One of the Smallest

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One of the Smallest

GERALD STERN
1997

INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
POEM TEXT
POEM SUMMARY
THEMES
STYLE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
CRITICISM
SOURCES
FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

Gerald Stern's poem "One of the Smallest" was first published in the journal Poetry in January 1997. A four-page poem, it is the first section of six sections in Stern's twelfth book of poetry, Last Blue, published in 2000. Stern did not start publishing poetry until 1971, when he was forty-six years old, but by 1973, he had received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to be a master poet for Pennsylvania, and he received numerous awards afterward, including the National Book Award in 1998 for his collection of poetry entitled This Time: New and Selected Poems. Last Blue was also well received as a continuation of Stern's emotional, exuberant expression of himself in surreal images. Using the first person, the narrator becomes a sort of Everyman based on Stern's own background and memories. "One of the Smallest" is typical of Stern's work in that it includes abundant imagery taken from elements of the natural world such as animals, plants, and a river. A poem about death and rebirth, "One of the Smallest" follows a ray of sunshine through multiple locations and transformations as a life force that is compared to and connected with a person's life span.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Born on February 22, 1925, Gerald Stern grew up in a rough neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His parents, both Eastern European

immigrants, were Orthodox Jews who sent him to a religious school, but he stopped practicing his faith shortly after his bar mitzvah. In childhood, Stern suffered from anti-Semitism; moreover, at age eight, he experienced the traumatic death of his nine-year-old sister Sylvia to spinal meningitis. In 1947, he graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, and then earned his master's degree from Columbia University in 1949. Although he began writing poetry in college, Stern taught college English for most of his professional career.

After graduation, Stern went to Paris for a year of travel and study at the Sorbonne, and it was there that he became seriously interested in poetry. Upon his return to New York, he entered a doctoral program at Columbia but left a year later to become the headmaster at a private school. He married Patricia Miller in 1952, and in 1953, they went back to Europe for three years. He eventually taught high school in Glasgow, Scotland. Upon his return to the United States, Stern began his college teaching career, holding positions at Temple University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Somerset County College. From 1982 to his retirement in 1995, he held a tenured position at the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa. Throughout these years, he was also a visiting professor at several other universities. He and his wife had two children, but the couple divorced in the late 1980s.

Stern did not publish his first book of poetry, Rejoicings, until 1971, when he was forty-six years old. Among more than a dozen subsequent collections of poetry are Lucky Life (1977, Lamont Poetry Selection Award); This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998, National Book Award); Last Blue (2000), which contains "One of the Smallest"; American Sonnets (2003, Griffin Poetry Prize); and Everything Is Burning (2006). He is also the author of a book of personal essays, What I Can't Bear Losing: Notes from a Life (2003).

Stern has received many other honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, five National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts for the State of Pennsylvania, the PEN Award, a chancellorship in the Academy of American Poets, and the Ruth Lilly Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award for a lifetime of achievement in poetry. A lyric poet who emphasizes lessons from memories and nature, Stern has made a significant contribution to American literature.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Gerald Stern gave a reading of "Roses" from his book American Sonnets for the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry. As of 2007, video of this reading was available on the Griffin Poetry Prize website.
On November 23, 1998, Elizabeth Farnsworth interviewed Gerald Stern for the PBS Online NewsHour. As of 2007, both a print and an audio version were available at PBS website.

POEM TEXT

This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.

POEM SUMMARY

Lines 1-8

"One of the Smallest" is a long poem without stanzas. Rather than simply say that there is one long thread that runs through the whole poem tying it together, it would be more accurate to say that there is one long thread running through the poem as if placed there by a sewing machine gone berserk, zigzagging unevenly as Stern's thoughts ricochet down the poem. However, there are divisions that can be made according to subject and punctuation.

The poem starts with "one of the smallest" things in existence, a ray of light. The "first gray light" of morning finds its way through a tiny hole "in the cracked window blind" in the narrator's room. Sunshine, "made of gas and water"—a reference to the gaseous composition of the sun and the way sunlight reflects off particles of water—although the "smallest, smallest" microscopically small, can still catch the eye in an otherwise darkened room.

Lines 9-23

The sunlight is needed by living creatures, and Stern lists among them an eagle, a mole, a rabbit, a quail, and a lilac. He emphasizes the mole by repeating, "even a mole, a mole" because even though the mole lives mostly underground, it, too, needs sunlight. As a human, the narrator needs sunlight so much that he says, "I tore down walls, I cut my trees," to allow more sunlight to reach him. He enjoys the sunlight by sunbathing while lying on his back with "a rock to support" his head, swimming, and then drying in the sunlight, even if the bright sun can make his eyes water. Stern notes the passage of time in a reference to "the wind and the dirt" wearing away the surface of the earth as he segues into the segment of the poem that deals with death.

Lines 23-35

As the day and the years progress, the sun "slowly died." When the sun sets, it appears to die out, but it is actually dying over millions of years, while the narrator is dying "much quicker, much quicker." The narrator describes life as a race "until I was wrinkled" by old age, but he and the star are both "losing light." The narrator says, "I was dying before I was born," because from the moment life begins it is on a journey to death. At birth, the narrator describes himself as "blue" perhaps in reference to those babies who are born a little blue because before birth they did not get sufficient oxygen. A healthy baby will turn red when crying, and the narrator says, "I was red much later." The redness is Stern's color for life, "a copy" of the sun exploding down the path of life, but the narrator is inescapably born for death, even if he "fought against it."

Lines 35-43

In the first line, Stern refers to "the first gray light," and he returns to that image in line 36 as a comparison to the evening sky that is "rose" in one sky and "white" in another. The narrator actually says "a rose," perhaps to create an image of an evening sky when the varied colors are layered like the petals of a rose. The white sky may be equivalent to the bright light to which one is supposed to go at death, the "one place the light comes back" in the darkness that is death. At this point, the narrator says, "I disappeared like a fragment of gas … or fire." Choosing to use the words gas and fire again, Stern is making connections to the gases and fire of the sun in the disintegration of the narrator's life.

Lines 44-52

Eventually, Stern wants to resurrect the narrator, but first the fiery, gaseous fragments are cooled and transformed into metal and then, after "one or two more centuries," made into a bell. Some people who believe in reincarnation or multiple lives believe there may be large time gaps between lives and perhaps that is why Stern provides a length of time before the metal finally gets made into something. The narrator insists that he is made into a bell and "not a bridge, not a hammer"; more precisely, he envisions becoming "the tongue of a bell" because he wants to "sing as the bell does."

Lines 52-62

The burst of light that exploded the narrator's being into gaseous fragments is one viewpoint, but, the reader is told, there could be another way of looking at his death. Perhaps instead his was a "long slow burning" fire as one might have with a slow-burning wood such as that of the olive or carob trees, two trees still in existence after thousand of years. The narrator says that is what is wrong with human life: it is more like the comet's flash of fire than like the plants that have lasted on earth longer than humans.

Lines 62-85

Even more short-lived is the flame on a match. Stern describes in detail the composition and function of a match and a matchbox. Anyone who has ever used a match is reminded by Stern's description of exactly the process of striking a match, letting it burn, and how it looks afterwards. Readers can almost smell the "fosfur" (usually spelled phosphor), hear the striking of the match, count with the narrator through the six seconds that the flame lasts, and see the curled remains of matches in the ash tray. The matchbox is also vividly described with its stack of matches, the two rough striking areas on the sides of the box, and how one holds a match to light it. No matter how common the action, the narrator says that the "flash of fire" is "always a shock," because one never knows when the match will catch fire and when it will not. Besides, the making of fire simply by scratching a treated piece of wood against a rough surface still seems like magic, so the experience is always new and enlightening because each match starts a new fire.

Lines 86-93

Speaking of forever, time has apparently passed, and the narrator finds himself once again in his yard, once again starting out blue with his mouth agape, perhaps from the surprise of the transition. The narrator is immediately able to discern the season because he has a bridal wreath in his right hand, so it must be June, the month of weddings. Why is his left hand scratching? Is he clawing his way back into life? Stern is a poet of place, so the narrator is located in a yard that has a dogwood tree and an iris.

Lines 93-102

Is the narrator looking at the iris, or has the narrator become the iris in a new life? He says he is without a beard, and irises have what is called a beard in the center of the flower, but he also says that he is streaked with purple, a common color for irises, and that his "hands are folded and overlapping" just as the iris's large petals appear to be like folded hands. As a plant, he loves the rain and "blossoms for fifteen hours a day" in the summertime sunlight.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Stern is Jewish and has written poems about the Holocaust as well as many other subjects. He is often called a Jewish poet. In a small group, discuss whether heritage or subject matter makes someone a Jewish poet. For reference, look up his poem "Soap" or his poem "Adler."
Gerald Stern did not publish his first book of poetry until 1971 when he was forty-six years old. After that he published more than a dozen books and earned numerous prestigious awards. Research the time in Stern's life before 1971 and write a brief biography of the man before his career as a poet.
Why is Stern called the modern Whitman? Make a list of the characteristics of the poetry of each man and compare them. Is it valid to say that Stern writes in the style of Whitman? Defend your answer in a written answer or a presentation to your class, with specifics from your list.
In 1982, Stern began teaching at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and remained there until his retirement at the age of seventy in 1995. The Iowa Writers' Workshop is one of the most famous schools for aspiring writers of all genres in the United States. Make an online search for other colleges that offer degrees in professional or creative writing. If you wanted to be a writer, where would you go and why? Explain your answer to your class.
Stern won the National Book Award in 1998. What is this award and why is it so prestigious? How many genres does it cover? Make a comparison of the National Book Award to the Pulitzer Prize. Compare lists of recent winners. Report your findings in a brief, bulleted format.

Lines 102-121

In this last section of the poem, the narrator shifts back to being a human who walks "through streams of some sort." As the sunlight bombards his eyes, he likes to think that the sun is what gave him "life in the first place." The next several lines ponder how natural it might be, as primitive peoples did, to worship the sun for its life-giving properties. Instead, modern people sometimes see the sunlight as "disturbing, call it interfering" when in its pervasiveness it lights up the area around the dumpster "at five in the morning" or shines on the river at six. The narrator describes being "a little tired from the two hundred steps." Are these steps a reference to the one or two centuries in line 46 that it took for the metal to be made into a bell? Or does Stern have a backyard that has two hundred steps down to the river? Regardless, his iris is blooming and his maple tree is blowing in the wind. All is well. He has been a mole, a rabbit, a stone, maybe a bell and an iris, or at least shared life and the need for fire and sunshine with them. Life is "garish," a bright flash of many colors, and then a burning of human energy.

THEMES

Light versus Darkness

A career-long theme for Stern was that of light versus darkness, that this natural contrast or conflict is inherently important to humans in both a biological and an emotional way. "One of the Smallest" incorporates light and darkness with life, death, and rebirth. The narrator of the poem says that light "was what gave me life in the first place," and Stern makes this connection between light and life throughout the poem. In lines 9-11, he asserts that the plants and animals need sunlight. In the same way, the narrator needs sunlight so much that he tears down walls and cuts down trees to get more of it. Stern describes a scene in which the narrator is soaking up the sun outdoors by sunbathing and swimming. The implication is that his energy and his joy come from the sunlight. However, the sun is dying and so is the narrator. By "losing light," he disappears into fragments, but he reappears into his sunlit yard after an explosion of light brings him back to life. A popular image of death is going into the light, but for the narrator of the poem death is darkness, an absence from the world until his essence is remade and brought back to life by the fire of light. Although the word "light" is used many times in "One of the Smallest," the words "dark" and "darkness" are not because death is equated to darkness or the loss of light. So, although there are allusions to death in this poem, the emphasis is on the power of light to generate life and rebirth, a power so strong that even "one of the smallest" particles of light can awaken a person to a world of joy.

Memory and Nostalgia

Memory for Stern is as much a device as a theme; he uses memories to generate poetry. The idea, however, is to encourage readers to take a trip down memory lane with the narrator of the poem for the purpose of sharing memories and comparing them to the readers' own. Perhaps whatever the "I" of the poem learns from his memories serves as a lesson for readers, too. Stern is not being didactic or nostalgic in a heavy-handed way; rather, the memories are an opportunity for thoughtful examination that might lead to a resurrection of goals and the search for paradise that Stern feels is a central quest for all humans. Nostalgia prompts one to look back and gain perspective about events in one's past. At the same time, it prompts one to bring the pieces of one's life together in order to blend past, present, and future into a cohesive whole, of applying logic to the emotions lingering from the past. In "One of the Smallest," the speaker in the poem remembers a past life spent in sunshine and nature. Death takes that life away for a while, but light, the energy of fire and the sun, gives it back. The interim period is a remembrance of the fragments of his essence being made into the tongue of a bell, remembering how slowly the olive and carob trees burn and how long they have been a part of the earth's resources, remembering in detail the construction and use of a matchbox and matches. Stern's narrator imagines being transformed into a bell's tongue. The close-up look at the matches provides a way to come back to the fire and light that will rekindle his life and place him once again in his yard, where he does not remember the dogwood and the iris, but time has gone by and there is a new world to experience in the warmth of the life-giving sunlight that he appreciates so much.

Rebirth

A frequent subject in storytelling, mythology, and religion, rebirth can be portrayed as spiritual, as a metaphoric rectification of one's life, or as a some kind of reincarnation. The symbols of rebirth include baptism, the rites of spring, the rise of the mythic phoenix from the ashes, and so on. Whether used in the Odyssey, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or Groundhog Day, the theme is a familiar one that usually involves uprooting the subject who then journeys to the new life. Rebirth is used frequently by Stern as a device for becoming free of inner conflict and the past's burdens, a type of cleansing. In "One of the Smallest," rebirth takes place after a transformation through time and matter. It is described as the reincarnation of the narrator into an iris, but also possibly into a mole, rabbit, stone, and then perhaps back into a human who can once again

relish the joy of light and nature. Perhaps the narrator has been all of the these things at different times as the molecules of nature evolve and transform, just as the molecules of the sun bring life to everything.

STYLE

Lyric Poetry

Lyric poetry, the dominant form of the twentieth century, does not tell a story; it has a single narrator, not the poet, who speaks in first person. This "I" is a distinguishing feature of lyric poetry and is used to express a state of mind, present an argument or a justification, make an observation, or contemplate a problem. Readers of lyric poetry need to identify the type of person speaking and the listener to whom the narrator is speaking. Stern's poems are based on his memories, but he does not reveal the source of those memories, nor does he regard the speaker as his personal mouthpiece. Rather, the speaker is a contemporary representative person, more singular than the Everyman of Whitman and other poets. In "One of the Smallest," the "I" gives individuality to an experience that yet could be the life and fate of anyone.

Free Verse

The most commonly used style of poetry in modern times is free verse. While it does not have strict metrical patterns, fixed line lengths, or ending rhymes, it qualifies as poetry because of its rhythms and sound patterns. Students of free verse should look for divisions within a poem (not just stanza divisions but divisions from one line to the next), line length, repeated syntactical units, imagery patterns, sound devices, and word choices. Assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme are used to create the desired sound qualities, while repetition of words and phrases with the same syntactical structure is used to create a rhythm. Another way to create rhythm is by constructing phrases of about equal length. In "One of the Smallest," Stern uses word and phrase repetition liberally. Line length can also help to convey emphasis or create tension. For example, a series of long lines followed by one short line might signal a commentary on the preceding lines or the solution to a problem. "One of the Smallest" has lines of almost equal length throughout, which may signal that Stern wants the reader to keep going, to keep reading with the speed that the passage of time takes with one's life. Stern is known for his use of imagery from nature, and "One of the Smallest" is replete with free verse patterns of flora and fauna, sunshine, and water.

Colors

An important part of the imagery that Stern uses is color. Last Blue is the title of the collection in which "One of the Smallest" is the first entry, and blue is a dominant color throughout the poems in the book. In "One of the Smallest," the word "blue" appears only twice, once describing the narrator's color at birth, "blue at the start," and "sitting with my mouth open in some unbearable blue," but six other colors help to paint the landscape: gray (twice), as in the "first gray light that came into my room" and "The light of morning was gray"; red, the color he becomes after the blue of birth; green, "the light of morning was gray with a green"; white, the evening light was like a rose, "though it was white"; pinkish, "the pinkish head" of the match; and purple, "I'm streaked with a kind of purple," like the iris. Imagery is intended to appeal to the senses, and use of colors helps to convey a vivid picture to the reader.

Sensuality of Nature and Physical Things

Stern is noted for his extensive use of images from nature. The things he names, such as plants and animals, give concreteness to his abstract expression and give readers something familiar to cling to as they try to follow the narrator's associative thoughts. In "One of the Smallest," the reader finds an eagle, a mole, a rabbit, a quail, a lilac, an iris, and dogwood, maple, olive and carob trees. There is a river, a stream, a yard, sunrises, and sunsets; in all, Stern sees nature as an integral part of the human experience. Also, his belief in the human need to find the lost paradise causes him to fill his landscapes with the abundant garden people may associate with paradise. Stern glorifies nature and its importance to the human environment. The renewal of life, part of nature's cycle, finds its way into Stern's poetry, as it does in the story of life, death, and rebirth that is "One of the Smallest."

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Poetry in the 1990s

Post-World War II poetry in the United States could be categorized into definite schools, and discussions centered on traditional forms versus free verse, or academic study versus experimentation. In the 1980s, there were still definite boundaries between competing styles, but change occurred in the 1990s when reality in poetry became totally relative to the imagination of the poet. This change is referred to as the postmodern movement, and it held to no rules as it mixed varying viewpoints with psychology and experimentation with language. American poetry showed the influence of overseas and in film techniques (such as the split screen and shifting angles) and fostered diversity among women and various ethnic groups, thus joining in the burgeoning global literature movement. The result was a public interest in poetry that in the early 2000s continued to be at an all-time high. Colleges increased the number of creative writing programs, poetry slams and readings were well attended, and the Internet opened a vast exchange among poets, aspiring poets, and readers. The introduction of the World Wide Web in 1992 led to paperless, experimental poetry that is technology-driven and includes graphics, animation, and hypertext links.

Poetry in the 1990s dashed off in all directions as if the doors were opened to a big new world, and poets raced to see where they could take the genre. Consequently, in the early 2000s, it became almost impossible to typify the poetry of this decade. Anthologists had to narrow their titles to categories in this time period; for example, women's writing in the 1990s; ethnic writers; jazz poetry; cowboy poetry; hip-hop; poetry of nature, of wit, of family, etc. It could be said, though, that there were two major starting points for this new adventure from which the genre grew: first, poetry of the self, as influenced by Robert Lowell and the confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s whose impact continued to be felt for decades, and, second, poetry of the world as typified by Elizabeth Bishop. The latter type was like a narrative, setting scenes centered on detail. The two roots of postmodernism were polar opposites and in between fell all the new poetry with various themes. Both Lowell and Bishop influenced Stern, who won the National Book Award in 1998. However, Stern definitely falls into the category of poetry of the self, which explores the psyche and expresses very personal emotions.

In addition, a study of the Pulitzer Prize winners of the decade shows a tendency toward the negative. Doom and gloom were common themes of the 1990s, perhaps because of the increased concern for the earth's environment that can be found in the poetry of the time. Whatever the cause, the negativity did not prevent the world of poetry from becoming larger and more diverse. It is hard to make a short list of notables in the field, but a few American names of import in the 1990s are Jorie Graham, Louise Gluck, Philip Levine, Charles Wright, Robert Pinsky, and Yusef Komunyakaa.

Reincarnation

An essential belief of some religions is reincarnation, the idea that the essence of a person can come back from death to live again, perhaps many times. Some religions assert that reincarnation can be cross-species, that a person may come back as an animal, for example. The idea is that the soul gains new experiences and learns in each life until spiritual perfection is achieved, at which time the sequence of birth, death, and birth ends. If the person errs with one life, then the next life could be as a lower species or in a lower station. Reincarnation is a central teaching of Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, as well as to many Native American and Inuit traditions. It was also believed by some ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. Some modern New Age philosophies subscribe to the idea of reincarnation. Scientologists believe in immortality and that one is not born into another life but into another body. Buddhists believe in a continual momentum of ever-changing life, but they do not believe the individual entity or soul returns. Rebirth as used in literature usually means a spiritual renewal that is symbolized by death and rebirth, although mythology and folklore are full of stories about people who come back from the grave, often as ghosts or spirits. The theme of rebirth is generally used by writers to explain going through some kind of catharsis or dramatic life-changing turning point. Stern's "One of the Smallest" leaves the interpretation of rebirth or reincarnation up to the reader.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Many critics warmly received Stern's Last Blue. For example, Carlos Reyes, writing on the collection for the book review section of Willamette Week Online, points out that, "like wine, [Stern's] work only gets better with age. This is a rare book where each new reading brings us further insight into our existence." A reviewer for a volume on American Writers, Jonathan N. Barron agrees, commenting that "One of the Smallest," is a "visionary, even apocalyptic, tale of death, rebirth, and regeneration." As to singing, noted Booklist critic Donna Seaman says that Stern "levitate[s] out of the ordinary to take in the big picture and to feel the lift, the free-floating, singing bliss of life."

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Stern won the National Book Award in 1999 for This Time: New and Selected Poems. This collection contains selections of Stern's best poetry from his seven previous volumes as well as new poems, and the collection shows remarkable consistency in theme and style through the years.
Everything Is Burning is Stern's 2006 collection of poetry, published when the poet was eighty-one years old. As he did before, Stern based the poems on his own life and his Jewish-American heritage, but there seems to be a wider range of emotions and subjects in this volume.
In 2003, Stern published a memoir, What I Can't Bear Losing: Notes from a Life, a reminiscence that includes explanations about the development of his writing style.
Since Stern is often compared to Walt Whitman, a good companion to the study of Stern's poetry is Whitman's 1855 masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, which is available in various editions.
Stern admits to preferring elements of Emily Dickinson to Walt Whitman. Multiple editions of her poetry are available, including a 2006 edition, entitled Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Stern recommends to readers the work of poet Rainier Maria Rilke (1875-1926), whose popularity increased after Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann published The Essential Rilke in 2000.
As a young man, Stern sought out W. H. Auden, whose Collected Poems are available in a 2007 edition from Modern Library.

The focus on common events drew the notice of John Taylor, in his review of Last Blue for Antioch Review. Taylor writes that Stern's twelfth book of poetry is "composed in a vigorous first person and focused on the vagaries" of daily life. Taylor notes the extraordinary way that Stern presents ordinary things: "Stern's serpentine, kaleidoscopic verses combine, as in a Cubist collage, unexpected juxtapositions or contradictory viewpoints." Taylor further comments: "Capricious, amusing and sometimes suddenly poignant in their imagery, these poems exhibit mobility and uprootedness as paradoxically constant themes." He concludes that the collection has a "plucky, if melancholy, spirit." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly agrees: "The language is far from ordinary…. The poems still rely on Stern's inimitable blend of coiled anger, love of life and raffish, on-the-outside-looking-in wit."

Concerning Last Blue, a Ploughshares reviewer finds: "This is a sparer Stern than we're used to … he's writing now with a tighter focus, as though he had to make every word count. The best news is he does." But the reviewer for Publishers Weekly assures readers that Stern has remained true to his established style and that "While there are few surprises here, the quality of the poems is consistently quite high, and the voice behind them remains winning and companionable." In all, Stern won praise from many reviewers.

CRITICISM

Lois Kerschen

Kerschen is an educator and freelance writer. In this essay, she uses Stern's own words from his interviews to show how Stern's poetic practices were applied in "One of the Smallest."

It is common practice in the study of literature to examine the life of the author in hopes of finding clues to the inspiration behind the work. Often researchers can learn about the literary philosophies and creative practices of poets prior to the twentieth century only through any writings they or their learned admirers left behind on the subject. Since newspapers, radio, television, scholarly journals, and the Internet have proliferated, information about every variety of artist usually takes just a quick investigation. A further advantage of studying a modern writer is the likely availability of interviews with the author. Although some are reclusive and rarely give interviews, Gerald Stern has granted a number of them, as well as writing literary articles of his own. Besides, Stern has been a teacher most of his life and as such is inclined by the nature of the profession to share his knowledge with others. Therefore, reading his interviews can provide insight into his work. Specifically, it is interesting to see if what he preaches is what he practiced in "One of the Smallest."

Jeffrey Dodd, Elise Gregory, and Adam O'Connor Rodriguez conducted a 2005 interview with Stern for Willow Springs, a literary magazine produced at Eastern Washington University. In this interview, Stern talks about the process by which he arrives at a poem: "I begin with language. I don't begin with ideas, I don't begin with images. I begin with words." In regards to "One of the Smallest," the reader may then wonder if the poem began with the word "sunlight" and then Stern thought about when sunlight has made an impression on him, such as the first light of morning. "Language is everything," Stern continues to explain in the Willow Springs interview. He says, "I let the words transform me, carry me, literally, to places and experience. Occasionally, I'll actually think of an experience, relive an experience. You'll read a poem that might describe an experience, but it starts with language." So, in "One of the Smallest," Stern went from the thought of that first morning light and let the thought carry him to what the ray of light touches, who sees it, how it feels when multiple rays warm him outdoors, and then arrives at a comparison of light to life which, when it fades, becomes death.

Similarly, in a 2002 interview with Gary Pacernick for the American Poetry Review, Stern says that he allows himself to "just move along as the spirit, if you will, takes me. God knows what that spirit is. Call it the muses, call it unconsciousness, guilt, shame, love, hope, memory." Stern describes this process to Pacernick as an associative way of writing in which "one thing leads to another." The reader can then see how, once the ray of light leads Stern to a comparison with life and death in "One of the Smallest," he moves on to the death of the narrator, an interim time as a bell tongue, and then rebirth.

In Greek mythology, the muses were the nine goddess sisters who served as patrons and sources of inspiration for the arts and sciences. For Stern, perhaps the muse of poetry is still around to guide him and in "One of the Smallest," this associative method of Stern's is obvious. Thoughts run down the page with only a few commas and a rare period to give pause. The poem's opening sentence, if it can be called a sentence, runs for twelve lines. The next two sentences run eleven and twelve lines, but the fourth sentence runs from line 35 to line 92! Trying to keep up with where Stern is going requires a mental gymnastics that feels like being shot into a pinball machine, and yet there are no vague allusions sending the reader to the dictionary. All the terms are everyday language, and for an abstract work, there are sufficient logical connections to enable the reader to hang on for the whole ride. Everyone has seen sunlight peeking through a window shade. Everyone has seen pictures of, if not actual, eagles, moles, rabbits, quails, lilacs, dogwood, and irises. Readers have seen bells, bridges, hammers, and matchboxes, and understand the point about olive and carob trees. The abstract nature of the poem comes in its ideas, but Stern describes everyday, concrete objects with words that are piled and scattered about, words that, as he says, carry him to places and experiences, words that fly wherever the spirit guides them, to express those thoughts and his feelings. Stern told Sue William Silverman in an interview for Fourth Genre: "What I believe … is that there is a subordinate or superior body or mind that is writing, organizing for you, and you must submit to that body or mind. It's inchoate or invisible, without making it too mystical or being too Freudian about this." Put in its simplest terms, Stern summed up the process for Silverman by saying: "I just write and hope it's good."

Stern wrote in a 1999 essay for American Poetry Review: "Poetry helps people live their lives through its music," through poetry's "exquisite interpenetration of these two things, moral force and tenderness, or brute power and tenderness." Stern's words may run pell-mell down the page in "One of the Smallest," but there are the commas, periods, and dashes to create pauses as well as repetition of words and phrases, and parallel structures to create the meter, the beat of the music. In five places, he repeats words side by side. Then in lines 46 through 51 he scatters the word "bell." In lines 21 through 22, there is a short structural repetition, "what was abraded and what was exhausted," followed by an extended structural repetition in line 26 through 33 with "I was" repeated eight times to set up a progression of changes. Using this repetition definitely sets up a rhythm and serves as a sort of refrain in the music of the poem. Other repeated words and phrases follow in the rest of the poem but become slightly less frequent as Stern gets into detail with his comparisons and then brings his poem to its conclusion.

Stern also referred to the music of poetry in his Silverman interview, telling her that "In poetry, the music comes first, and I would never write a bad line, or what I consider a bad line, in order to get some content into the poem." Content in the poem is the story that Stern tells. He admitted to Elizabeth Farnsworth in an interview for the Jim Lehrer News Hour that he is like "the ancient mariner who grabs people and says: ‘Listen, I have to tell you something. I have to explain myself.’ I suppose as I'm explaining myself to others, I'm quintessentially explaining myself to myself." Nonetheless, his poems are not confessional, nor do they express what he thinks about issues. Rather, they are his way of enabling the reader to participate in the spiritual journey that the muses allow him to pursue. There are no issues in "One of the Smallest," just the journey as he imagines it, and he invites his readers to tag along so they can experience the same feelings. As Stern emphasized to Farnsworth, his poems "don't relay the adventure of my life. I become, in effect, at the best, representational, so that my life is the reader's life, that the reader can zero in on those aspects of my life as I reveal them, that he can say, yes, that's what happens to me." The simple, concrete language that Stern uses helps readers relate to Stern's life and recognize similarities to their own lives.

For Stern to call upon aspects of his own life in his poetry, he has to draw on past experiences, but not in a sentimental or nostalgic way. Although Jane Somerville reports in the American Poetry Review that Stern proposes, "‘Maybe the subject of the poem is always nostalgia,’" he clarifies this statement by saying that "‘conventional nostalgia fits’" are only "echoes of the real thing … authentic nostalgia is ‘the essential memory.’" This type of memory, Stern says, has "great psychic roots with true and terrifying aspects of rupture and separation." The pain of separation, Stern further asserts, stems from the loss of paradise. Living in the modern world automatically means not living in paradise, and humans instinctively are trying to re-create paradise and envision a future world. Somerville records Stern as saying, "I see it as an intense desire to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off. I see it as a search for the permanent." All of these elements are present in "One of the Smallest." Nostalgia as memory is seen in the first part of the poem in the picture of the narrator cutting down trees, basking in the sun, and swimming, then later being in the yard and seeing flowers, trees, and a river. Whether Stern ever actually cut down trees is not the point. These are all real things that he has seen or witnessed. They are brought to mind by his original subject of sunshine and are connected as he automatically goes on his search for paradise, for his Garden of Eden. The permanency he seeks lies in the fact that the garden is there in his first life, and even after his rebirth, the garden is there again. He is reassured that paradise will always be there.

"One of the Smallest" wonderfully exemplifies the use of memories to describe the small joys of life that a person embraces until they disappear "like a fragment of gas" or fire. Stern picks up on the idea of fire in line 42 and carries it through three manifestations until line 85: fire changing the fragments into metal that can be used in the making of a bell, the slow burning wood of the olive and carob trees, and the fire that is produced by a match. These three examples are all taken from memories about seeing how metal and a bell are made, memories about how slowly olive and carob trees burn, and detailed recall of the parts of a match and how a match works. The joyful memories are what make the eventual separation at death so painful. As Stern says, this is a loss that humans can hardly bear to face, so Stern turns the story of "One of the Smallest" into one that describes death as a transformation into a new life, giving hope that there may yet be a future and a paradise in a garden with dogwoods and irises.

Source: Lois Kerschen, Critical Essay on "One of the Smallest," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007

Gary Pacernick

In the following interview excerpt, Pacernick asks Stern to share his thoughts about Walt Whitman (to whom he is often compared), Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, and Ezra Pound in connection with their influences on his poetry. Stern is also asked how maturity has affected his poetry.

[Gary Pacernick:] The person who introduced you at your reading at Barnes & Noble yesterday said you're often compared to Whitman, that you're a reincarnation of Whitman, which is not terribly accurate. But he's influenced most of the American poets who followed him. And in your poem, "Lucky Life," again from that earlier volume, I see a lot of Whitman there. And of course in a lot of the other poems: the use of catalogs and parallel structure. Of course one could argue that you got that from the Hebrew prophets. And your affirmation of self, your kind of manic joy and energy remind me of Whitman. And then even the very title, "Lucky Life." Any thoughts about Whitman?

[Gerald Stern:] I love Whitman, and in the long poem "Hot Dog," which is in Odd Mercy, one of the two principle figures, characters, personalities, voices, in that poem is Whitman. The other is Augustine. I present them as kind of polar opposites, for good or ill, correctly or incorrectly. And Whitman even as a literal figure in the poem. There's a section of that poem where he is dying; he's dead. When I wrote that, and in the poem itself, I'm lying on my back in his little bed in the last house he lived in in Camden, New Jersey. I actually was there and I was doing that.

I love Whitman. I don't love all of Whitman. There's a lot of Whitman that is repetitive, flat, excessive. But when he's on, there's no one like him. In "Song of Myself," he's elusive, he's a genius, he's brilliant, and he's smart. And I love that Whitman. I don't know how it happened that there are so many connections between him and me. There are with Whitman and many contemporary poets. One could say the same thing of Galway Kinnell, one could say the same thing of Allen Ginsberg, to a degree Philip Levine, to a degree Robert Bly. Maybe me more than the others or maybe a little less than some of the others. Certainly less than Ginsberg; I think even less than Kinnell.

I find myself getting a little angry and resisting it. But resisting it has nothing to do with Whitman as a poet. It's got to do with what seems to me too easy an identification. Resisting the connection. Maybe I want to be more "original" and not be derivative; maybe that's an element. As far as the two grand masters, Dickinson and Whitman, I find that Dickinson is the one that continues to interest me more. She is the one I read more. The last time I went to Europe, I took two books with me. Dickinson's Letters and Dickinson's Poems. I didn't take "Song of Myself."

What that means I don't know. Psychologists, Jungians, tell us about the opposites. I don't know what I can say about Whitman that is not obvious: his expansiveness, his openness, his liberal view of the world, his sense of an open future, his belief in redemption through unforeseen ways, his use of ideology and various ideologies metaphorically rather than literally. So that at the end, for example, of "Song of Myself" where he's almost a Christ figure, and I think possibly that was deliberately in his mind when he wrote that poem, he says, "Look for me somewhere else." He says, "It's time to explain myself. Let us stand up." I love that Whitman. That humorous, serious Whitman.

It's interesting about Whitman. He speaks very little about the Jews. I'm sure he loved the Jews. I'm sure he had a good nineteenth-century liberal vision of Judaism, if he thought about it. I don't think he thought about it a lot. Certainly he's an important element in Yiddish and Hebrew thinking. There are many, many early translations of Whitman into Yiddish and into Hebrew. But Whitman does not have a Jewish taste. There is humor in Whitman but it's a different kind of humor. I think that quality in me that is nervous, ironic, mean, even nasty, elusive in my way, derives from another place than Whitman. I think there are other connections. One doesn't always know the connections. Certainly Yeats is a connection, certainly Marlowe, Shakespeare, Christopher Smart, Eliot and Pound, Stevens in different ways, Williams, Coleridge. Coleridge very, very much so. But I don't reject it, I'm just trying to elaborate on this. I'm not speaking against Whitman. God love Whitman.

What about Dickinson, though? I mean, I was surprised when you said—

I know. I saw the look of surprise on your face. I don't know what I can say about it. I love her metaphors. I guess the thing about her I love the most is her mystery, her elusiveness, and her metaphysics. I love how she presents every poem as a kind of problem to be solved. I do the same thing, in a way. Whitman doesn't do that. I love, of course, her music. I love her bizarre imagination. I love her grotesqueries. I don't like the mechanical rhymes and the woodenness.

You have a poem about Auden.

Yes.

In Paradise Poems, "In Memory of W. H. Auden."

Which is of course a paraphrase of his "In Memory of W. B. Yeats."

Ah, that great elegy.

"Earth receive an honored guest;/ William Yeats is laid to rest."

Did you meet him? In the poem you make it seem like you met him.

I met him, yes. Several times.

What kind of personal impact did he have on you and of course what kind of impact did he have on you as a poet through his poetry?

Well, it's interesting that, when I first started to think about poetry, memorize poetry, read poetry, and even write poetry in my early, early twenties, one of the poets I read intensely was Auden. I loved Auden, and I thought that Auden was my maître, my master. The interesting thing was that in many ways we were absolute opposites. He was ironic, intellectual, academic (maybe not academic), formal, coming from quite a different tradition with a different view of things, a different use of language. Yet I loved him, I loved his songs and sonnets, I loved his elegies, I loved his biographical poems (about Forster, about Freud, about Yeats and so on).

I read him eagerly and avidly. I knew poem after poem of his by heart, and I still do. And yet he was not a true influence. Really someone like Marlowe was more of an influence. Someone like Isaac Rosenberg. Certainly someone like Yeats or Pound. I visited Auden in the early fifties. I had just written a long poem with the absurd title of "Ishmael's Dream." It was an outsider's outsider poem, I spent a year at it. I was living in Paris, writing at a little desk every day, ten, fifteen lines. I had no idea what it was about. One didn't have Xerox machines in those days. My poor fiancé at the time, later my wife, typed up ten, twelve copies of this long poem.

I sent one copy to Auden. He asked me to come see him. He was living in the West Village then, Christopher Street, I believe. It was going to be a laying on of hands. I thought, this was it. And I remember spending a long, long afternoon, a half day with him. There were some other people in the apartment, and I was this innocent, almost ignorant, Pittsburgher, kind of an intellectual tough. I remember I and my friends spent an hour discussing what clothes I would wear. Should I wear a suit and be a neo-academic? Should I wear a sweater and pants and not shave and be a Pittsburgh ruffian. Well, they were talking about theater and cheese and God knows what. I knew Velveeta cheese. I mean, what did I know about cheese, coming from Pittsburgh. And it was a long day, and finally I said to him, "Mr. Auden, what about my poem?" He looked at me, and he said, "Oh, I really liked the last ten lines." A kind of a lyric at the end of the poem. And I was furious at him for years for that.

Of course it was inevitable. I was writing ecstatic poetry without focus. Now I'm writing ecstatic poetry with focus. At least I hope so. It took me a long time to focus. It was inevitable that he would say what he did say. Later I took a course with him at the New School, on the sonnet. He was brilliant, he could talk for hours. And I've always loved the man! I think there was a grand decline in his later years, and he became more and more English and more and more Anglican, though I think poems like "In Praise of Limestone," and some of the other later poems, are great poems, and I think he is being redeemed as an important poet. That's my relationship with Auden.

Your poem called "Near Perigord" in Paradise Poems has the same title as one of Pound's poems.

Right.

Pound was an influence, as you said, on yourself and so many other people. He's emerged as the most important poetry person of the twentieth century. Can you forgive him for his hatred of Jews and his pro-Fascist and pro-Nazi stance during the Second World War? And along with that, how can such a person influence Jewish poets?

You know, Pound often would defend himself and his relation to Jews and the libel, as he saw it, by saying that so many of his friends were Jewish, and they were. "Some of my best friends." As far as Pound's influence on me, I was obsessed with Pound and fascinated with him and his work, including "Personae" and The ABC of Reading as well as The Cantos. I admired so many things about him, even his rigidity and his formality and his assumption of being a guru. The teacher, the only teacher. We were looking for such a man. I think he has written some extraordinary poems. But I think The Cantos is a flawed poem. I think it's flawed because he was flawed. I think it's unfinished, undeveloped. It is not a great poem. I think there are parts of it that are extraordinary. The parts that are extraordinary are really lyric outbursts. The poem doesn't have a superstructure. Maybe a long poem can't have such a superstructure in our time, connected with a core belief. Clearly I love those parts of that poem, for example the part which he wrote in 1945 when he was in prison.

The Pisan Cantos.

The Pisan Cantos. One loves those poems. But I find them flawed, too. I mean, there's a lot of self-pity and a lot of self-congratulation and self-forgiveness in those poems which now I find objectionable and even abhorrent. His influence on me has been in an overwhelming sensitivity to language and to the urgency and importance of the poem, and that's his influence on all the poets. Merwin and Kinnell and so on. Levine. Rich. He's taught me to be precise, to try to be precise about language, to make the words be authentic, to reject Victorianism, as he understood it as a young man. It's language where he's the major influence. And the importance of literature, where literature had become like almost a, well, I hate to say it, a kind of religion to us.

As far as his philosophy, as far as his Jew baiting: disgusting, vile, abhorrent, unforgivable. As far as Ginsberg's forgiving him in the famous incident that's recorded in the Parish Review interview, Pound embracing Ginsberg, Ginsberg embracing Pound, Pound saying it was a suburban prejudice, whatever the hell that means, Ginsberg kissing him and forgiving him, I find that to be sheer bulls——. I can't forgive Ginsberg for that stupidity. Ginsberg has no right to forgive Pound. For whom? For the Jews slaughtered? Of course Pound didn't slaughter Jews. Pound possibly didn't even know about the camps. Possibly. We're talking about words here, we're not talking about actions. That's another complicated subject. I don't forgive that in Pound. Pound never asked for forgiveness. That is unforgivable. The sad thing about it is his defenders, his critics, never truly accounted for that aspect of Pound, Pound as fascist, as Jew baiter, as racist.

That aspect of Pound I can't forgive. But most of all, seen from a literary point of view, it was the central flaw in his writing, and in his soul, that prevented The Cantos from being a great poem. My dear friend, Jack Gilbert, whom I grew up with in Pittsburgh and who adores Pound, tries to separate the fascistic poems from the others. I think that's a mistake. I think that you can't ignore Pound's fascism. It's a critical part of his thinking, or it became so at a certain point in his life. Was he crazy? Was Hitler crazy? Of course he was crazy. So nu, what does that mean? Does that answer the question?

You're forty-one. Does that kind of maturity give you a new, fresh perspective or vision? Let's put it this way: has your vision changed, do you think, since you've become mature?

Of course it has, but not just the vision. You know, one changes physically, psychologically, spiritually, as one gets older. One can't resist it, one can't help it. There's new joy and there's new sadness. There are sadnesses you absolutely forget about, they seem so unimportant, and new sadnesses that enter. Obvious ones. Closeness to death, for example. There's also new joys, surprisingly enough. I'm more joyful now than I've ever been in my life. I have periods of absolute elation. To some degree it's connected with the satisfaction that I did what I wanted to do in this life, quite frankly. To the degree that I didn't do exactly what I wanted to do, there's sadness, or if I didn't achieve what I wanted to achieve in my way, you know? The language changes in the poems, the subject matter changes. On one level, I'm writing longer poems in order to work out the matter. On another level I've also started to write shorter lyrics again.

A friend of mine said recently to me, "You know, the poems of yours I really like," and I took this as a kind of criticism, "are your shorter lyrics that your were writing in Rejoicings and Lucky Life. Later the longer poems are interesting, but they don't have the intensity of the shorter lyrics." I don't agree, but I listened to what she said. I'm trying almost deliberately to know what's happening by itself; also, to return to the shorter lyric. I think I'll be doing that. The language changes, the focusing changes, the point of view changes. It's hard to talk about it without being just banal; talking about the wise old man, or the gray beard, or wisdom or knowledge. I prefer to talk about knowledge rather than wisdom. It's knowledge. I seek, and knowledge does not mean information, and it does not mean scholarship. Knowledge is, for me, a deeply emotional, intensive, energetic, mystical quality. …

Source: Gary Pacernick, "Gerald Stern: An Interview," in American Poetry Review, Vol. 27, No. 4, July-August 1998, pp. 43-44.

Mark Hillringhouse

In the following review, Hillringhouse describes the consistency of the style and techniques of Stern in regard to his use of metaphor, his play upon the senses, and his intimate expression of truth, poignancy, and compassion. Hillringhouse says that Stern vacillates between self-burial and rebirth, and follows two currents: his Jewish past and his present as a poet.

Gerald Stern is a poet I can keep coming back to with new interest and amazement. He is not experimental. He doesn't try to change his style with each new book. There is no attempt at postmodern abstraction. He writes emotionally charged poems that speak with directness and sincerity and that pay close attention to physical detail and the many nuances of human joy and sorrow. He is a poet who is sensitive to the slightest changes in light, color, texture or sound. Particular attention is paid to the hands and the fingers and the mouth, the sense organs of touch. Stern is above all else a sensuous poet, rubbing, stroking, caressing. This is how he moves.

He is a metonymic poet, letting a part of one thing stand for another, displacing the meaning from one image onto the next, creating new meaning out of old contexts. There are certain poetic ingredients that go into every poem: There is place description; an evocation of memory; a ritual of self-burial; there is nature: moles, opossums, spiders are used as totems for his alter ego. Trees, flowers, and birds are named as a part of this ceremony. There is resolution in the form of beatitude.

In his background there is a shtetl past inherited from his parents and imported to the new world from Eastern Europe. There is nostalgia for the old cramped quarters of that world. There is a beloved sister who died tragically at a young age, a circle of boyhood friends, sensitive, intellectual youths who would pursue poetry. There is an Upper West Side past as a graduate student at Columbia University. There's a daughter, a son, an ex-wife and other women who trail him in memory as he moves from his fifth-floor walk-up in New York City to his houses in Pennsylvania and Iowa.

Stern writes elegies for love. There are sad and tender poems addressed to his deceased mother, poems to friends, poems about his bitter-sweet and angry youth, oedipal struggle, poems about getting older, of finding, finally, a state of grace. Half the new book Odd Mercy is a thousand-line poem entitled "Hot Dog" which is broken into seventeen segments. It is a New York poem of the Lower East Side, the Polish and Jewish quarters, the grubby immigrant life, the vagrants, the meanness and sweetness of it all. In another way, the poem is a form of "Prelude" about the growth of the poet's mind as he discovers his identity.

Half of the time Stern's poetry is buried in an idealized youth of the narrator who shovels and digs through his memory to uncover the talismans and fetishes of his growing up. These talismanic psychic connections have the narrator walking in a semi-conscious state and living in two worlds, but the new world that replaces the old world is shabby, rude, obscene, superficial, insulting. It's the ugly "McPresent." It's New York destroyed or old traditions eroding, lost, gone forever: old department stores, cafeterias, former apartments, disappearing, forgotten except by the narrator. The tone is always elegiac or vatic. These are poems of exile, poems of exodus, of being the only Jew in a land of goyim. That connection is extended to other artists, poets, painters, musicians, who like Jews are celebrated for their own battles with the Philistines.

Stern vacillates between two opposite poles, from self-burial, or some low form of animal death, to rebirth on a higher plane. This tendency to bury himself under the earth or to immerse himself under water is a symbolic attempt to free himself from the burden of his own childhood, the life he rejected, the Orthodox world of his parents. In Odd Mercy, in the long poem "Hot Dog," this struggle becomes obvious in several places and much of the writing wrestles with this dilemma:

… When I was thirteen I left

shul Yom Kippur afternoon and sneaked

back to my house; I ate a Bartlett pear

and I was free a little, but my stomach

was almost burning from my fear. I threw

the core into the toilet, my mother and

    father

never found out. That night at supper we ate,

I remember, some fruit and cheese but they

were irritable from fasting and from standing

half the day. That pear, I know, always helped

    me.

It made me stubborn. It gave me certain

    detachment.

It kept me hidden. I can be in the middle of

anything because of that pear …

(Further on in the same poem he writes)

… I was able

When I was twenty to stay underwater for

    three

whole minutes—under a dock; it would have

    been longer

except they pulled me up. I found a way

to exhale a little, and float—in the dark—

    the light

was above me, and behind me; they were

    angry

and frightened that I stayed so long, and I

was sad to come up …

There are two main currents in Stern's work. One flows out of the cities of an industrial, pre-war, ghettoized past where the narrator was formed, and another flows into the here and now where the narrator has to struggle to locate himself in a meaningful way. Or, as the poet/narrator writes in a poem called "Diary":

I am at last that thing, a stranger in my own

    life,

completely comfortable getting in or getting

    out of my own

Honda,

living from five cardboard boxes, two small

    grips,

and two briefcases.

This strange sense of alienation comes from two sources, from trying to be a poet and from being Jewish. In the third section of "Hot Dog" the narrator argues the differences:

… What I loved

was arguing with a Lutheran over the law

and watching him suffer; over three coffee

    cups

a couple I knew reached out, they may have

    been Quakers

or radical Catholics, they were loving, they

    stood for

reason, above all else; we talked for an hour

about the forbidden—milk and meat—

    Maimonides

was at their side, he was their coach; they

    argued

hygiene and nourishment and toxic qualities

while I was for obedience to the book,

for its own sake, and slavery to the words …

The book referred to is the Torah, but it is also the commitment to poetry, to being compelled to write poetry and to struggle with the language as another form of devotion. There is strangeness and alienation in moving out of one world and into another. And this, ironically, is where Stern is able to get much of his subject matter, by traveling through the culture he lives in as both a native and a tourist.

His narrator examines these lives and tries to make connections to the parallel world of nature where there are always two forces, the force of light and darkness, heat and cold, life and death. The parts of the body, like separate entities, contain their own individual memories. Each poem describes a season in miniature, the weather of a particular city street, or backyard garden, or a few feet of muddy riverbank. In this physical world the narrator always performs two actions or motions, one to the left and one to the right. There is constant duality. This is Stern's metaphysical dance, his way of living in two worlds. "Birthday," the opening poem, is a good example:

It is that they spend so much time in the sky

that bluebirds have streaks of red across

    their chests;

and it is that—except for the robbing of their

    houses—

they come north for my birthday bringing

    the light

of southern Texas with them. Every year

I am able to do the mathematics

and stand like another bird—outside my

    door—

with one foot in and one foot out, half-

    looking

for the first light and whisper one phrase or

    other—

The narrator acts as a kind of human fulcrum and attempts to achieve a balance between dual forces, the relentless forces of nature which are absolute and the forces inside the mind of the narrator where a joyful sadness is brewing. This double reference is a ubiquitous feature of Stern's work and can be found in almost every poem. Within his duality there is one symbolic direction for punishment, loathing or scorn, and another direction for forgiveness, grace and redemption. One direction is for self-sacrifice, falling one way for love, one way for poetry, and for transcendence. The other direction is for touching the mind and the past. There's hope for a second chance behind this meditation coupled with the movement of nature. This becomes clearer towards the end of the poem:

when the thaw comes and the birds begin to
    swell
with confusion and a few wild seeds take
    hold
and the light explodes a little I lie down
a second time, either to feel the sun
or hear the house shake from the roar of
    engines
at the end of my street, the train from North
    Dakota
carrying sweeteners to Illinois, moving
forward a single foot, then backwards
    another,
one of those dreary mysteries, hours of
    shrieking
and banging, endless coupling, the perfect
    noise
to go with my birthday …

Onto this stage of the narrator's drama enters the world of human activity, noise and machinery. It is an infernal intrusion, the noise of the present age, and it fills the narrator sometimes with horror and sometimes with sorrow.

Noise is another frequent element with many dimensions. There are many voices of many decibels, tenors singing and birds warbling. There are also many unpleasant sounds: animal roaring, screeching, shrieking, sobbing and moaning, and there are groans, gasps for air, snorting and raging. There is also silence. It is in that silence that the poet waits and listens. Stern is like Keats in his garden listening to nightingales. And though this country lacks that enchanting species, a native crow will do for the final section of Diary:

An American crow, a huge croaker, a

    corvus,

who caws four times, then caws five times at

    six

in the morning will be my thrush,

and I will turn from painted door to hanging

    spider to crooked

curtain rod

to hear his song.…
 

before coming down together

for an early breakfast

and an hour or two of silent reading …

Stern's first book, Rejoicings, was about loss, separation, getting rid of shame and guilt. There's a quiet anger in those poems. There's the bitter-sweet taste of youth ending, there's the serenity of special places, of finding the grid locations of the soul. The poems "The Unity," "The Poem of Life" and "On The Far Edge of Kilmer" from that collection exemplify the pattern that his best work would take in Lucky Life and in later books such as The Red Coal and Paradise Poems where Stern hits his stride.

Two signature poems emerged out of Lucky Life: "The Power of Maples" and "At Bickford's." They are like Psalms. The speaker addresses himself in prayer. There is the same type of parallel structure found in Psalms whereby one phrase is followed by another, repeating the same idea yet transcending it with metaphorical leaps. In "At Bickford's" the "I will" anaphora could be taken right out of Exodus, God talking to Moses, going back and forth from "you" to "I." In Lucky Life the center of his later work emerged and developed into the poetic longing to simplify and unclutter existence thereby reducing it to its timeless essentials. Odd Mercy returns to this theme.

It's a theme embodied in the desire to live the life of the mind. One of the poet's poetic quests is for true knowledge—the simplicity of knowing. He seems to want to return to the foundations of philosophy, to the pre-Socratics, when it was possible to reduce matter and existence to a single permanent substance. All this so he can ponder the fate of the things he loves and cherish them one more time before they vanish. In the last stanza of the poem "Bitter Thoughts" he tries to capture this desire:

maybe I'll find a harp, or the end of a lute

with a wire attached, maybe the wind will

    sing

for me—there on the granite curb—and

    maybe

knowledge will come and I will understand it

once and for all, the light that first existed,

    the

struggle between imperishables, what I

    thought of

for most of my life, near a water-stained

    lampshade

that saved the world and an overcoat that

    renewed it.

In reading Stern's poetry I can connect the lines of the final stanzas of his first book to the end of Odd Mercy, over twenty years apart, and not feel any discontinuity in the writing. He has never steered away from his passion. Reading him I become more acutely aware of what things matter most in my own life. Stern is a poet of deep intimacy and of personal knowledge who is not afraid of letting his narrator face the truth of his past nor of his feelings. There is a tender moment of confession between mother and son near the end of "Hot Dog" that gives the reader the impression of eavesdropping:

… My mother only once

told the truth about her father, the saint

who sent his boys to work when they were

    twelve

so he could sit there reading. "He never

    kissed me

once," she said, "he never touched me." She

    was

eighty-five when she said that, she would

    have

eight more years; we talked at the end, we

    learned

to love each other.

If Gerald Stern were a painter he would be a Chagall, floating colorful dreams and memory in a mysterious upside down world. Or, if he were a composer, he would be a Dvorak, rhapsodic, full of melodic contours and the haunting rhythms of gypsy folk music. There is much I have learned from him about where to locate a poem. He is able to find poetry in places others have overlooked or neglected, and he is able to write poems about what has been left behind or about objects that have been discarded. Few have his poignancy or his compassion.

Source: Mark Hillringhouse, "The Poetry of Gerald Stern," in Literary Review, Vol. 40, No. 2, Winter 1997, pp. 346-51.

SOURCES

Barron, Jonathan N., "Gerald Stern," in American Writers, Supplement IX, edited by Jay Parini, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002, p. 17.

Dodd, Jeffrey, Elise Gregory, and Adam O'Connor Rodriguez, "A Conversation with Gerald Stern," in Willow Springs, No. 56, February 11, 2005, p. 15.

Farnsworth, Elizabeth, "This Time," in Online NewsHour, November 23, 1998, p. 3, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec98/stern_11-23.html, (accessed September 18, 2006).

"Last Blue by Gerald Stern," in Ploughshares, Fall 2000, p. 230.

Pacernick, Gary, "Gerald Stern: An Interview," in American Poetry Review, Vol. 27, No. 4, July-August 1998, p. 41.

Review of Last Blue, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 247, No. 8, February 21, 2000, p. 83.

Reyes, Carlos, Review of Last Blue, in Willamette Week Online, http://www.wweek.com/editorial/2729/1691/ (accessed October 21, 2006).

Seaman, Donna, Review of Last Blue, in Booklist, Vol. 96, No. 14, March 15, 2000, p. 1319.

Silverman, Sue William, "A Conversation with Gerald Stern," in Fourth Genre, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 2004, p. 113.

Somerville, Jane, "Gerald Stern and the Return Journey," in American Poetry Review, Vol. 18, No. 5, September-October 1989, p. 39.

Stern, Gerald, "How Poetry Helps People to Live Their Lives," in American Poetry Review, Vol. 28, No. 5, September-October 1999, pp. 22, 23.

———, Last Blue, W. W. Norton, 2000, jacket flap.

———, "One of the Smallest," in Last Blue, W. W. Norton, 2000, pp. 13-16.

Taylor, John, Review of Last Blue, in Antioch Review, Vol. 59, No. 3, Summer 2001, p. 639.