Gerald Stern, one of America’s most beloved and respected poets, who wrote of his childhood, Judaism, mortality and the wonders of the contemplative life with spirited melancholy and earthly humor, has died. He was 97.
Stern, New Jersey’s first Poet Laureate, died Thursday at Calvary Hospice in New York City, according to his longtime partner Anne Marie Macari. A statement from Macari, released Saturday by publisher WW Norton, did not include a cause of death.
Winner of the National Book Award in 1998 for the anthology This Time, the balding, round-eyed star has sometimes been personally confused with Allen Ginsberg and often compared to Walt Whitman for his lyrical and sensual style and gift for marrying the physical, from world to world big cosmos.
Shaped by the rugged, urban environment of his hometown of Pittsburgh, Stern also identified strongly with nature and animals, marveling at the “power” of a maple tree, comparing himself to a hummingbird or a squirrel, or finding the “mystery of life” in a dead animal on the street.
A lifelong agnostic who also firmly believed in “the idea of the Jew”, the poet wrote more than a dozen books and described himself as “part comedic, part idealistic, full of irony, full of mockery and sarcasm”. In poetry and essays, he wrote with particular intensity about the past—his immigrant parents, long-lost friends and lovers, and the striking divide between rich and poor, and Jew and gentile in Pittsburgh. He considered The One Thing in Life from the 1977 collection Lucky Life to be the poem that best defined him:
There’s a sweetness buried in my head
There is water with a small cave behind it
There is a mouth that speaks Greek
I’ll keep it to myself; what I come back to;
the one thing no one else wanted
He was over 50 before winning major awards, but was often quoted in the second half of his life. In addition to his National Book Award, his honors have included being a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Leaving Another Kingdom and receiving lifetime achievement awards such as the Ruth Lilly Prize and the Wallace Stevens Prize. In 2013, the Library of Congress awarded him the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Early Collected Poems, hailing him as “one of America’s great poet-heralds in the Whitman tradition: with moments of humor and quirkiness, and an enduring generosity, his work.” celebrates the mythologizing power of art”.
Meanwhile, he was named New Jersey’s first Poet Laureate in 2000, and inadvertently helped bring about the position’s early demise. After his two-year tenure, he recommended Amiri Baraka as his successor. Baraka sparked a violent outcry with his 2002 poem Somebody Blew Up America, which claimed that Israel had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks the previous year. Baraka refused to resign, so the state decided to no longer have an awardee.
Stern, born in 1925, recalled no major literary influences as a child, but spoke about the lasting trauma of the death of his older sister Sylvia at age eight. He would describe himself as “a brawler who hung out in pool halls and got into fights.” But he told the New York Times in 1999 that he was a well-read hitter who excelled in college. Stern studied political science at the University of Pittsburgh and received a master’s degree in comparative literature from Columbia University. Ezra Pound and WB Yeats were among the first poets he read attentively.
Stern lived in Europe and New York during the 1950s, eventually settling in a 19th-century house near the Delaware River in Lambertville. His creative development came slowly. It was only during free moments in the military, serving briefly after World War II, that he had the “sweet idea” of writing for a living. He spent much of his 30s working on a poem about the American presidency, The Pineys, but despaired that it was “indulgent” and “dull”. As he approached his 40s, he worried that he had become a “forever old student” and a “forever young teacher.” It was through his midlife crisis that he finally found his voice as a poet and discovered he had “taken an easier path” than he should have.
“It also had to do with realizing that my protracted youth was over, that I would not live forever, that death was not just a literary event but very real and very personal,” he wrote in the essay Some Secrets, published in 1983. “I was able to let go and finally become myself and lose my shame and pride.”
His marriage to Patricia Miller ended in divorce. They had two children, Rachael Stern Martin and David Stern.
Stern mostly avoided topical poetry, but he was a longtime political activist whose causes included desegregating a swimming pool in Indiana, Pennsylvania and organizing an anti-apartheid reading at the University of Iowa. He taught at several schools but had great skepticism about writing programs and academic life. At Temple University, he was so enraged by the school’s decision in the 1950s to build a 6-foot brick wall separating the campus from the nearby black neighborhoods of Philadelphia that he made sure to climb the wall on his way to class .
“The institution subtly and insidiously works on you in such a way that although you appear to have freedom, you become a servant,” he told the online publication The Rumpus in 2010. “Your main problem is getting promoted to the next thing. Or let yourself be invited to a picnic. Or get a permanent position. Or get laid.”
In addition to Macari and his children, Stern is survived by grandsons Dylan and Alana Stern, and Rebecca and Julia Martin.