Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Poet wrote of Judaism, mortality and natural world
GERALD Stern was one of America’s most loved and respected poets who wrote with spirited melancholy and earthly humour about his childhood, Judaism, mortality and the wonders of the contemplative life.
Stern, who has died aged 97, was New Jersey’s first poet laureate.
Winner of the National Book Award in 1998 for the anthology This Time, Stern was sometimes mistaken in person for Allen Ginsberg and often compared to Walt Whitman because of his lyrical and sensual style, and his gift for wedding the physical world to the greater cosmos.
Stern was shaped by the rough, urban surroundings of his native Pittsburgh, but he also identified strongly with nature and animals, marvelling at the “power” of a maple tree, likening himself to a hummingbird or a squirrel, or finding the “secret of life” in a dead animal on the road.
A lifelong agnostic who also fiercely believed in “the idea of the Jew”, the poet wrote more than a dozen books and described himself as “part comedic, part idealistic, coloured in irony, smeared with mockery and sarcasm”.
In poems and essays, he wrote with special intensity about the past – his immigrant parents, long-lost friends and lovers, and the striking divisions between rich and poor and Jews and non-Jews in Pittsburgh.
He regarded The One Thing in Life, from the 1977 collection Lucky Life, as the poem that best defined him.
He was past 50 before he won any major awards, but was cited often over the second half of his life.
Besides his US National Book Award, his honours included being a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1991 for Leaving Another Kingdom and receiving such lifetime achievement awards as the Ruth Lilly Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award.
In 2013, the US Library of Congress
gave him the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Early Collected Poems and praised him as “one of America’s great poet-proclaimers in the Whitmanic tradition: With moments of humour and whimsy, and an enduring generosity, his work celebrates the mythologising power of the art”.
He was named New Jersey’s first poet laureate in 2000, and inadvertently helped bring about the position’s speedy demise.
After serving his two-year term, he recommended Amiri Baraka as his successor. Baraka would set off a fierce outcry with his 2002 poem Somebody Blew Up America, which alleged that Israel had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks the year before.
Baraka refused to step down, so the state decided to no longer have a laureate.
Stern is survived by longtime partner Anne Marie Macari.