I.

By Gerald Stern, Ross Gay and Alicia Ostriker

A masterful long poem from one of our great American poets.

Gerald Stern’s long poem I. is an extraordinary and wild compilation of poetic modes, moods, and registers—meandering and focused, hallucinatory and concrete, deranged and deeply ecstatic. Inspired by the sight of a derelict synagogue on the Lower East Side, I. is an intrinsically New York poem, concerned with shifting structures of place and identity in the face of time and rapid change. Though first written in the late aughts, Stern’s brazen, mischievous politicality and blasphemous spirituality, refracted through the biblical book and prophetic character of Isaiah, feel particularly relevant to the present moment. Intertextual, critical, at times jubilant and derisive, I. brims with Stern’s idiosyncratic mix of high intellect and chthonic populism.

The book features Stern’s original introduction, as well as a foreword and afterword written by poet-luminaries Ross Gay and Alicia Ostriker.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ayin Press
• Release date: Dec 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986780382

Gerald Stern

Gerald Stern (1925–2022) was the author of more than twenty collections of poetry and essays. His most recent book of poems is Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000–2018 (W. W. Norton, 2020). He received numerous awards, including the National Book Award for This Time: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 1998). He lived in New York City.

Book preview

Cover: I. by Gerald Stern

I.

Gerald Stern

Foreword by Ross Gay

Afterword by Alicia Ostriker

This book was made possible through the generous support of the Opaline Fund. We are grateful for their commitment to the transformative power of creative work, and to amplifying a polyphony of voices from within and beyond the Jewish world.

Copyright © 2009, 2023 by Gerald Stern I. was first published online by Blackbird.

Foreword copyright © 2023 by Ross Gay

Afterword copyright © 2023 by Alicia Ostriker

Cover design, book design, and typesetting by Melissa Weiss

First Edition

First Printing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, known or unknown, including electronic and information storage and retrieval systems, without the express prior written permission of the publisher, except for brief quotation in a review.

Ayin Press

Brooklyn, New York

www.ayinpress.org

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Distributed by Small Press Distribution

ISBN: 978-1-5323-6201-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022943356

Ayin Press books may be purchased at a discounted rate by book clubs, synagogues, and other institutions buying in bulk. For more information, please email [e-mail].

Acknowledgments

Gratitude to Blackbird where I. first appeared online, to the team at Ayin Press for bringing this work to the page, and to Chase Berggrun and Anne Marie Macari for making it all possible.

Foreword

Ross Gay

Introduction

Gerald Stern

I.

Gerald Stern

Afterword

Alicia Ostriker

Praise for Gerald Stern

Stern is a romantic with a sense of humor … a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary.

Edward Hirsch

[Stern is] the wilderness in American poetry.

Stanley Kunitz

His work derides provincialism and points to a world of experiences beyond American borders and transcendent of temporal limits. Stern has lived in this rich world, and his poetry calls attention to its failures, beauties, and curiosities without fear, shame, or sentimentality.

Jeffrey Dodd, Elise Gregory, and Adam O’Connor Rodriguez in Willow Springs (2005)

[Stern is] a post-nuclear, multicultural Whitman for the millennium—the U.S.’s one and only truly global poet.

Kate Daniels in the Southern Review (1998)

Foreword

Ross Gay

I’m trying to remember now, as the tulips are coming up—we’ve inherited some, and we’ve planted a bunch: reds, yellows, bumblebee-colored—and the goumi blooming (a more sensuous smell you will never encounter), and the pears with their gaudy bedroom scent, and the plums and Nanking cherry already most the way through, and the big sweet cherry in the cemetery, old enough to have concrete hitching posts beneath it, where the horses could shade and rest and, for a couple lucky weeks, nibble the lowest fruit—a century old that tree? And oh, the Russian sage, which Stephanie and I planted as soon as we got this little house, to remind us of the Russian sage in front of Jerry’s house in Lambertville, where we met by now seventeen years ago.

I’m trying to remember just when Jerry and I made a trip (was it one trip? two?) to the vicinity of the ostensible scene of I.—Second and Twenty-Third—where, by now, though I haven’t been that way in a few years, I’d be surprised to find even the slightest remnant. But back then, 2006 or 2007, the Cosmos Diner was there, the abandoned synagogue as well, and Stern needed to look at the East River, he needed to properly describe a scene he was imagining in the poem (sections XXII–XXVish), to describe some shores and mucks and signage and such—it’s called lyric research: get up thereabouts (often up thereabouts is in your head, or your soul) and start sniffing around. Also known as adamant digression. One of the many things in which Stern is my teacher.

If we ate at the Cosmos—which I’m pretty certain we did—I have probably conflated it with another meal, this one on the way to a reading in one of the little-ish towns off Route 22 in New Jersey, and this reading would have been more in the late nineties or early aughts, I think; in the afterglow of when This Time came out, winning Jerry the National Book Award, and what all went along with that, which would’ve included more and better-paying readings, though this one he was doing for free for a friend who ran a little series, I’m pretty sure she had breast cancer. Jerry very kindly brought me along and asked me to read a few poems before he read his—oh yes, I should say this too:

I was Gerald Stern’s