“….but show me two hands concealing
love and you have the whole history of the human race there”
-Gerald Stern, “Love,” In Beauty Bright
Jerry,
I open my eyes under the mosquito net and one mother is so close I can see my blood pulsing in her engorged abdomen. She can’t fly yet because she’s too heavy and still working on pumping out the unnecessary water; that’s how fresh our encounter is. I know my blood provides the protein she needs to nourish her eggs. I took what didn’t belong to me to nourish mine. Proof of it: my son is still asleep, serene, under his mosquito net. But I’m itching like hell. And my neighbor almost died of dengue. The mother senses my murderous intentions. I sense that.
It’s February 20, two days before your 95th birthday. When given a choice of weeks to blog, I chose this one so I may say here, on Best American Poetry, “Happy Birthday” to you, our Best.
Jerry, I will not tell you how mother-mosquito and I settled it, but I can tell you that geckos have been proliferating insanely in this ocean-fronting apartment in Las Terrenas (Dominican Republic), and each day I pretend I have not given roaches an ultimatum, and have been working on my rages (sharpening them, yes) and complicities, and on the trickiest one, mercy.
I have been reading your newest gift to us all, Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018 (W.W. Norton, 2020) and your voice reading “Frutta da Looma,” “Adonis,” “Knucklebones,” and “Blessed as We Were” feels as close as it felt when I listened to them in December, in your apartment. I’m reading and re-reading you (you and the poems, you as your own poem) so I may love the world (its peaches and rain and goats and beetles and hollyhocks and cracks and sweet necks and green gracehoppers and live and dead warbles, the baby rat with empty eye sockets, and even every single human, at least for a bit) and love it despite its absurdities and murderous bent, and sometimes I repeat after you, “enough of pain, and down with / 666—I’ll take kindness, most of all / kindness, for love is the murdered thing,” and sometimes “the humming that is called poetry” is enough and sometimes not, and then too I return to your poems, so I may stroke the cicatrix over the dead bullet that’s made a home in your flesh.
This week I tried to draft a poem for you. It turned into a poem about hot flashes, how they return me to my mothers, how they burn with love. You were in it, a matriarch. You showed me how to save a frog trapped in NYC traffic. Street vendors had run out of boiled chestnuts. You said Don’t ever stop. Walk backwards and forwards. Follow the smell of burned pretzels.
It was a bad draft. It will never be a poem, but you were so outrageously beautiful in it.
Beloved Jerry, here are a few poets sending wishes in anticipation of your birthday—with more celebratory thoughts and a garland of poems inspired by you, for you, tomorrow:
Chase Berggrun: Dearest Jerrele, your smile and song brighten my every day. Here's to 96, 97, 98, and 99. Love always, Chase.(Mihaela’s note: Read also Chase’s “Jerrele: On Being the Personal Assistant to Gerald Stern”:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2019/12/jerrele-on-being-the-personal-assistant-to-gerald-stern)
Jill Bialosky: From the esoteric of “Blind Nothingness” to the mundane of a “Plaster Pig” anything can trigger a magisterial Stern poem that transforms as it evolves. From our days when I was your student at the Iowa Workshop where one of my nascent poems, “Oh Giant Flowers,” was inspired by your passionate impulse, to championing your later work at Norton, I have been blessed by your loving spirit and your big embracing poetic voice. You are the youngest ninety-five year old I’ve ever known with more brilliance to come. Blessed as We Were is a triumph.
Kate Daniels: I first fell in love with the poetry of Gerald Stern in 1978 or ’79 shortly after he had published Lucky Life. I was in the MFA program at Columbia University, and I recall that poets all over the city were talking about an unusual book which had won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets and was nominated for a National Book Award. It was a somewhat late-in-life second book. Jerry was 52 when it came out: a late bloomer, we younger poets mused. When I read it, I understood why it was the topic of so much conversation. From my first acquaintance with them, Jerry’s poems swept me away with their eclectic voice, magnanimous, even operatic vision, their boldly expressed intensities. They made me rage and weep. I wanted to write poems like his – big poems capable of carrying big emotions, addressing big, important subject matter. There it all was in the pages of Lucky Life.
It was my infatuation with that book that would have taken me to hear him read at the old Donnell Library on 53rd Street. While I deeply admired poets like Adrienne Rich and Robert Penn Warren, I was sometimes intimidated by the personae in their poems. Jerry’s poems seemed to be speaking right in my ear, just to me, conversant with all my secrets and insecurities, giving me permission to be imperfect and unsure. All those years ago, when he stepped to the podium, unbuckled his watch and then tore off his jacket and threw it on the floor, and began reading and talking all in a sort of sweaty jumble, I just fell in love with the messy humanity of the poet himself which so closely replicated what I felt in the poems themselves.
Since then, I am fortunate to say that I have known Jerry as both poet and friend for more than thirty years. He remains one of the enduring masters for me – of poetry, of course, but also of a certain way of being human that provokes both heartbreak and a warlike rebelliousness. I am grateful for his longevity, and for the way his work continues. His parlance – even as he approaches one hundred years old – still delights and staggers me. Happy birthday, Jerry – you darling, you rascal, you brilliant and subversive old heartbreaker, you poet for the ages.
Lynn Emanuel and Jeff Schwartz: As blessed as we are to have you and your poetry. Much love and happy birthday.
Alicia Ostriker:
Dear Jerry, your way of lifting your chin and your voice in glorious praise and blame of our world, in raucous laughter and deep grief for our absurdities, has been an undying model and influence on me. Yes, you single-handedly changed to course of the river of American poetry. It needed changing! Hurrah! Happy birthday now and forever.
Jeff Friedman:
We’re whirling and singing, our faces red with laughter,
our bones shaky, our trumpets blasting,
Colleen’s hair streaming, my dome with its single crater shining—
whirling and singing, doing the dance of freezing cold New Hampshire,
the furnace on the blink, icicles inside the windows,
the oven on for heat, Ruby barking your name,
the three of us chanting your poems into white clouds,
O glorious 95th, O beautiful Jerry,
With love from Colleen, Ruby and Jeff
And wishes for 5 more Jerry Stern books by your 100th birthday
Ilya Kaminsky: What a lucky life to have met the poet who knows, finally, the power of maples. To know the man who loves cows best when they are a few feet away--and he opens the dining room window, so cows reach in to kiss! What a lucky life! To be blest with everlasting music. Thank you for opening these windows for us, thank you, Gerald Stern.
Richard Katrovas: In the 80s, Jerry visited my first wife Betty and me in New Orleans numerous times. Betty, her mother Lynn, Jerry and I on a couple of occasions fell into one of the Greek bars on Decatur, I think it was the Delphi. The tinny Greek music, cranked up, as always, too loud, made it impossible to communicate without shouting. At one point, a thoroughly shit-faced sailor from one of the Greek merchant ships docked on the river tore off his shirt, jumped on a table, and danced, his face contorted with something part joy, part excruciating pain. Perhaps it was excruciating joy. I thumped my chest and shouted, though the music was so loud only Jerry could hear me, "My people!" Jerry leaned toward my ear and simply said, "That dance is thousands of years old," which was his way of telling me to show a little respect not for the drunk sailor, but for the ancient spirit that inhabited him and mandated that he dance.
Joan Larkin: Thank you for all the songs––at supper tables, in taxis, in elevators––in all the rooms and on all the pages your voice brings alive. And for the way you wear your hat… Love on your day and always.
Tony Leuzzi: Dear Gerald, one of the happiest days of my life was meeting you in Lambertville for an interview, followed by a lunch, and then an impromptu search for hats. I learned so much from you that day, not only about your own work, not only about your memories of Stanley Kunitz, and not only about your thoughts regarding Whitman's connection to the Jewish prophets, but also what it means to be immersed in a profession you love. You showed me the manuscript of your then book-in-progress, In Beauty Bright, which happens to contain one of my favorite poems of yours, "The Two Graces." But as I sign off, I must thank you for all of your work and, in particular, a poem that moves me more than all the rest: "Bela"--your tribute to Bela Bartok. As my favorite classical composer, he is perennially undersung by most. But your poem, filled with biographical information, is somehow intensely personal and moving in ways that have given me great joy. I salute you on your 95th!
Phillis Levin: Forever new, dear Jerry, in your ancient faith in the word, you remind us of why we are here and what we are here to do. Thank you for showing us a way to turn and tune one’s being into an instrument of praise.
Lia Purpura: Happy day, Jerry! We share the same birthday — remember singing to me in the halls of EPB? From Baltimore, I’m singing to you. And with love.
Barbara Ras: Dearest Jerry,
If I could I would list 95 reasons why I love, admire, and cherish you. But space prevents that, so I will list 10-- one per decade, rounding up.
- When your work appeared on the poetry scene, a ripple went through the Force, and poetry was changed forever by your exuberance and originality.
- Your praise of the world makes me a better person.
- Your laments urge the world to improve.
- Your praise and your laments equal each other in beauty, subtlety, ferocity, and righteousness. I would miss them if they didn't exist.
- Your voice is a song of prophets, Gypsies, cellists, philosophers, the stiff dog, the blind rat, and a universe of the living and the dead, many trees, and roses, just to mention a few.
- Your music lifts my spirits to places I've never been before.
- You are funny and wise.
- Your memory exceeds the length of the Old Testament, which means you know a lot and share your knowledge generously.
- Our long talks on the phone have been better than sex, though you would probably disagree. It’s okay--even when you disagree I love you.
- Your friendship has been a miracle in my life.
David Rigsbee: You and your work have been on my mind for nearly 50 years, and I come back to your poems every year. You have been one of the handful of poets who replenish my own imagination. Thank you for that and for your kindnesses to me over the years and for your incomparably good company!
Ira Sadoff: Sending love to my adopted Jewish uncle and dear friend for forty years, who's been so generous, who's inspired me (and countless others) and my work, and whose humor, whose passion for justice, his respect for history and nature has made him not only a great poet but the great person he is. Stay healthy, Jerry. We need you and love you.
Philip Schultz: At JFK waiting for a flight to Rome, remembering seeing you in the 70’s, you on Van Adam, welcoming me to the big city. Always so excited, bursting with joy and love of poetry, life. Such a dear friend, human, our walk in the park a month ago, the same twinkle in your eye. Much love, boychick!
Karen Subach: Blessings, Jerry, on the occasion of your 95th birthday! The times in the backyard of Governor with its tangle of green, you singing, “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens,” turmeric “sunflowers” across your white shirt during curry feasts— and other times during my sorting through your piles of letters on onion skin papers in the house full of quilts, you making your morning phone calls in your wool cap— “Phil! Phil!”— you telling Diane’s son Jason to stop killing mosquitos because each one has a soul—and you shouting from my truck at the homophobic Topekan Christian protestors of arts events: “F*ck all of you! I love sodomy!”— among so many moments of deep awareness, good counsel, father-daughtering, poet-to-poet listening, shared appreciation of absurdity, outrage at injustice, grief at parallel losses—come to mind as I recall you. I love your beautiful wildness— your fearlessness in love and in life. Thank you for your poems. Thank you for your teaching. Health! Peace! Joy! Much love—
Judith Vollmer: Happy Birthday, dearest Jerry, who showed me how to read a city, how to love mine/ours—Pittsburgh—unconditionally, and how to sing the strange music. Blaze on, beloved teacher, beloved friend.
Michael Waters: Your generosity, your poems, and your presence, Jerry, teach me how to be a poet. Your humor and rage given language and shape prod me toward better work. I read your new poems and hear you singing them and suddenly I'm inside your voice. It's a great place to be, a space like no other, distinctive, American, making and remaking itself word by word. Happy 95th, Jerry, and thank you for each of your remarkable gifts.
Ellen Doré Watson: Jerry! O thou of most ravenous & fertile mind—and a heart the size of Greenland! Trickster, lover, singer, laugher, you have enriched us all with your words and self. Thank you, in every language.
Afaa 尉雅風: Jerry, so how is it that you are both time traveler and carrier of a magic wand of tradition, crossing genres and generations? You and August Wilson in the same neighborhood? Amazing, my friend, and more amazing that you electrify the language now for nearly a century, a sign of certain immanence or shamanistic bond made in the breath of the three rivers’ air.
Dean Young: Gerald Stern has been a fundamental source of poetic vitality for as long as I have been reading poems. Over the years, his gait may have changed, but his poems always leap and bolt with ageless energy and verve. Obviously, Gerald Stern is one of our greatest renewable resources!
Photo of Gerald Stern at The Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading, September 2010. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald.
Photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald of The Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading, with Thomas Ellis at the lectern and, in the front row, David Lehman, Amy Gerstler, Amy Glynn, Gerald Stern, David Shapiro.
Photo of Gerald Stern, Sharon Olds, and David Lehman at launch reading. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald.
