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Gerald Stern, one of America’s most beloved and respected poets, wrote about his childhood, Judaism, death and contemplative life with vibrant melancholy and worldly humor. Miraculously, he has died at the age of 97.
Stern, New Jersey’s first poet laureate, died Thursday at Calvary Hospice in New York City, according to his longtime partner, Anne Marie Macari.
A Macari statement released Saturday by publisher WW Norton did not include a cause of death.
Winner of the National Book Award in 1998 for the anthology “This Time,” Stern is sometimes mistaken for Alan Ginsburg himself and is often compared to Walt Whitman for his lyrical and sensual style, as well as his The gift of combining the physical world with the larger universe.
Stern was influenced by the rugged urban environment of his hometown of Pittsburgh, but he also had a strong sense of identity with nature and animals, marveling at the “power” of maple trees, comparing himself to a hummingbird or a squirrel, or discovering “the secrets of the world” . life” on animals that died on the road.
The lifelong agnostic, who also believes in “Jewish ideas,” has written a dozen books and describes himself as “part comedy, part idealistic, satirical, ridiculed and smeared by irony.”
In poetry and prose, he writes about his past with particular intensity—his immigrant parents, long-lost friends and lovers, and the stark differences between rich and poor, Jews and non-Jews in Pittsburgh.
He considers “One Thing in Life” from the 1977 “Lucky Life” series to be the poem that best defines him.
He was over 50 years old before winning any major awards, but was often cited for the rest of his life.
In addition to winning the National Book Award, his accolades include being a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1991 for Leaving Another Kingdom, and receiving such lifetime achievements as the Ruth Lilly Award and the Wallace Stevens Award prize.
In 2013, the U.S. Library of Congress awarded him the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Award for Early Poems, hailing him as “one of America’s greatest evangelists of the Whitman tradition: for his humor and whimsy, and enduring generosity, His work celebrates the mythical power of art”.
In 2000, he was named New Jersey’s first poet laureate, inadvertently contributing to the post’s rapid demise.
After completing his two-year term, he recommended Amiri Barakah as his successor. Baraka would spark an outcry in his 2002 poem “Somebody Bombed America,” which claimed Israel had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks the previous year.
Baraka refused to step down, so the state decided not to have a winner anymore.
Stern, who was born in 1925, doesn’t recall being a major literary influence as a child, but does talk about the lasting trauma of the death of his sister Sylvia when he was eight years old.
He described himself as “a thug who hangs out in a pool hall and fights”. But, he told The New York Times in 1999, he was a learned thug who excelled in college.
Stern studied political science at the University of Pittsburgh and received a master’s degree in comparative literature from Columbia University. Ezra Pound and WB Yeats were among the first poets he perused.
Stern lived in Europe and New York in the 1950s, eventually settling in a 19th-century home near the Delaware River in Lambertville.
His creations developed slowly. It was only in his spare time in the army that he briefly served after World War II that he had the “good idea” to write for a living.
He spent most of his 30s writing “The Pines,” a poem about the American presidency, but despaired that it was “indulgent” and “boring.”
At nearly forty, he worries that he has become a “forever old student” and “forever young mentor.”
Through his midlife crisis, he finally found his voice as a poet and found that he had been “walking an easier path than he should have been doing”.
“It also has to do with my realization that my long youth is over, that I will not live forever, that death is not just a literary event, but a very real and very personal realization,” he wrote in “Some Secrets.” wrote in. 1983. “I was able to let go and finally be myself and lose my shame and pride.”
His marriage to Patricia Miller ended in divorce. They have two children, Rachel Stern Martin and David Stern.
In addition to Macari and his children, Stern has grandchildren Dylan and Alana Stern and Rebecca and Julia Martin.
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