Poet Tied Cosmos to Physical World, With Mockery

Gerald Stern's honors include a National Book Award
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Oct 29, 2022 5:45 PM CDT
Gerald Stern Wrote About Natural World and Pittsburgh
Gerald Stern speaks to the audience during the National Book Awards in New York in 1998.   (AP Photo/Osamu Honda, File)

Gerald Stern, one of the country's most loved and respected poets who wrote with spirited melancholy and earthly humor about his childhood, Judaism, mortality, and the wonders of the contemplative life, has died. He was 97. Stern, New Jersey's first poet laureate, died Thursday at Calvary Hospice in New York City, his longtime partner, Anne Marie Macari, said Saturday. A cause of death was not provided. Winner of the National Book Award in 1998 for the anthology This Time, Stern was often compared to Walt Whitman because of his lyrical and sensual style, the AP reports, and his gift for wedding the physical world to the greater cosmos.

Stern was shaped by the rough, urban surroundings of his native Pittsburgh, but he also identified strongly with nature and animals, marveling at the "power" of a maple tree, likening himself to a hummingbird or a squirrel, or finding the "secret of life" in a dead animal on the road. A lifelong agnostic who fiercely believed in "the idea of the Jew" the poet wrote more than a dozen books and described himself as "part comedic, part idealistic, colored in irony, smeared with mockery and sarcasm." In poems and essays, he wrote with special intensity about the past—his immigrant parents, long-lost friends and lovers, and the striking divisions between rich and poor and Jews and non-Jews in Pittsburgh. He regarded "The One Thing in Life," from the 1977 collection Lucky Life, as the poem that best defined him.

He was past 50 before he won any major awards but was cited often over the second half of his life. Besides his National Book Award, his honors included being a Pulitzer Prize finalist and receiving a series of lifetime achievement awards. In 2013, the Library of Congress honored him for Early Collected Poems and praised him as "one of America's great poet-proclaimers in the Whitmanic tradition: With moments of humor and whimsy, and an enduring generosity, his work celebrates the mythologizing power of the art." He mostly avoided topical poems, but he was a political activist whose causes included desegregating a swimming pool. At Temple University, he was so enraged by the school's decision in the 1950s to build a 6-foot brick wall separating the campus from the nearby Black neighborhoods of Philadelphia that he made a point of climbing the wall on the way to class. "The institution subtly and insidiously works on you in such a way that though you seem to have freedom you become a servant," he said in 2010.

(More obituary stories.)

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