One of the wonderful aspects of launching my Book Journal web site is that I receive a steady stream of reading suggestions from friends.  One that arrived via email last month was from a dear college friend who pointed out that Gerald Stern had died that week at the age of 97. My friend went on to reference a poem that Stern had identified as his favorite.  The poem was ‘The One Thing in Life’, and I will highlight the entire poem in my monthly update from the Poetry Tree on the Charles.

Finding the poem difficult to understand, I became interested in Stern and found ‘Lucky Life’, Stern’s second volume of poems, at the Lamont Library at Harvard.  When published in 1977 it was nominated for the National Book Award and received the Lamont Poetry Selection from the Academy of American Poets.  The poems are, in fact, challenging in both subject matter and language.  Themes emerge—the cycles of nature and life, the cruelty of modern society and its opposition by people like Emma Goldman, Pablo Casals, and others, and the specific beauty of places from a small, nearly abandoned town in New Jersey to the renewing ocean and beach in Florida to New York City and its gritty neighborhoods of small stores, bars, and restaurants and their devotees.

The language is powerful and direct but the ideas and themes are complex and often quite hidden.  I found that in reading ‘The One Thing in Life’ as in many of these poems, I couldn’t really get the message without copying down the language. This enabled me to see where Stern was going and how he planned to get there.  Among the dozens of wonderful phrases in his other poems, I particularly liked this final stanza from a poem entitled ‘This is It’ about the a decaying town, Lambertville, NJ: “I crawl across the street to have my coffee at the low counter,/to listen to the noise of saws drifting through the open window/and to study the strange spirit of this tar paper cafe/stuck on a residential street three or four blocks/from Main and Bridge where except for the sudden windfall/of the looping detour it would be relegated forever/to the quiet company of three or four close friends/and the unexpected attention of a bored crossing guard/or exhausted meter man or truck driver./I listen to the plans of three teen-aged businessmen/about to make their fortune in this rotting shack/and walk—periodically—past the stainless steel sink/to take my piss in the misplaced men’s room./I watch the bright happy girls organize their futures/over and around the silent muscular boys/and I wait, like a peaceful man, hours on end,/for the truck out back to start, for the collie to die,/for the flies to come, for the summer to bring its reckoning.”

The melancholy of aging and decay and the bright hopes of youth that will be dashed by this cruel life— the beauty of the language are all characteristic of Stern’s poetry.  It’s not easy or fun stuff, but it’s very, very good.   Much honored with the Wallace Stevens and Lilly Awards and named the poet laureate of New Jersey from 2000 to 2002, Stern is well worth reading.  I’m adding him to my list of favorite American poets.