Gerald Stern is the author of 10 books of poetry,
including This Time and Last Blue.
His many other awards include the Lamont Prize, a fellowship
from the Guggenheim Foundation, three National Endowment
for the Arts Awards, and a Fellowship
for the Academy of Arts and Letters,
and a Ruth Lilly prize.
He's taught at numerous universities,
including Columbia University, New York University, Sarah
Lawrence College, University of Pittsburgh,
and the Writer's Workshop in Iowa City.
I'm going to fess up to something right now.
A very dear friend of mine came from the Bay Area
to make this introduction for me and I lost her in traffic.
And I know when we're done, we're
going to have some words about it.
But she has just arrived and I am so thrilled.
[APPLAUSE]
As is Alison Deming, so thrilled that she's here.
So I just want to say, my friend and colleague Melanie Maier
will be introducing Gerald Stern tonight.
Mel and I met at a poetry workshop some years ago.
She's a San Francisco native, a graduate of UC Berkeley
and Hastings Law School, the author
of a chapbook, The Art of the Everyday and her poems
have been published in Convolvulus and the Written
Council Literary Review, among many other journals.
A frequent visitor to Tucson, Melanie
made a special trip here tonight to hear
Gerald Stern, with whom she studied
and whose work she admires.
Thank you, Melanie.
[APPLAUSE]
Now, shall I start from the beginning?
Excuse me, but it was quite a journey getting here.
It's kind of fun, actually, I haven't
been lost in a long time.
Gerald Stern lives both-- well, actually,
he used to live both in Lambertsville,
New Jersey and New York City.
But I understand that he's given up
his apartment in New York City.
So it's just New Jersey for now.
He has two children, Rachel, who's here tonight.
As is his granddaughter, Rebecca.
She's a nutrition therapist and mother
who lives right here in Tucson.
And his son, David, who is an architect in Boston,
Massachusetts.
Stern was the first Poet Laureate of New Jersey.
He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
in 1925, the son of Polish and Ukrainian immigrant parents.
He received degrees from the University of Pittsburgh
and Columbia University.
And spent his 20s living and traveling
between New York City and Europe, principally
in France and Italy.
He wrote and published poetry in his early 20s,
but began to publish extensively in his middle and late 40s.
He has taught at many universities,
including Temple University in Philadelphia, New York
University, and for 14 years, at the esteemed University
of Iowa's Writer's Workshop, before retiring in 1995.
He is the recipient of many awards.
I think, actually, you had heard part of that when I walked in.
But I'll go through it again.
Including a Guggenheim Fellowship,
three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships,
the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts
for the State of Pennsylvania, the Lamont Poetry Prize,
the Melville Kane Award, the Bernard F. Conners Award---
Mommy!
The Jerome J Shestack Poetry prize, the Bess Hoskin award,
a Penn Award, the Patterson Poetry Prize.
The fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Ruth Lilly
prize, and in 1998, the National Book Award.
He has published 11 books of poetry,
and his most recent which he will read from tonight among
others is American Sonnets.
I really discovered Gerald Stern in 1997,
at the Aspen Writers' Workshop, surrounded by beauty,
and had five days to focus on just poetry.
He was an encouraging, generous teacher.
And he said, I looked back at my notes to remember exactly,
that the most important thing for a poet to do
is read poetry.
Don't be linear, and he never is.
I'm still struggling with that one.
Stern's poetry is both celebratory and dark.
Gail Mazur of the Boston Globe says
he shows us the paradoxical nature of life.
We see it at the end of "Hot Dog", one
of his most well-known poems.
And I quote, "I was the oldest.
I felt very old.
Though truth was, I was youngest too, my own riddle.
I felt young today, what with the rain,
what with the wind, what was the rolling bottle that
won't let me alone, and yesterday
morning's news still underfoot.
And all those trees, still bare, but starting to turn a little.
And two or three birdlets, getting ready again
for the next eternity."
He has been compared to Walt Whitman, who
celebrated and sang of himself, and in so
doing, sang of others.
So too does Stern sing.
And I quote, "I walk between my avenues singing my note.
And it's our note too."
Gerald Stern's Judaism informs his work.
We see it constantly, as in, and again
I quote from "Hot Dog", "I who didn't shower at Auschwitz,
you should forgive me for mentioning it again.
I breathed my fire wherever I went."
Well, breathing fire he is, but in a humane way.
We see it in his newest book, American Sonnets.
One reviewer said of Stern, "he is still
making his inventory of the American sublime."
Here we see poems about string beans,
sinks, the smell of snow in 1940,
shadows, spiders, God's round eye, a goose honking with love.
And American heaven is--bad news for us
out West--in the Hamptons.
These 59 love poems are so fiercely intelligent, burning
with passion, zany, irreverent, and I think, full of light.
A marvelous light that exposes, it dazzles,
it illuminates the humaneness of life, of the poet,
the humaneness of us all.
It is with great pleasure, and I'm
very proud to introduce Gerald Stern.
[APPLAUSE]