January 6, 2020 Issue

Gerald Stern has one of the most distinctive “voices” of any poet I know of. His “Warbler,” in this week’s issue, is actually a quite restrained example of it. But it’s there in the third stanza, in the way he moves from “bird” to “buried” and then to this delightfully surprising part: “in this case in the freezer, / a cold graveyard, / two cartons of ice cream, / one vanilla, one dulce de leche, / to remember him by.” In a Stern poem, you never know what's coming next. 

Charles Simic, in his “You Can’t Keep a Good Sonnet Down” (Memory Piano, 2006), says that Stern has a “talking voice, friendly and often rambling. His freedom to go wherever his imagination happens to take him gives his poems a feel of adventure that is hard to resist.” I agree. Consider his extraordinary “The World We Should Have Stayed In” (The New Yorker, October 6, 2014):

The clothes, the food, the nickel-coated iron
flower tables, the glass-and-wood-fluted doorknob
but most of all the baby girls holding
chicks in one arm and grapes in the other
just before the murder of the Gypsies
under Tiso the priest, Slovak, Roman Catholic,
no cousin to Andy, he Carpatho-Russian
or most of all Peter Oresick, he of Ford City,
he of Highland Park and East Liberty
Carpatho-Russian too, or just Ruthenian,
me staring at a coconut tree, I swear it,
listening late on a Saturday afternoon
a few weeks before my 88th to
airplane after airplane and reading the trailers
by the underwater lights of yon organ-shaped
squid-squirming blue and land-lost swimming pool
the noise a kind of roar when they got close
I’m watching from the fifth floor up, Warholean
here and there oh mostly on the elevator but
certainly by the pool, his European relatives
basking under his long serrated leaves
coconuts near the top—ripe and dangerous—
like Peter, coming from one of the villages inside
Pittsburgh, like me, half eastern Poland, half southern
Ukraine born in the Hill, on Wylie Avenue,
the first village east of downtown Pittsburgh,
Logan Street, the steepest street in the Hill,
two blocks—at least—a string of small stores and
Jewish restaurants, Caplan’s, Weinstein’s, I was
born at the end of an era, I hung on with
my fingers then with my nails, Judith Vollmer’s
family was Polish but they were twelve miles away from
Peter’s village, this was a meal at Weinstein’s:
chopped liver first or herring or eggs and onions, then
matzo-ball soup or noodle or knaidel, followed by
roast veal or boiled beef and horseradish
or roast chicken and vegetables, coleslaw
and Jewish pickles on the side and plates
of cookies and poppy-seed cakes and strudel,
Yiddish the lingua franca, tea in a glass,
the world we should have stayed in, for in America
you burn in one place, then another.

The connections here are flying – from “nickel-coated iron flower tables” to “the murder of the Gypsies” to Andy Warhol to Peter Oresick to “me staring at a coconut tree” to “airplane after airplane” to “reading the trailers / by the underwater lights” to “organ-shaped /
squid-squirming blue and land-lost swimming pool” to an elevator to “long serrated leaves / coconuts near the top – ripe and dangerous” to “downtown Pittsburgh” to “Logan Street, the steepest street in the Hill” to “a string of small stores and / Jewish restaurants, Caplan’s, Weinstein’s” to “Judith Vollmer’s / family” to the amazing “meal at Weinstein’s” described in seven glorious lines of delectable detail – lines that make me smile every time I read them.

What a strange, exhilarating, eccentric, surreal, inspired assemblage! You might call it almost crazy. I love it.