Dear Readers:
Each month, you will receive an email from me about the boredom & the horror & the glory. This is the 40th one.
After I met Gerald Stern, I made some messy notes on a Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer that I found when I was walking to the subway from his senior living high-rise on the Upper West Side. This was in June 2019. Brian and I were in New York for the first leg of a classical guitar orchestra tour Brian was doing. From New York, we were going to fly to France and take a coach bus around the country, the orchestra playing at different stops along the way.
The morning of the day we left for France, I realized I was pregnant. I can’t even type the words “coach bus” without feeling waves of nausea and despair, and I’ll probably never look as cute as I did in the pics we took in the New York part of that trip, the Gerald Stern day, hanging out with Emily and her then-three-year-old, waiting outside with a surprisingly large group of people for a J.C. Penny in Times Square to open so I could buy socks.
I couldn’t figure out what to wear to see Gerald Stern, and I think I settled on a sleeveless, jersey, navy blue button-down top and really short denim cut-offs. I have a vague memory of deciding at the last minute to tuck in the shirt for a more appropriate look.
We were meeting because he had wanted to meet with me. He had emailed me the previous summer, about an essay I had written about his poetry.
He was so, so nice. My essay in the Birmingham Poetry Review was not that great, and neither was the one in Insane Devotion. The Birmingham Poetry Review essay is written in such a formal tone that hardly any content comes through. This is especially odd because the essay was about the conversational, loose, messy, ironical mode of his protest poems. Insane Devotion was a book about Stern, edited by another really nice poet, Laura McCullough. Looking now at that essay, I can tell that I was really angry as I was writing it. Through some difficult and time-consuming research, I had discovered that when Adorno said there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, he wasn’t talking about poetry—poetry was like a random word he had pulled out, the least important word in the sentence. He was saying that the concept of “before” and “after” had collapsed in on itself because a society that lived by the values of progress, of creating a shining after, had created the Holocaust. After learning this, when I returned to Stern’s poetry about the Holocaust, I saw him as imagining a life after the Holocaust in a way that was flatly structuralist, not engaged with the critique-of-Enlightenment-style modes I and my friend Adorno preferred. This didn’t just annoy me; it made me angry, and I think I wrote the essay in an overly complex way to try to stem back the tide of my anger. Point being, if someone was writing essays about me like this, I would not email them and invite them for tea.
“Affectionately!” When he didn’t even know me! And I loved how he said he was “coming from nearby Pittsburgh,” at 93, when he had lived in New York for decades and decades. A lot of his writing is about “coming from Pittsburgh,” about his youth there, getting arrested or getting into fights, attending the University of Pittsburgh when it wasn’t a thing to study poetry. He wrote about teaching at community colleges in New Jersey and at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He wrote about the brutality and ugliness of these places, but he also romanticized them, these kinds of places that don’t usually get the chance to be romanticized. He saw their richness, depth, beauty, dignity, and history.
And he did that with his own weird life, too. He had worked as an administrator of a poets-in-the-schools program in Pennsylvania, taught at tons of different “crazy colleges” (as he impolitely referred to Heidelberg when I was teaching there), he was the head of the teachers union in New Jersey, he lived for a year in France and spoke excellent French, he flipped houses on the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border with his son. He was denied tenure. He went on leave because he was so angry, quit pretty good jobs, and made scenes at meetings. He was shot in the neck in his car at a red light in Newark in the ’80s. He had Tourette’s Syndrome, which caused him embarrassment and pain. He spent years trying to be a Great Poet, years of intense study that shows in his huge range of references, classical through Modernism and Postmodernism. During this time, he didn’t publish a single poem or even know any other poets besides two other guys from Pittsburgh (Dick Hazley, a pioneer in poetry therapy, and Jack Gilbert). He didn’t publish his first poem until he was in his 40s. “I was born with odd eyes and an odd heart. What I had to do was accept those eyes and that heart,” he writes in a short essay, “Straddling,” in the book Stealing History.
Finally, when he was in his 50s, when his first book was published, Jerry achieved. He won fancy awards, he held fancy positions—he taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop for more than a decade. But he didn’t become some fancy guy. He writes about how boring the ceremony was when he received a major Academy of Arts Medal. And when he writes about teaching at Iowa, he’s not talking about being at Iowa (the way the university-affiliated always carefully put it, like they’re skimming on the surface of it, doing their research without picking up any local contamination); he’s talking about being in Iowa. He writes about looking for heritage quilts and going to the 4H campground and living in a former nunnery there. He was still more Jerry than he was a poet.
But he was such a great poet. “What I learned I learned with a vengeance even if it came late,” he writes in his awesome book of essays What I Can’t Bear Losing. His poems always sound like they’re starting in the middle, like either the speaker or the reader is walking into a room two minutes late. They take place in the middle, between the brutal histories, personal and global, that he maintains a hyperawareness of (the Holocaust, his beloved sister’s death from meningitis at 9), and something positive, like recognition of beauty, or a real, earned, not-cheesy hope. Here are some of them. In all those years he was lost, he found a looseness. That was his poetics—the years, the lostness, the looseness, the weirdness.
It took us more than a year to meet. He had just moved in to the senior living high-rise when I visited him in June 2019.
From my Trader Joe’s notes:
“How old do you think I am?”
Me: “uh…90-ish?”
He has greatness but he’s a human being, with the verb. When I told him something like that, he didn’t care.
I’m sure he told many people these things but he also told me.
We took a very slow walk about halfway down the short block—the street, not the avenue—then back. I held out my arm and he took it. This was when he talked about the many things he’s told other people, things I knew from reading his essays and poems. But it was a joy and a comfort and a privilege to hear him talk directly to me about his disorganized life.
After that, we went to his room, which was small and tidy. I sat on the bed and he sat on a chair. I asked him to sign several of his books (which I left at my brother Sam’s apartment because I didn’t want to take them to France, and they’re still there.). He showed me some pictures of his family and a book about Pittsburgh with old black and white photographs. Then we went down to the lobby and sat for a bit. He asked how I was going to get back to Brooklyn, and when I said I didn’t know, he told me what trains to take and where to transfer. There was a bit of awkward casting around for conversation as we wrapped up. According to my notes, he said “let’s stay in touch” but I wasn’t sure he meant it.
I wrote him a postcard when we got back from France, thanking him and saying how much I loved meeting him. I didn’t hear back from him. I should have emailed him after that, but I didn’t want to bother him. I knew that Jerry didn’t like or appreciate or require reverence. I feel the same way about reverence, but still, his celestial combination of greatness and weirdness made me shy. When Andy Warhol moved from Pittsburgh to New York, Jerry drove him to the train station. Andy gave him a painting in thanks, which Jerry’s mother lost in Miami Beach sometime between 1969 and 1987.
He died on October 27, 2022. He was 97 years old. I wore denim cut-offs with a 2-inch inseam to meet him.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Dear Lucy, This is a beautiful piece. Glowing with all the right kinds of appreciation. Honorable. Dignified. Full of genuine love. Not formal at all -- you don't write formal but maybe the Birmingham Review piece was formal.
Lucy, I love this so much.