d say
you need to get out more, and I’m sure you didn’t know
when Gerald Stern was 14 years old he rushed into
a burning tenement building, rescued a family of
Ukranian immigrants from certain death by conflagration—
and though that didn’t really happen,
I don’t think Jerry would mind if I told you that
or about when, at breakfast, he tapped the back
of my hand with an index finger, asked, Did you know
I ran the mile in high school? went on to tell how, every day
after classes, he hiked up Overlook Drive to Schenley Oval,
the abandoned horse track in south Pittsburgh to make two circuits
of the mile and a quarter, run until Harry, his father, came to get him
and I can see him now setting down his books,
walking the packed dirt freckled with chickweed and clover and violets
toward the grandstand, breaking into a slow trot,
rounding the first turn, churning into a canter, legs pumping
now into a gallop, surging the curves, plunging
headlong down the homestretch, hair flying wildly behind
as he tossed his head, screaming with pain or joy–
then he told me about a boy, an eight year old messenger,
blue wool jacket, red satin tie, funny grown man hat,
delivering messages, packages all over downtown
and how he had to go into the Asbury Hotel, how there was
a sign in the lobby, “No Jews and no dogs,”
that’s the way it was in those days,
asked could I imagine walking into that place every day,
every day seeing that sign and wondering,
What could they possibly have against dogs?
David Rigsbee
At Last a Meadow
for Gerald Stern at 95
I drove down with Linda
to meet you in 1977, that tough year.
On the way back, careening through the Poconos,
we nearly soared off a cliff, when I launched
into an inspired and definitive analysis
of “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which she thought,
tossing her blonde mane, ridiculous.
It was the wild beginning of love,
two desperados, an ancient Mercedes,
and an underlined book by that old Nazi,
Heidegger, tossed in the back.
You opened the door and greeted us,
I remember, horn-rimmed and blinking.
That was the beginning. When I visited again
years later with a different girl in tow,
a picture of you with Paul McCartney
caught my eye. It was a party, you said.
When he asked you what you did,
you replied, “I’m a poet.” Then added,
“And what do you do?” This led to a duet:
“Try a Little Tenderness,” which you correctly
tied to Jimmy Durante, not Otis Redding.
There was an evening in San Francisco
when we went around the table: Kizer,
Hirsch, Levine, Diane Johnson, Alice Adams,
Schevill and the scholar fromage, Leon Edel.
We were each to recite a poem from memory
and to keep going until we ran out of poems
or drink. By the end of the evening, only you
endured, reciting with gusto any poem
we mentioned. Even the most obscure.
I managed only one, the poem that ends,
“time will throw a dart at thee.”
After I had returned from a summer in Rome,
you showed up at a reading I gave in New York
and cheerfully recalled how you had taken a piss
at the Arch of Titus, the original anti-Semite.
“I guess you could say it was an arch-piss,”
was how you put it, complete with a pause
to allow that to sink in. Running into you
later at the Met, you recounted, underlining
your cleverness, how you had landed
a two-week assignment, free of obligation,
at a balmy southern university for $35K.
But there was also the dog, the schnitzel,
opossums and Jack, whose first fame
puzzled you, Jesus and Nietzsche, Galileo,
1945 and the world “at last a meadow,”
the pigeons and Sylvia, the shaking and sadness
but also the dancing, always the dancing,
and the atrocious singing, and the stories
of Stieglitz and Orwell, of saints forgotten,
of Pittsburgh and Paris, soot and snow,
love affairs, assignations, Poland and Germany
with the dead nearby, brilliant, and beloved.
Karen Subach: From a postcard sent to Jerry from Rhodes in October, 1995:
Dear Jerry,
You would be walking around
with a sprig of thyme in your hand
and an olive wreath on your head.
You would be waving to Turkey from Rhodes Harbor
and wondering why there was so much bloodshed
when there was Homer
— and Cavafy,
and every lemon picker could recite a little Sappho.
Hurry up and buy your house on Samos!
Find a little door to paint teal—
and a patio with a mosaic
where you can write your poems.
Alicia Ostriker:
Into the Street
for Jerry Stern
Here comes the sun again
reminding everyone to rise and shine
so we pour the coffee and hear the news
we pick up the paper and sigh like arthritic dogs,
and we might like to blow our exasperated
brains out, when we think about the world
then again we might laugh ourselves silly
figure out how to profit by it
or wonder how to love it anyway
This is what freedom and consciousness are for
as if we are standing on the roof
of a very tall tower
looking at the complicated view
then taking the elevator
going out into the street
Lucky us
Michael Waters
Letter to Stern from Suceava
J:
The waitress upon whom I’ve bestowed
A vulgar sobriquet, Titsecu,
If only to vex my faux-jealous wife
Who asks if I’d flirted enough to learn
Her name (I’d hunkered down to write a poem),
Would prod you to sing some ’40s standard
Or apt “Romania, Romania,”
Not because she doesn’t know how sorry
Her future in this town will be. She does.
She unbuttons her soiled, unisex smock,
Café Tzara sewn in cursive above
One sentry-stiff breast, just as her girlfriend
Skids the Ducati curbside. And she’s off.
I imagine you here among street kids
Who’d trail you, your rabbinical piping,
From train station and dump and sewer nerves
To the only crêpe stall that serves Gypsies.
Almost ninety, you’d boom out brotherhood—
That worn word—as your lice-ridden parade
Revved past pyramids of rat-gray rubble,
The lunar ruins of this post-comm muddle.
The waitress might hear you and, if she knew,
Almost forgive me. Titsecu, I tease
As my wife struggles not to unfrown.
Tough Titsecu.
Ever yr bad boy,
M
We are blessed to live in what your friend Philip Levine named “The City of Gerald,” a city-poem in which we can learn how “to see the universe in an acorn & hear the music of the lost in an empty Pepsi can,” and “where the imagination is king & the honey locust its bride.”
Happy Birthday from all of us poets, readers, students, friends, warbles and red maples!
For essays on Gerald Stern, see Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (edited by Mihaela Moscaliuc, Trinity University Press, 2016)