Day: June 9, 2003

The Poetry of Gerald Stern

Right after I finished my blog entry “The Wasteland of My Heart,” I received a NY Times Tracker poetry alert. Upon opening the link, I was introduced to Gerald Stern, A Poet Raging Against Pretension (and Princeton). Nothing too unusual about that, I receive these updates regularly. However, once I read:

Mr. Stern loves poetry, not for its deftness or technical structure but its ability to transmit the deepest human emotions, “passion, anger, love, justice and fear.”

I knew that I was obliged to spend the next few hours running down his poetry and checking him out on the web. I certainly wasn’t deterred by the final quote in the article:

“Poetry should be passionate and outrageous and political and most of all revolutionary,” he said. “I am a radical, although as I get older sometimes I get too soft and am just a liberal.”

Of course, I don’t consider myself radical, though some might, but I hope I’ve let it be known that I am liberal, and judging from what I found the same kind of liberal that Gerald Stern is.

In the old days I would have had to get my lazy ass up, get myself dressed and travel miles to a book store, and probably not my local B Dalton bookstore, either, because it’s poetry section has been shrinking and shrinking ever since it opened a few years ago. This morning, though, after a minimal search I was confronted with a virtual cornucopia of Stern poems, and a number of revealing essays at the same time.

First I went to pbs.org and found an interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth and Stern. For those already satiated with reading, there’s even a real audio interview, with the added advantage of getting to hear Stern read two of his poems, a real treat for those of us who believe that all poetry really has to be heard to be fully appreciated.

For me, the most revealing part of the interview came in the following exchange:

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You have – in your poems there are many poems about the Holocaust. This is something – there’s a great sense of loss in all of your work, which I think comes from that partly.

GERALD STERN: It partly comes from that. It comes from personal matters – the death of my sister. It comes from family matters – one is not altogether sure. But, of course, loss and the elegy remain the most typical poem of our period.

but there are certainly other insights to be found here.

Seven of his poems can be found at Norton poets online,
where, naturally enough, you can find a listing of all of his poetry books, while another three, and an excellent mp3 recording, can be found at http:/The Hapless Dilettante. Another link to eight poems, some of which overlap the above, can be found at Gerald Stern

At The Academy of American Poets you can find three poems and a reading of “The Dancing,” my favorite poem from the selection of poems I have found:

THE DANCING

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never seen a post-war Philco
with the automatic eye
nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop–in 1945–
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing–in Poland and Germany–
oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

With all these opportunities to meet new poets and to read samples of their work online without having to find them in a college library perhaps poetry can still be relcaimed from the universities and brought back to the general public.

The Wasteland of My Heart

I’m not leaving T.S. Eliot without at least personally coming to terms with his masterpiece “The Wasteland.” There’s no denying it’s an impressive piece, surely Eliot’s “tour de force.” Even if, like me, you’re unwilling to explore the literary allusions as extensively as they demand, you immediately feel the despair implied by the title.

Nor is it as exhausting and time-consuming as it used to be to explore the allusions in the poem because you can go to an
Extensive site on T.S. Eliot’s poem, a nearly 600 page exploration of Eliot’s masterpiece. Of course, if you don’t have a life to live, you can study the poem on your own.

Still, it’s one thing to understand a poem and something quite different to love it. It seems to me that whether you love “The Wasteland” or not depends to a large extent on whether you agree with Eliot’s definition of poetry, as explained in
American Poetry from T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg

The dominant figure in modern poetry from the 1920’s through the middle of the century, in part because of his stature as a critic and publisher, was the poet T. S. Eliot. In his landmark essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” (1919) Eliot defined poetry as an escape from emotion and personality–a definition that subsequent American poets have alternately embraced, argued with, and denounced in such a vigorous fashion that it may be useful to consider it as a linchpin of modernism.

The article, a remarkable short history of modern poetry I heartedly recommend to anyone interested in that sort of thing, goes on to trace the reaction to this remarkable statement through a discussion of some of America’s greatest modern poets.

As I read the essay, it became perfectly clear to me why I have the reaction I do to Eliot’s poetry. When I think back, I suspect that the five pages of footnotes at the end of the poem, not just my initial confusion, are what immediately turned me off to the poem. This is a poem of the “mind” not of the heart.

Now, I admire rational thought as much as anyone. I am, after all, an INTP, and “the central goal of the INTP … (is) …to understand
and seek truth.” But it is really the N, the intuitive, not the T, the thinking aspect, that truly attracted me to poetry in the first place.

It was Thomas Hardy’s vision of an unjust world where pure happenstance and societal restrictions doomed men to unhappy lives that first attracted me to literature and poetry. Hardy’s poetry is many things, but it is not “intellectual.” Of course, I also attended the UW where Theodore Roethke was holding court, and his “work was possessed of a romantic sensibility and vibrant, deeply lyrical language. In fact, at times I have wondered if I had begun my poetic studies in the East instead of the at the UW whether I would have had a totally different attitude towards poetry. Or would I have dismissed it entirely and pursued a career in physics as I had earlier intended.?

For whatever reasons, I am still drawn to the poetry of the heart. It is the emotional appeal of the poetry to my own heart, not any logical argument, that is most likely to convince me of the authenticity of the poet’s vision.