The Lambertville-based American poet Gerald Stern, who died on October 27 at the age of 97, was the author of nearly 20 books and the recipient of the 1998 National Book for “This Time: New and Selected Poems.”
He was also the first Poet Laureate of New Jersey, appointed in 2000 by Governor Christie Todd Whitman. The position was later abolished.
As noted in a 2014 U.S. 1 profile, Stern was a Pittsburgh native well-versed in his Jewish ancestry from Ukraine and Eastern Poland and the way it shaped his youth.
His parents and grandparents gravitated to an established enclave in Pittsburgh and made a living for themselves.
As reported, Stern’s early world was more working-class than academic or cultured — no books in the house, as he has told interviewers. His paternal grandfather was in the cigar business, and his maternal grandfather was a rabbi-like figure who made sure ancient laws were adhered to in preparing kosher foods. Stern’s father sold clothes; his mother tended to domestic life.
The poet’s childhood memories evoke the grittiness of pre-EPA Pittsburgh, where the steel industry made its mark in the skies, which precipitated soot that would collect in a stain around a man’s sweaty shirt collar in the summertime. Most of the workers at the mills were his family’s countrymen, who were underpaid, became resentful over the rampant antisemitism of the time, and took out their frustrations on amateur gridirons, which made the Pittsburgh area the football mecca that it remains today.
He said he became a poet despite Pittsburgh’s cultural isolation and cited two searing memories as contributing to his creative start as a teenager. “One was my sister’s death when she was nine, and I was eight. I was not allowed to share in the mourning. So I spent most of my life sharing that mourning. The other thing was the extreme antisemitism that surrounded me at the time. I was beaten up on my way to kindergarten once because I had killed someone named Christ.”
He also mentioned the poem that W.H. Auden wrote in memory of the influential Irish poet William Butler Yeats and quoted the famous line, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”
Stern served in the Army Air Corps, and after World War II he earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s at Columbia in New York City. He did post-graduate work at the University of Paris and started to publish his poems.
When he returned to the United States, Stern taught at Temple University in Philadelphia, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, at New Jersey’s Raritan Valley Community College, the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and Drew University in Madison. He settled in Lambertville after frequently passing through on the town on his way to visit a friend in Pennsylvania.
Among Stern’s work is the New Jersey specific “The Pineys,” published by Rutgers University Press in 1969.
Although he had been stationed at Fort Dix near the Pinelands during his military service, the poet said he was later drawn to the desolate state forest because it had become a battleground between potential developers and preservationists for years. He also said it was a place where someone could hide out or be hidden, if need be.
Sterns most recent book was, “Blessed As We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000—2018.”
The following is a brief sample with a decidedly New Jersey reference.
