Gerald Stern – författare

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

The centerpiece of Gerald Stern's ninth collection is a long poem titled "Hot Dog," named for a beautiful street woman who lives in and around Tompkins Square Park. Other characters in this poem are St. Augustine, Walt Whitman, Noah, Gerald Stern himself, and a ninety-year-old black preacher from the Midwest. In "Hot Dog," and throughout, Stern wrestles with the issues—hope, memory, faith—that have always occupied him.

"This healthy collection of new poems and selections from seven previous volumes is remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward his own past as a way of understanding the recurrent questions of growing old: 'Why did it take so long / for me to get lenient? What does it mean one life / only?' " — Publishers Weekly (starred review)  "Gerald Stern's achievement is immense. In this beautiful gathering . . . one encounters a poet who praises and mourns in turn and even at once." — Grace Schulman, The Nation "Stern is one of those rare poetic souls who makes it almost impossible to remember what our world was like before his poetry came to exalt it." — C. K. Williams

Following his National Book Award winner, This Time, Gerald Stern further explores history and memory, the casual miracles of relationships, and his irrevocable connection to the natural world. The weight of history and the bouyance of memory, the casual miracles of relationships, and his irrevocable connection to the natural world are some of Gerald Stern's ongoing themes in this new book. The poems in Last Blue range in tone from the joyously unrestrained to the quietly somber. A Stern poem can begin with the majestic cadences of an Old Testament psalm, turn on an almost invisible hinge, and bring into focus the smallest detail. Here is a radiant collection from an essential voice in American poetry.

Gerald Stern calls upon his own life as a ground for his poems. Showing a horror of lies, treachery, and war, he offers redemption through stark language and plain speech.

In Save the Last Dance, Gerald Stern gives us a stunning collection of his intimately personal—yet always universal, and always surprising—poems, rich with humor and insight. Shorter lyric poems in the first two parts continue the satirical and often redemptive vision of his last collection, Everything Is Burning, while never failing to carve out new emotional territory. In the third part, a long poem called "The Preacher," Stern takes the book of Ecclesiastes as a starting point for a meditation on loss, futility, and emptiness, represented here by the concept of a "hole" that resurfaces throughout.

The lyric poems of In Beauty Bright, although marked by the same passion and swiftness as Gerald Stern’s previous work, move into an area of knowledge—even wisdom—that reflects a long life of writing, teaching, and activism. They are poems of grief and anger, but the music is delicate and moving.from "In Beauty Bright":In beauty-bright and such it was like Blake’slily and though an angel he looked absurddragging a lily out of a beauty-bright storewrapped in tissue with a petal drooping,nor was it useless—you who know it knowhow useful it is—and how he would be deadin a minute if he were to lose it thoughhow do you lose a lily?

Divine Nothingness is a meditative reflection on the poet’s past and an elegy to love and the experience of the senses in the face of mortality. From the Jersey side of the Delaware River in Lambertville, Gerald Stern explores questions about who and why we are, locating nothingness in the divine and the divine in nothingness.

National Book Award winner Gerald Stern’s wistful and lively poems span countries and centuries, reflecting on memory, aging, history and mortality.

For five decades, Gerald Stern has been writing his own brand of expansive, deep-down American poetry. Now in his nineties, this “sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary” (Edward Hirsch) engages a lifetime of memories in his poems, blending philosophical, wide-ranging intellect with boisterous wit.Memory unites the poems in Blessed as We Were, which reach back through seven collections written over almost two decades. Stern explores casual miracles, relationships, and the natural world in Last Blue (2000); offers a satirical and redemptive vision in Everything Is Burning (2005) and Save the Last Dance (2008); meditates on the metamorphosis of aging in In Beauty Bright (2012); and captures the sensual joys of life—even when they are far in the past—in the wistful love poems and elegies of Galaxy Love (2017). The volume concludes with over two dozen new poems that combine the metaphysical with the domestic, from the passage of time and the cost of love to the profound banality of cardboard and its uses.With his characteristic exuberant, oracular voice animating every line, Stern reminds us why he is one of the great American poets, one who has long “been telling us that the best way to live is not so much for poetry, but through poetry” (New York Times Book Review).

For five decades, Gerald Stern has been writing his own brand of expansive, deep-down American poetry. Now in his nineties, this “sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary” (Edward Hirsch) engages a lifetime of memories in his poems, blending philosophical, wide-ranging intellect with boisterous wit.Memory unites the poems in Blessed as We Were, which reach back through seven collections written over almost two decades. Stern explores casual miracles, relationships and the natural world in Last Blue (2000); offers a satirical and redemptive vision in Everything Is Burning (2005) and Save the Last Dance (2008); meditates on the metamorphosis of ageing in In Beauty Bright (2012); and captures the sensual joys of life—even when they are far in the past—in the wistful love poems and elegies of Galaxy Love (2017). The volume concludes with over two dozen new poems that combine the metaphysical with the domestic, from the passage of time and the cost of love to the profound banality of cardboard and its uses.With his characteristic exuberant, oracular voice animating every line, Stern reminds us why he is one of the great American poets, one who has long “been telling us that the best way to live is not so much for poetry, but through poetry” (New York Times Book Review).

On March 9, 1976, a violent explosion, fueled by high concentrations of methane gas and coal dust, ripped through the Scotia mine in the heart of Eastern Kentucky coal country. The blast killed fifteen miners who were working nearly three and a half miles underground; two days later, a second explosion took the lives of eleven rescue workers. For the miners’ surviving family members, the loss of their husbands, fathers, and sons was only the beginning of their nightmare. In The Scotia Widows, Gerald M. Stern, the groundbreaking litigator and acclaimed author of The Buffalo Creek Disaster, recounts the epic four-year legal struggle waged by the widows in the aftermath of the disaster. Stern shares a story of loss, scandal, and perseverance–and the plaintiffs’ fight for justice against the titanic forces of “Big Daddy Coal.”Confronted at nearly every turn by a hostile judge and the scorched-earth defense of the Scotia mine’s owners, family members also withstood the opprobrium of some of their neighbors, most of whom relied on coal mining for their livelihoods. Meanwhile, Stern, representing the widows of the disaster on contingency, amassed huge bills and encountered a litany of formidable obstacles. The Eastern Kentucky trial judge withheld disclosure of his own personal financial interest in coal mining, and a popular pro-coal former Kentucky governor served as the lead defense counsel. The judge also suppressed as evidence the federal mine study that pointed to numerous safety violations at the Scotia mine: In a rush to produce more coal, necessary ventilation had been short-circuited, miners had not been trained in the use of self-rescue equipment, and ventilation inspections had not been made. Moreover, Scotia did not even have a trained rescue team. Ultimately, the Scotia widows’ ordeal helped to inspire the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, which changed safety regulations for coal mines throughout the country.The Scotia Widows portrays in gripping detail young women deciding to pursue a landmark legal campaign against powerful corporate interests and the judge who protected them. It is a critically important and timeless story of ordinary people who took a stand and refused to give up hope for justice. Praise for The Scotia Widows:“This is a very scary story, a guided tour of the grinding cogs and spinning wheels inside the machinery of justice. Gerald Stern’s compassionate account of the ordeal of the Scotia widows shows you how horribly out of kilter it can all get when greed and self-interest are at the controls. Only with luck and the expertise of Stern does justice emerge in the end, a bit tarnished but still intact.”–Jonathan Harr, author of A Civil ActionFrom the Hardcover edition.

In what could be boldly called a new genre, Gerald Stern reflects with wit, pathos, rage, and tenderness, on 85 years of life. In 70 short, intermingling pieces that constitute a kind of diary of a mind, Stern moves nimbly between the past and the present, the personal and the philosophical. Creating the immediacy of dailiness, he writes with entertaining engagement about what he’s reading, be it Spinoza, Maimonides, John Cage, Etheridge Knight, James Schuyler, or Lucille Clifton, and then he seamlessly turns to memories of his student years in Europe on the GI Bill, or his political and social action. Unexpected anecdotes abound. He hilariously recounts the evening Bill Murray bit his arm and tells about singing together with Paul McCartney. Interwoven with his formidable recollections are passionate discussions of lifelong obsessions: his conflicted identity as a secular Jew opposed to Israel’s Palestinian policy; the idea of neighbors in various forms — from the women of Gee’s Bend who together made beautiful quilts to the inhabitants of Jedwabne, who on a single day in 1941 slaughtered 300 Jews; and issues of justice.

Gerald Stern, National Book Award-winning poet, creates a powerful new prose book in his ninth decades, as he contemplates mortality. In his characteristic audacious, uncompromising, funny, and iconoclastic style, Stern looks back at his life and forward to how he will end his days.Will he be cremated—against the tenets of Judaism—or buried, and if buried where? He visits synagogues to find answers to questions that are unanswerable. He examines his identity—a Jew born of immigrant parents and raised somewhat haphazardly in Pittsburgh, on account of the death of his sister, Sylvia, at ten, when the author was eight years old.Her death lingers over Death Watch, as much as the author’s own inevitable demise.Stern wrestles with his identity in Judaism, his name uprooted from its origins, as so much of his life will be willfully disrupted from the expectations of his parents and the norms of a predictable path. Stern recounts his life, itself “a grand digression,” which takes him from Pittsburgh, to the Army, to Paris on the GI Bill, and back to the US, where he immerses himself in the literary culture around him.Death Watch – which Stern describes as an account of a final journey – reads instead as a vivid, passionate, and, at times, whimsical look at the gamble of living life to its fullest, choosing the life of a poet, philosopher, prophet, lover, radical, and perpetual trouble-maker.He revels in his past love affairs, the many women beloved in his life. He recollects books that occupy his recent reading—the work of W.G. Sebald, Blaise Cendrars, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline—and how memory is always at the heart of literary accomplishment and what creates the staying power of great literature.Stern’s early and traumatic loss of his older sister provides the occasion to imagine what her life might have been had she lived. Sylvia, the painful loss, which his family refused to talk about, erasing her life, as they erased her death in their inability to cope with its magnitude. Sylvia, nonetheless, lives on with Stern—his everlasting muse, his eternal companion.In a lighter vein, the author tells about his misbehavior—beginning in the sixth grade when he discovers his teacher wears a wig to cover her bald head, a secret he immediately spreads to the entire school. On a visit to Camden, New Jersey, he visits the Whitman home and takes a moment to lie down in Whitman’s bed. In the William Carlos Williams Library, he walks out with Williams’s hat, which on second thought he returns to its rightful place. As a teacher at Temple University, he lectures the institution’s president in front of a faculty assembly on the mistakes in grammar and English usage he made in addressing the meeting. But while walking the edge, speaking out for justice, Stern never falters in his commitment to poetry, his dedication to writing, and his championing of fellow writers.Death Watch gives us a writer at the peak of his powers—no holds barred. Stern joins the likes of writers such as Tony Judt, Oliver Sacks, Jean-Dominique Bauby, and Randy Pausch, who, while contemplating mortality, celebrate lives lived in full tilt. In the case of Gerald Stern, his memoir portrays a life lived at the edge of boundaries, with the intoxication of poetry and love, and with the compassion of a writer who ends DEATH WATCH with a celebration of orangutans.

Early Collected Poems gathers the poems from the first six books of Gerald Stern’s body of work. A master poet, Stern has sought new language for the overlooked, neglected, and unseen facets of human experience. Whether writing about modern poets, Hebrew prophets, death, war, or love, “Stern’s literary songs are sharp, surprising, and unerring in their delivery” (Ploughshares, Editor’s Choice).from “The Red Coal”The coal has taken over, the red coalis burning between us and we are at its mercy—as if a power is finally dominatingthe two of us; as if we’re huddled upwatching the black smoke and the ashes;as if knowledge is what we needed and nowwe have that knowledge. Now we have that knowledge.

The poems in this new volume by the winner of the National Book Award span countries and centuries, reflecting on memory, aging, history, and mortality. “Hamlet Naked” traverses Manhattan in the 1960s from a Shakespeare play on 47th Street to the cellar of a Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village; “Thieves and Murderers” encompasses musings of the medieval French poet François Villon and Dwight Eisenhower; “Orson” recounts a meeting of the poet and Orson Welles, exiled in Paris. Gerald Stern recalls old cars he used to drive—“the 1950 Buick / with the small steering wheel / and the cigar lighter in the back seat”—as well as intimate portraits of his daily life “and the mussel-pooled and the heron-priested shore” of Florida. These are wistful, generous, lively love poems and elegies that capture the passage of time, the joys of a sensual life, and remembrances of the past.

In his thirteenth collection, the 1998 National Book Award winner presents us with fifty-nine "Stern Sonnets," of twenty or so lines rather than the traditional fourteen. Using the events of his life as starting points, Gerald Stern deals with time and loss, with the dichotomy of light and darkness, and—always—with the possibility of joy. This stunning collection moves from autobiography to the visionary in surges of memory and language that draw the reader from one poem to the next.

Gerald Stern's poetry has been variously praised for its visionary quality, its scope and passion, but most especially for its wholehearted embrace of life. Stern's special manner of joie de vivre is immediately evident in his prose pieces as well. In this collection of personal essays, Stern speaks to the reader on subjects closest to his heart -- family, justice, Jewishness, ecstasy, loss, and love, as well as Andy Warhol, Paris, and getting shot in the neck. He ranges from passionate literary discussions to buoyant anecdotes about "borrowing" William Carlos Williams' hat from the writer's historic home. With seven new pieces, What I Can't Bear Losing celebrates a writer passionately engaged with life in America after World War II and gives a glimpse of the poetic processes of one of today's most beloved literary voices.

In the tradition of essayists like Montaigne and Emerson, Gerald Stern reflects with wit, pathos, rage, and tenderness on 85 years of life. In 70 short, intermingling essays Stern moves nimbly between the past and the present, the personal and the philosophical. Creating the immediacy of dailiness, he writes with entertaining engagement about what he's reading, be it Spinoza, Maimonides, John Cage, Etheridge Knight, James Schuyler, or Lucille Clifton, and then he seamlessly turns to memories of his student years in Europe on the GI Bill, or his political and social action. Interwoven with his formidable recollections are passionate discussions of lifelong obsessions: his conflicted identity as a secular Jew opposed to Israel's Palestine policy; the idea of neighbors in various forms, from the women of Gee's Bend, who together made beautiful quilts, to the inhabitants of Jedwabne, who on a single day in 1941 slaughtered 300 Jews; and issues of justice.

In Death Watch, the National Book Award-winning poet Gerald Stern uses powerful prose to sift through personal and prophetic history and contemplate his own mortality. Characteristically audacious, uncompromising, funny, and iconoclastic, Stern looks back at his life and forward in time to how his story will play out. Wrestling with his identity in Judaism, he explores how his name was uprooted from its origins, as so much of his life will be willfully disrupted from the expectations of his parents and the norms of a predictable path. Stern recounts his life, itself "a grand digression," which takes him from Pittsburgh, to the Army, to Paris on the GI Bill, and back to the United States, where he immerses himself in the literary culture around him. Stern's early and traumatic loss of his older sister provides the occasion to imagine what her life might have been, and he revels in his past love affairs, the many women beloved in his life. He recollects books that occupy his recent reading--the work of W.G. Sebald, Blaise Cendrars, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine--and how memory is always at the heart of literary accomplishment and what creates the staying power of great literature.Death Watch is as an account of a beloved poet's final journey; a vivid, passionate, and, at times, whimsical look at the gamble of living life to its fullest, choosing the life of a poet, philosopher, prophet, lover, radical, and perpetual troublemaker.