Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern

By Philip Levine

Gerald Stern has been a significant presence and an impassioned and idiosyncratic voice in twentieth and twenty-first-century American poetry. Insane Devotion is a retrospective of his career and features fourteen writers, critics, and poets examining the themes, stylistic traits, and craft of a poet who has shaped and inspired American verse for generations.

The essays and interviews in Insane Devotion paint a broad picture of a man made whole by the influence of the written word. They touch on the contentious and nuanced stance of Judaism in the breadth of Stern’s work and explore Stern’s capacious memory and his use of personal history to illuminate our common humanity. What is revealed is a poet of complexity and heart, often tender, often outraged. As Philip Levine writes in his lyrical foreword to the volume, Stern is both sweet and spiky, a born teacher who can teach me to see the universe in an acorn and hear the music of the lost in an empty Pepsi can.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781595347695

Book preview

Introduction

RAGE AND RADICAL EMPATHY

Mihaela Moscaliuc

Author of twenty-two volumes of poetry, three collections of essays and memoirs, and a book of drawings, and subject of dozens of interviews, Gerald Stern has established himself as a significant presence in the literary constellation of his generation, among poets such as Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Robert Hayden, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Philip Levine, W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, and James Wright, and as an impassioned and idiosyncratic voice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry.

Stern was born on February 22, 1925, in Pittsburgh, of immigrant cranes / from Polish Russia and German and Jewish Ukraine (There I Was One Day, ECP, 364) who left the Old World in 1905, during a time of escalating anti-Semitism and subsequent mass migrations to the United States. His Jewish sensibility, the tonal configurations of which range from lamentation to exultation, is strongly inflected with his close or distant ancestors’ experience of exodus, displacement, exile, persecution, and resilience, and with the particulars of his family history. This heritage figures in Stern’s work within the larger context of European intellectual history and in the context of America’s literary landscape, where his strand of Judaism intersects and partially overlaps with that of writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Levine, Stephen Berg, David Ignatow, Alicia Ostriker, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick. His dictions, accented with occasional Yiddishisms and infused with Jewish humor, draw attention to the impurity of American English and to writers’ responsibility to keep it that way—tensile, slightly uncomfortable in its own syntactic skin, open to grafting.

Though critical recognition came fairly late in life—with the publication of Lucky Life (1977), which won the Lamont Poetry Prize Award—once he started taking himself seriously (as he declares in The Bite), Stern turned the humming that is called poetry into an indispensable ritual and habit of the mind, producing work that has been distinctive in craft and dependably memorable in its approach to fundamental concerns with history, heritage, suffering, redemption, beauty, and injustice. However, his disinterest in experimentation and in either adhering to or helping fashion poetic trends did not secure him immediate acclaim. As Jane Somerville notes in her preface to the monograph dedicated to Stern’s work, Free of allegiances, Stern was able to draw on the resources of both tradition and revolution. Yet his poetry is not the middle-ground compromise of these extremes; instead, it is traditional and revolutionary at the same time: steeped in learnedness and respect for the past, yet possessed of anarchic vigor, obscure and allusive, yet conversational and direct.¹ As Stern has suggested on a number of occasions, he has been writing out of a sense of necessity. In a passage that recounts being shot by a teenager at a stoplight in Newark and then segues into recollections of malicious killings of innocent beings (including not only the writer Bruno Schultz, but also a frog), he declares, I have taken up the trade of poet in part because of the difficulty in understanding—and the need to explain—just that willful, capricious, perverse behavior. It’s as if there is no other way.² Stern’s concern with justice and human folly extends to all things alive, as evinced by the all-inclusiveness of his gaze and the attention with which he ensures that denunciations of wrongdoing do not usurp the possibility of giving voice to the wronged or overlooked. Class and social consciousness modulate even the most private observations, reminding us that, as historical beings, we are also political beings.

My own poetry, he declares in What I Can’t Bear Losing, embodies everything I have done and everything I believe in—it couldn’t be otherwise—including what I haven’t consciously thought about, including what I don’t know (WIC, 319). It is precisely in this coalescence of life and writing that my deep affection for Stern originates. When I heard him read, in 1997, a year after I emigrated from Romania, something shifted irrevocably in my understanding of poetry, and when, in the hours following the event, the humming did not cease, as Stern kept reciting from memory, conjuring Samy Rosenstock (Tristan Tsara), lamenting latent anti-Semitism, wondering about the Old Country’s shifting borders, and breaking into Aaron Lebedeff’s nostalgic Romania, Romania, I began to understand what it meant to be a poet of the world, in the world: make writing inseparable from living, and live consciously, introspectively. It is to these internalized dictates that I attribute Stern’s incessant chronicling of the life of the mind and its engagement with the world, locust by locust, street corner by street corner. On the surface, lines such as Everything, suddenly everything is up there in my mind (The Bite, ECP, 48) or I have / a hundred things to think about, my mind / goes back, it is a kind of purse, nothing / is ever lost (Knowledge Forwards and Backwards, ECP, 407–410) read as two among the many instances in which solipsistic speakers explain themselves, think out loud, and record the activities of their senses as if such activities might bear great relevance to anyone else besides the speaking self. Actually, in Stern’s case, they do. Stern’s speakers have relinquished the illusion that an absolute understanding of the other is possible or even fully desirable. And isn’t knowing the self a precondition for knowing the other? It is this understanding of the self and a testing of its capacity for empathy that the Sternean I attempts in poem after poem, as it wrestles with questions of power, self-awareness, and relatedness. More often than not, at the core of his poems’ narrative and lyrical pulls and thrusts lies the desire to meet, engage, or inhabit the others, be they human or inanimate. His approach to the world shows indebtedness to the romantics’ hermeneutics of sympathy and a conscious dismissal of the modernists’ disparagement of sentiment and the postmoderns’ hip resignation in the face of emotional entropy.

Stern’s work reads as a poetic testimony of accountability—one person’s, one writer’s, and, merging the two, one mind’s heroic squabble and love affair with the world, a song of powerlessness partly solaced by the knowledge that he is a decent citizen of this world. His Knowledge Forwards and Backwards (ECP, 407–410) speaks to this condition via lament and allegorical looping in jagged cadences:

I wait for the pain to change

to pleasure, after a while my lips will stop moving,

I will stop moaning, I will start sleeping, one day

there is an end, even if at this end

there is lucidity and gruesome recollection

and I am paying for every red mark and blue mark.

I have the calendar in front of me;

I have the pencil at my lips, but no one

can live in place of us, . . .

(Ibid., 408)

A latter-day Janus officiating over our passages, the speaker of Knowledge Forwards and Backwards recognizes the burdens of prescience and of the permanently alert consciousness:

and I am only beginning to feel this—I am

accumulating—what could I call it, a shadow?—

I am becoming a kind of demon, you turn

into a demon, with knowledge forwards and backwards,

backwards, forwards, you develop a power,

you develop a look, you go for months

with sight, with cunning, I see it in older men,

older women, a few of them, you stand

at some great place, in front of the Port Authority

(Ibid., 408–409)

As the perspective swerves, the first person morphs into a second person that is both version and extension of the I:

you see the decade in front of you,

you see yourself out there, you are a swimmer

in an old wool suit, you are an angry cabbie,

you are a jeweler, you are a whore, the smell

of burned pretzels is everywhere, you walk

backwards and forwards, . . .

(Ibid., 409)

As Richard Kearney suggests, given that the social and cultural embedding of all experience limits our ability to share fully the experience of those with historical, social, or cultural positions dissimilar to ours, we need to let our imagination play . . . in a way which animates and enlarges our response to the other.³ As is often the case in a Sternean poem, the I moves tenderly and inventively toward the you, toward closing the gap between self and other, and this act of self-displacing or selfothering⁴ lays the ground for radical empathy. Though full identification remains impossible, the cross-pollination of I and you generates restorative music and an inclusive we:

if we could just be singers

we’d walk down Main Street singing, no one as yet

has done this, three and four abreast, the language

could be Armenian, it could be Mohawk—

that is a dream too, something different from Whitman

and something different from Pound. What a paradise,

in front of the Quaker Inn, the women are watching,

I’m singing tenor, someone is taking a picture.

For me, when there is no hierarchy, for me,

when there is no degradation, when the dream

when lying is the same as the dream when walking,

when nothing is lost, when I can go forth and forth,

when the chain does not break off, that is paradise.

(Knowledge Forwards and Backwards, ECP, 409–410)

Stern can afford to entertain the idea of paradise because to the empathic mind nothing is lost. Despite the clumsiness to which he alludes so often, and aided by the saving graces of irony, he goes forth and forth by feeling with others rather than for others (empathy as opposed to sympathy), by bringing their lives into his subjectivity. The margins they occupy find centrality, if momentarily, in the act of enunciation. I was an immigrant / Jew in Boston, I was a Vietnamese / in San Jose, offers the speaker of Making the Light Come (ECP, 390), inviting us to accept this double subject position not as a fracturing of the speaking voice, but as a version of a collective that acknowledges the heterogeneity of the immigration experience. Another poem in which we see Stern’s empathic strategies at work is My First Kinglet (ECP, 360–361), which begins with a positioning of the kinglet on the memory spectrum (I saw my first kinglet in Iowa City / on Sunday, April twenty-second, 1984), then spirals into a moving and slightly humorous homage-elegy in which the brief encounter between speaker and kinglet takes on quasi-religious dimensions. He reaches for a kiss, opens his hand into a pink / and living nest (aware of how disgusting maybe, or terrifying that might be for the bird); the kinglet, a pure Protestant, warbling in the woods, / confessing everything (360), sings, then takes off, leaving the speaker whistling to the trees, all that was left of [his] soul contained in the pencil stub, a wobbling hunk of lead embedded in wood, / pine probably (ibid.). Whatever transference takes place during this brief encounter, it triggers in the speaker the desire to burst into another hymn, give thanks to the trees and to the tulips with their six red tongues, and pair the kinglet’s confession with his own. Something has changed in this speaker and, in the tripping diction, we are experiencing his response to the change, to the process of hybridization. For five or ten minutes, he is one of those madmen you see / forcing their way down Broadway, reasoning with themselves / the way a squirrel does, the way a woodpecker does, / half dressed in leaf, half dressed in light (ibid., 361); he is waving his arm and beating his palms, and his hamstrings have shortened, he notes, as he trips toward

the thicket I lived in for two years, more or less,

Dutch on one side, American Sioux on the other,

Puerto Rican and Bronx Hasidic inside,

a thicket fit for a king or a wandering kinglet.

(Ibid.)

He returns to his home (the thicket), part man and part kinglet, touched with the madness of squirrels and woodpeckers, and with a heightened awareness of the relational nature of his identity and position: he is part of an eco-ethnic community that stands, metonymically, for the global one.

At once unbridled and tenderly ironic, Stern probes his own attachments to the world, the daily pleasures and burdens of being of this world and witness to its discord and delights.

Stern also reminds us how hard it is to sustain belief in mankind, how hard to reconcile cruelty and injustice with faith and / in beauty. It takes a lifetime of writing, of quarrels with oneself and the world to arrive at an understanding of divine nothingness (the title of Stern’s most recent poetry collection) and to seek and accept the sweetness of life (The Sweetness of Life, ECP, 136) when all sweetness seems gone. Stern’s redemptive visions never let us off the hook, no matter how ebullient their dictions; as they work toward deliverance, these visions decant the sins that made deliverance necessary in the first place, face us squarely with ruin, and urge us to touch and memorize wounds. Stern is a poet of rage as much as he is a poet of celebration, and these two seemingly dissimilar responses to the world could not relate more clearly in his work. One earns the right to the latter by wrestling with the former.

Stern’s attraction to weeds, decayed buildings and old cities, the obviously overlooked, the easily neglected,⁵ and his frequent returns to sites of injustice and oppression (the pogroms of Europe and the Holocaust, class injustice, racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, environmental destruction) speak to his devotion to outwit[ting] the future by remembering.⁶ Natural objects, the poet insists, are also poverty objects—Black locusts. Weeds. Sparrows and swallows.⁷ His work posits questions that have concerned ecologists, eco-ethicists, and environmentalists for a long time, but which have only received serious attention in the last decade or so: What are the possibilities of returning to a more responsible and ecologically attuned way of inhabiting nature, and how can we reground human cultures in the natural systems without treating the latter as mere material resources and commodities, but as valuable in and of themselves? A lover of rural and city scapes alike, Stern might say: Start by paying attention. I want us to all kiss the ground, endlessly, endlessly, he declares in an interview with David Hamilton, then goes on to praise William Merwin’s garden in Hawaii, a garden in which that poet has planted every species of tree he could find. Maybe it’s politically absurd to think that he’ll retain the past, in the face of a general onslaught, but the way a poet operates is: if he does it in his own mind, it’s done, if Merwin does it in his little garden, then it’s done in time, in history, in space; and it exists. And those species exist. . . . I want us all to do that in some way. I wish I would do more of it. I want us all to have gardens. How about just that simple.⁸

In Hanging Scroll (ECP, 197–198), after examining a scroll depicting a brown sparrow on an apple branch and then turning his attention to the six starlings in his dead tree, he declares,

for me, everything hangs in the balance

in the movement of those birds,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

my one chance for happiness

depends on wind and strange loyalty and a little bark,

which I think about and watch and agonize over

day and night,

like a worried spirit

waiting for love.

(ECP, 198)

I heard Stern say, in a conversation with Judith Vollmer, that he thought of himself as a love poet. He is, without question. Maxine Kumin might append this declaration: and every love poem is an elegy. During a public interview, she clarified this with the remark that if we were not informed with a sense of dying, we would not be moved to write love poems. Stern’s poems chronicle one man’s determination to love the world, his failures and successes to do so, and the inevitable angers that accompany such quixotic endeavor. It may well be that Stern’s angers are entrenched in his Jewish sensibility (as he is often driven, he says, by extreme anger, a la the Jewish prophets),⁹ but I see them primarily as embedded in his humanist cosmopolitanism. Stern’s work exposes rage as a condition of invested local or global citizenship, a manifestation of civic consciousness. To celebrate the world without rage is unethical, Stern’s work intimates. The individual consciousness that operates in ways that occlude, conveniently, the realities of suffering becomes culpable in the proliferation of suffering. In one of this earlier poems, When I Have Reached the Point of Suffocation, he remarks,

It takes years to learn how to look at the destruction

of beautiful things;

to learn how to leave the place

of oppression;

and how to make your own regeneration

out of nothing.

(ECP, 25)

Volumes later, in Rage, he begins, I lost my rage while helping a beetle recover (IBB, 84). He has a particular kind of love for each trapped being and a particular rage for what threatens each love.

Stern’s loquacious speakers tear at the ground, dig, unearth, replant, or roll in the mud to ask forgiveness and hope for regeneration. Humming, lamenting, or barking, they observe the gnarling of roots so they may learn about the insides of the earth and our place outside. To all this they bring endless supplies of empathy and humor. I will collect all the stupidity and sorrow / of the universe in one place / and wait—like everyone else— / for the first good signs, Stern writes in Picking the Roses (ECP, 236–238), the Sisyphean task tempered by understatement. In a more recent poem, Slow to Learn (IBB, 82), the humor has given way to wistfulness, as he reflects,

But I’m fed up with bitterness

and I learned from Brecht that anger at injustice

makes your voice hoarse, and hatred of vileness

distorts your features, but I already knew it.

(Ibid.)

As evidenced in the most recent collections, In Beauty Bright (2012) and Divine Nothingness (2014), disenchantment with injustice might have made Stern’s voice raspier and occasionally bitter, and his style increasingly surprising in its associative turns and syntactic irreverence; however, unlike many other poets penning their outcries in this second decade of the twenty-first century, Stern has continued to favor comprehension over radical dissociation and ellipticism. In his essay Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment, Tony Hoagland remarks that in the contemporary arena, aesthetic shifts over time can be seen as a kind of crop rotation; the topsoil of one field is allowed to rest, while another field is plowed and cultivated. In the seventies the American poetry of image covered the Midwestern plains like wheat; in the eighties, perhaps, it was the narrative-discursive sentence which blossomed and bore anthological fruit. This shifting of the ground of convention is one aspect of cultural self-renewal. But the fruitful style and idiom becomes conventional, and then conventionally tired. Systematic development is out; obliquity, fracture, and discontinuity are in.¹⁰ Perhaps there is consolation in knowing that poets deploring, skittishly, the soullessness of our time have the stubborn romantic (WIC, 53) Stern to turn to for an Old World remedy of soulfulness and an example of what it means to be enraged at the posthuman age without losing faith in the mind’s ability to order the disarray.

A generous reader and supporter of poets with aesthetics radically different from his, Stern has been cultivating his voice without aligning himself with any particular literary movement. His work has undergone notable changes over the decades, and especially since midcareer, when his voice grew more urgent, less restrained and disciplined, and his syntax more fluvial, yet Stern remains a poet of consistency. Though you can never quite tell where a Stern poem goes until you get there (and even then you might not be sure of where you are or whether you have really arrived somewhere), you can identify it while still in the allegro, its sonic virtuosity unmistakable. The paratactic constructions, parallelisms, leaps and juxtapositions, conglomerate clauses, caesuras, accretion of coordinates, and other techniques that amend handbook syntax generate their own cadence and fuel the propulsive motion¹¹ that poet Joan Larkin has identified as a Sternean hallmark.

Stern’s comment, in a 1984 interview in the American Poetry Review, encapsulates the osmotic relation between being and writing on which much of Stern’s singularity as a poet is predicated: Everything depends on your signature, your breath, your person. Maybe your rhythm. Your peculiarity, your uniqueness. Your crankiness. That thumbprint of yours.¹² To some extent, this collection is an attempt at literary dactyloscopy, a reading of friction ridges and grooves and an examination of the patterns of loops, arches, and whorls that collate into Stern’s thumbprint and account for the distinguishable qualities of his work. What other poet, we may ask, echoing Stern, is on his knees in the frozen clay with a spade / and a silver fork, fighting the old maples, / scattering handfuls of gypsum and moss, still worshiping? (Making the Light Come, ECP, 390). As he declares in There I Was One Day, nobody does it my way, / shaking the left foot, holding the right foot up, / a stork from Broadway, a heron from Mexico, / a pink flamingo from Greece (ECP, 365). Indeed, nobody else does it Stern’s way. Accessible and sophisticated, gregarious and visionary, he is an American original, one of our most tender and recalcitrant sons.

The contributors to this collection employ various lenses to situate Stern’s work within literary traditions and in relation to other artists, and to address specific topics and craft issues, including Stern’s Jewishness; bold romanticism and reckless nostalgia; his quests for the Sublime and affection for the voiceless and discarded; ethical inquiries; urban sensibility and eco-consciousness; poetic qualities in his prose; idiosyncratic voice; variable lines and formal wildness; and other techniques that lend his voice its inimitable tenor. The critical discourses range from lyrical to scholarly, with some essays providing close readings of one or two poems and others taking on extensive analyses that include historical and literary contextualizations and engage with other scholarship on Stern’s work.

In the foreword, riffing with humor and lyricism on William Carlos Williams’s A man is indeed a city, Philip Levine constructs the great City of Gerald in all its quirky splendor. Then the essays in part 1 discuss the thematic and aesthetic trajectory of Stern’s work, its peculiar brands of nostalgia, irony, and romanticism, and Stern’s affinities with Crane, Dickinson, Whitman, and other writers, musicians, and philosophers.

Combining personal recollection and critical insight, Edward Hirsch offers a reading of Stern’s work as a guide for the perplexed. He identifies in Rejoicings (1973) Stern’s first major quest to transform loss into exaltation and sees in the poet’s return to wastelands an almost ecstatic commitment to mourning. Hirsch comments on Stern’s major technical breakthroughs in Lucky Life and The Red Coal and on the radically subjective presence of his I—a personal and political I whose favored place of enunciation is the afterwards. The essay underscores the function of memory and nostalgia, the transformative work of metaphors, and the regenerative power of music. The latter is further examined in Michael Waters’s close reading of Casals (In Beauty Bright), an elegy that shares the Sternean sonnet’s improvisational qualities and use of American vernacular. Waters reads Casals as a spiritual and artistic palimpsest via which Stern enters conversations with a community of artists, including Bach and Pablo Casals, whose gorgeous interpretations of the former’s suites serve as model for Stern’s own lyrical strategies. J. T. Barbarese’s analysis of Stern’s Bio poems, which are scattered over various collections, examines the intersection of the autobiographical lyric with the biographical, and the emergence of what the critic has dubbed reckless nostalgia—a nostalgia that privileges impurity and that is powered not by homesickness but by the incessant return to the broken and discarded, to the messiness of things.

Through close readings of Hart Crane’s Eternity, Emily Dickinson’s Because I could not stop for Death and Some things that fly there be—, and Stern’s The Red Coal and Knowledge Forwards and Backwards, Michael Broek explores the affinities between Stern and his precursors, especially as reflected in