{"id":36128,"date":"2005-02-11T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2005-02-11T20:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=36128"},"modified":"2025-02-18T11:49:21","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T19:49:21","slug":"issue-56-a-conversation-with-gerald-stern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-56-a-conversation-with-gerald-stern\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 56: A Conversation with Gerald Stern"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Willow<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Found in Willow Springs <\/em>56<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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February 11, 2005<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Jeffery Dodd, Elise Gregory, and Adam O’Connor Rodreguez<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH GERALD STERN<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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\"Gerald<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit: Lucky Life by Gerald Stern<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em>s<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Kate Daniels has described Gerald Stern\u00a0as a \u201cpost-nuclear, multicultural Whitman for the millennium\u2014the United States\u2019 one and only truly global poet.\u201d He may have had little choice in the matter. Born in 1925 to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine and Poland, he grew up in an ethnically diverse Pittsburgh, where he became friends with the poets Jack Gilbert and Richard Hazley. After World War II, Stern spent time in Western Europe before taking his \ufb01rst teaching job in the mid-1950s.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the \ufb01ve decades since, Stern has published fourteen volumes of poetry, including <\/em>Everything is Burning (2005), <\/em>American Sonnets (2003), and <\/em>This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award in 1998. His other honors include the Lamont Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, three NEA awards, a fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ruth Lilly Prize. He is also the author of a memoir, <\/em>What I Can\u2019t Bear Losing (2003). He has taught at Temple University, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and, before retiring in 1995, the Writer\u2019s Workshop at the University of Iowa.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou read between the lines,\u201d Stern says, \u201cand discover what the character and personality of another writer is.\u201d Reading between the conventional rhythms and understated images of his own lines, we \ufb01nd a poet who examines justice and injustice, cruelty and tenderness, conformity and freedom, as well as the vibrancy of memory. His work derides provincialism and points to a world of experiences beyond American borders and transcendent of temporal limits. Stern has lived in this rich world, and his poetry calls attention to its failures, beauties, and curiosities without fear, shame, or sentimentality. His is an unapologetically cosmopolitan voice, speaking to a world in need of softer dividing lines.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is that world, the international and intellectually imagined, that we agreed to discuss on a sunny Friday afternoon. Mr. Stern was gracious enough to be interviewed in his room at the Ridpath Hotel, in downtown Spokane, Washington.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

JEFF DODD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of the poets you refer to in What I Can\u2019t Bear Losing<\/em> share an understanding of having a communal experience while also feeling their own \u201cforeignness.\u201d Nazim Hikmet, Mikl\u00f3s Radn\u00f3ti, Hugh MacDiarmid\u2014none of their books get much airtime, even among Americans who know a lot about poetry. Which other poets do you believe deserve more attention in America?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GERALD STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Foreign poets that we customarily read, the main one\u2019s Rilke. But most people who read Rilke don\u2019t know he was a Czech Jew, not Ger- man. Of course, he was very much taken with the Slavic spirit, spent some time in Russia, \ufb02irting not with the political movement but with the emotional side of the Slavic syndrome. Then the second echelon of people we read are some French poets, like Apollinaire, 19th-century poets like Lautr\u00e9amont, though more for the specialist. Then down on the third level, particularly in the past thirty or forty years, South Americans, some Spanish poets like Lorca, Neruda, and so on. So, we don\u2019t know Portuguese poets. Occasionally, a person from Bulgaria or Portugal or even Africa will win a Nobel Prize and for a minute or two we\u2019ll read their novels or their poems. America is not to be condemned for this; it\u2019s so huge, it\u2019s a world unto itself\u2014there\u2019s no time, and there\u2019s no space, and it\u2019s not part of our education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book I\u2019m reading now, by Alexander Wat, a Polish poet, is an extended 400-page interview he did with Czeslaw Milosz. Wat grew up in Poland, in Warsaw, and he was a Polish-Jewish intellectual. He had an education like most of us here\u2014a humane, cosmopolitan, European education. But to be Polish and have this is very di\ufb00erent than having grown up in Kansas City. His \ufb01rst language was Polish, but he also knew Yiddish, though he probably didn\u2019t think it was a foreign language nor a complete language; it was just what was spoken in the house. How could it be a complete language? But it is another language. And Germany\u2019s right on the border, so he knew German. Yiddish is merely a version of 12th-century German. Mix in some Hebrew, some Slavic words. He knew Russian, French, Italian, and Spanish. And the distinction between Russian and Ukrainian\u2014they\u2019re literally separate languages. Much closer, say, than Italian and Spanish. But we don\u2019t have that equivalent closeness in languages in Western Europe and the United States. So he knew eight languages. And when he was in prison\u2014and he was in prison most of his adult years\u2014a Russian would be in his cell, and he would know if the person was from Belarus, or White Russia, or Odessa, and he would know Ukrainian, and he would know if the person was a Jew\u2014there are a thousand di\ufb00erent forms, replicas, shadows, shades to pick from; it\u2019s a little bit more boring here. We have our McDonalds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t have shades to pick from; things are more uniform. So a writer re\ufb02ects this, re\ufb02ects the complications. If you\u2019re Dutch, you don\u2019t just read Dutch literature. How about Danish literature\u2014you\u2019re not going to learn Danish? You\u2019re not going to learn Swedish? You\u2019re not going to learn English? French? Most American poets don\u2019t know other languages, not well enough to, say, speak them or read them. Phil Levine knows Spanish. Bly knows Spanish and some German, a little Swedish. But I can name many well-known American poets who don\u2019t know any foreign languages, let alone classical languages, because we didn\u2019t have that kind of education. So this is part of our problem, if it is a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pound was born in 1885, I think, and was deeply aware of this. When he was in his late teens, early twenties, he saw America as a desert. One of his fairly early poems, in Personae<\/em>, which preceded Cantos<\/em>\u2014the poem went something like this: \u201cWhat would it be like if America read the Classics?\u201d But Pound was a blowhard and an asshole, also a great poet, and an autodidact, and pushed his crazy ideas. He\u2019s very American. He acted like he was the only one who ever<\/em> studied Chinese, who ever read Proven\u00e7al poetry, he\u2019s going to teach everyone what to do and how to do it. That\u2019s another kind of American provincialism. Pound was a provincialist. And it was Gertrude Stein who said the most wonderful thing of Pound. She called him the village\u2014not idiot\u2014the village\u2026I can\u2019t remember the word. She was aware that he was somewhat of a provincial, at the same time that he preached universalism. And he knew German and French and he lived in France and England. But he was always self-conscious of it. You see, Wat would not be self-conscious. He would just assume\u2014of course you know Russian and Ukrainian and Lithuanian and Bulgarian and French; what else is there? But Pound would be conscious of the fact that he had read the Proven\u00e7al poets. Proud of it. And he was a great student, particularly of the Spanish, Italian\u2014Romance languages. So he had that. But his in\ufb02uence on that score was not long-lasting. Because most people didn\u2019t listen to him at all. It\u2019s a hard culture to change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DODD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is there a comparison between Pound\u2019s early career and Hugh MacDiarmid\u2019s, leading up to this sort of political willfulness, that in some ways destroyed their careers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, MacDiarmid didn\u2019t have the recognition. I knew MacDiarmid; I met him in Scotland. I lived for a year there. I met him by accident, because my former wife, Pat, and I were living in an apartment owned by some Scottish communists. So, we got introduced to the group of Scottish Marxists. Most of them were painters, a few poets. The leader of them was Hugh MacDiarmid, whose real name was Christopher Grieve. And on May Day we marched down the main streets of Glasgow. I visited him several times in his little farmhouse, which was halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh. He complained a lot\u2014Pound got all the attention and he didn\u2019t. They both were strongly interested in politics; they were on di\ufb00erent sides. They were both weird, crazy. Although MacDiarmid was not a racist. MacDiarmid\u2019s strangeness was that he was both a nationalist and a cosmopolitan at the same time. How could you be a communist, and thus believe in internationalism, and, at the same time, try to promote a new, local, language that was spoken in southwestern Scotland and be a Scottish nationalist? Because those were the particulars of his life; there\u2019s no logic or reasonableness to it. They wrote in Lallans and they made up their own words. Presumably, these words had some root or connection with the area of Scotland called Ayreshire, which is where Robert Burns was from. When you read some of the poems produced by those poets, you have to read the footnotes. They were communists, but this was not a people\u2019s poetry. They were intellectuals, learned intellectuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the things I learned over there is that Scotland is a totally di\ufb00erent country than England. We used to go to the movies in Scotland, and at the end of the movie, when they played \u201cGod Save the Queen,\u201d the Scots all walked out, because Queen Elizabeth II was not Queen Elizabeth II of Scotland. Because Queen Elizabeth I was a bastard Queen; she was not Scottish. She usurped Mary. The Scots speak a di\ufb00erent language, really think di\ufb00erently than the English. And they have bad press by the English who are the dominant party\u2014they say Scots are tight, when Scots are liberal, generous, lovely, beautiful people. And MacDiarmid, I love his poetry. It has a good spirit; he had a good spirit. Pound didn\u2019t have a good spirit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem with Pound lovers is that they either ignore or make excuses for his politics. They make a mystery, even a mysticism, a kind of priestly religion, out of his cultural and realistic views, and they hold him up as the great exemplar. But the spirit of the man was not kind. He was not a kind or loving human being. There\u2019s no reason a poet has to be a kind, loving human being, but I like kind and loving people. I like generous, kind, loving, decent, honest, authentic people, and I believe those qualities willy-nilly show up or don\u2019t show up in a poet. Some things in Pound are marvelous. I learned from him, as all my con- temporaries did, about the e\ufb03ciency of language, how to use language e\ufb03ciently and sharply, to make poetry as e\ufb03cient as prose. Not to be decorative, poetic, learning who to read to do that. Learning to read di\ufb00erently. Learning to read Chaucer, and not to trust the Romantics as much as we did. I learned a lot from him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I didn\u2019t learn kindness, generosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When they talk about the Cantos<\/em>, they generally say it\u2019s a failed poem, but Pound didn\u2019t intend for it to be a failed poem. He spent forty to \ufb01fty years at it. So, he\u2019s a failed poet. Do you say The Canterbury Tales<\/em> is a failed poem? Or the Comedia<\/em> is a failed poem? And so Pound lovers, such as my friend Jack Gilbert, will say that in the Cantos<\/em>, there are perfect lyrics interspersed among the other crap. And I don\u2019t read the crap\u2014newspaper articles from 1906, statements overheard in a bar in 1912, memoirs of Confucius, letters of Madison or Adams, whatever else the Cantos<\/em> are made of\u2014I read those beautiful little lyrics, forty lines here, twenty lines on paradise, 200 lines on su\ufb00ering. Pound lovers go on to say the most beautiful section of the Cantos<\/em> is the Pisan Cantos<\/em>, written when Pound was incarcerated by the American army and didn\u2019t have any books with him\u2014I think he had one book, Confucius, to read. Well, \ufb01rst of all, reading Confucius was idiotic. I mean, the idea that this guy, Pound\u2014from where, Idaho?\u2014was preaching Confucius when he was sixty to seventy years old is so weird. Confucius was a Chinese Puritan who believed in order. I\u2019m not interested in Confucius. I mean, fuck Confucius. I\u2019m much more interested in how the Chinese produced Zen, or Lao Tse. Why Confucius\u2014\u201cTo have order in the state you must have order in the family?\u201d Where did Pound have order in his family? What is this craziness he was talking about? Where\u2019s the order in the state? Or in the city? Was there order in his city? Order in his state? There were a bunch of Nazis over the border, right? It\u2019s totally crazy to preach that\u2014Bob Hass and Jack Gilbert and whoever else sitting there, going, \u201cGreat poet. Preaches Confucius.\u201d Assholes! Preaching Confucius, number one. Number two, the Pisan Cantos<\/em> are highly sentimental, self-pitying poems. \u201cWhat thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross\u2026?\u201d There\u2019s an beautiful lyric, but I don\u2019t trust it; I don\u2019t trust a voice if it\u2019s extremely sentimental. At one point, Pound had a phrase, \u201cOh, let an old man die,\u201d and he was sixty-two years old, plenty of life ahead of him. That was sentimental, self-pitying. I think we should\u2019ve shot him as a traitor. That would have been the appropriate thing\u2014we should\u2019ve shot him. It was a mistake not to shoot him. And we should\u2019ve shot some other poets while we were at it. Now, I still read Pound. I enjoy reading Pound. I love the crazy stu\ufb00. Because I\u2019m the kind of person who reads The New York Times <\/em>cover-to-cover\u2014crossword puzzles, ads. In Pound, I like the Madison, the Monroe. Of course, I don\u2019t like the Confucius. And Chinese scholars say Pound\u2019s Chinese was terrible. And he was a rotten anti-Semite son of a bitch, and that\u2019s unforgivable. It\u2019s just stupid, goddamn dumb. You can\u2019t be a great poet and be dumb. Period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another poet controversial in his home country, Nazim Hikmet, came up several times in your autobiography. Do you feel a special connection to him?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do feel a special connection with Hikmet. I don\u2019t know how I would like him as a person. I think I would like him. You know, you read between the lines and discover what the character and personality of another writer is, and say \u201cI like that guy. He\u2019s human. He\u2019s on the same wavelength.\u201d He has a poem, he\u2019s a quivering old man, he\u2019s sixty-three, and he\u2019s in a railroad station, in a restaurant, and the waitress comes to him, and he\u2019s writing in the waitress\u2019 voice: \u201cThis old man\u2019s sitting there, looking sick, I\u2019d love to help him order, talk to him, he looks lonely.\u201d Hikmet was so pure, so available. That was one thing I liked so much about him. And I like the humanity he expresses while in jail. He was in jail for years and years. He was a prisoner of the Turkish government, he was a communist. That\u2019s a problem for me: I hate communism. I don\u2019t hate it for the same reason the stupid Republicans do or the stupid Democrats. I hate it because it\u2019s senseless\u2014a kind of fake utopia that preaches one thing, then ends up utterly repressive. Certainly, all the communist systems we\u2019ve seen have been incredibly insecure and oppressive. Yet Hikmet remained a stubborn communist until the end. But maybe his experience in Turkey was even worse than it might have been, in his imagination, in Russia, and he certainly got special treatment there. So what he saw was not the inside of the prison, but a hall where he was glorified and given medals. It\u2019s his humanity that I love. He remains one of the great European poets of the 20th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more I read the Eastern European poets, the more I relate to them. I\u2019m not really an internationalist, I don\u2019t know that much about them, but the more I read German poets after the war, Polish poets, Russian poets before the breakup of the Iron Curtain, the more I connect with them. And actually, when I look at my own life, I\u2019m still an Eastern European. My family\u2019s only been here for 100 years. Exactly 100 years. And I grew up in Pittsburgh, American-raised, whatever the hell that means\u2014to be American. But I realize now I\u2019m somewhat of a foreigner. The fact is I\u2019m a Jew. But I didn\u2019t grow up in a Jewish world; I grew up at the beginning of the Midwest, Pittsburgh, where the Jew is an oddball, by and large. I was kicked in the ass daily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ELISE GREGORY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you had published American Sonnets <\/em>outside the United States, how do you think it may have been received?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have no idea. The whole issue of publishing outside the United States\u2014we\u2019re such a huge country. There are so many English-speaking countries\u2014Australia, England, Canada\u2014we forget they\u2019re there. We dominate. I was in Canada, nominated for a prize a couple of years ago, and I\u2019ve been exposed to a lot of Canadian poets and it\u2019s a whole beautiful world up there, some good and some bad poets. I was nominated for a prize for that book, American Sonnets<\/em>. It was very well received there. But, you know, Canada\u2019s so much like the United States. I\u2019ve discovered over the years how significant the local is in poetry. We\u2019re such a large country, I might write about fauna in New Jersey or streets or customs there, and you in Spokane, Washington might not understand it or vice versa, let alone the world at large. It also depends on the issue of what kind of poetry one writes. Unlike Yeats, Seamus Heaney, a marvelous poet, is more of a \u201clocal\u201d poet. Yeats was more of a \u201cgeneral\u201d poet. Yeats was more English<\/em>. And during his life, maybe his Irishness was a little bit ignored. It came more to the forefront later. But he\u2019s more of a\u2014not generic\u2014but general poet. There\u2019s nothing about, say, \u201cSailing to Byzantium\u201d that is not as relevant to someone living in Chicago as it would be to someone living in Dublin. But, when Seamus Heaney writes about fence posts, or gates, or vehicles in Northern Ireland somewhere, he uses the local dialect, the language for it; it doesn\u2019t resonate\u2014or as George W. Bush would say, \u201cresignate\u201d\u2014the same way as it might if he used a more general language. And it may be that Seamus Heaney, as an illustration, is deliberately using a language like that in opposition to the universal providence that has come through as a result of technology. My language tends to be, among these two, more local maybe, if you were to appraise me. So that someone in England might read it but would maybe have a more complicated time reading it. But yet, to tell you the truth, my poetry is not unavailable. On one level, it\u2019s very available. So I \ufb01nd people, surprisingly enough, in Israel, Germany, Ireland, who respond very strongly to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DODD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You speak of Pound certainly in a different tone than I\u2019ve heard you discuss W. S. Merwin. One thing they have in common, however, is an early love of the Proven\u00e7al poets, and Merwin has described how he came to love the Proven\u00e7al poets through a visit with Pound. You say also, in What I Can\u2019t Bear Losing<\/em>, that you have an a\ufb00ection for the Proven\u00e7al poets. Could you talk more about older European poetic traditions and how they in\ufb02uence contemporary poets?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, Merwin knows that poetry from the inside. He has a house in France. He knows French like he knows English. He knows it inside out. It\u2019s a whole separate culture, Cathar culture. I wrote a poem a number of years ago about the city of Albi, where the Albigensian Crusades happened, when the northern French descended on the southern French and destroyed their culture, their Protestantism. That\u2019s the culture, generally speaking, that produced the Proven\u00e7al poets. It was a great and beautiful literature. Dante considered writing the Comedia <\/em>in Proven\u00e7al. One of Dante\u2019s Cantos<\/em> is in Proven\u00e7al. I was in that area of southern France twelve or thirteen years ago, traveling with my son. We went to some town, the wind was blowing among some oak trees, I took a little nap in the grass, my son woke me up and said, \u201cDad, these signs are in Italian.\u201d I said, \u201cThat isn\u2019t Italian; take a closer look.\u201d It\u2019s Proven\u00e7al, which is close to Italian, it\u2019s close to French, close to Latin. I\u2019ve read the poets, tried to read them in Proven\u00e7al. I\u2019ve never studied it the way Merwin has. I had a student at Iowa who really got into that stuff, who knew Proven\u00e7al poetry. It was wonderful. It\u2019s a complicated, lovely culture. The physical world they lived in was just so beautiful, the weather was lovely\u2014it remains a kind of happy, sweet poetry. It was a blessed time. Of course, they had more complications than you\u2019d think. But their devotion to love, what it stood for, their special vocabulary, particular rhyme forms. It was a big in\ufb02uence on Italian literature and the literature of Spain and all of Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GREGORY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier, you spoke of several modernist poets. Most of the modernists were interested in epics and spent much of their lives completing these great epics\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would-be great epics. Are you thinking of H.D.?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GREGORY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Williams\u2019 Paterson<\/em>\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we were really getting into it, we\u2019d have to make a distinction between the long poem and the epic. Then we would have to talk about what an epic is, or has been at least\u2014just because an epic had to be one thing 1,000 years ago doesn\u2019t mean it has to be the same thing today. And it used to be that a poet, all through his career, take Keats, felt he had to write his long poem, his epic. That was a poet\u2019s challenge\u2014whether he was Spenser, Chaucer, Tennyson\u2014he had to write his long poem. Keats wrote some long poems, they\u2019re wonderful to read. Endymion<\/em>. But the ones we know most of all are the Odes<\/em>. And some letters, some sonnets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was interested in writing an epic from the word \u201cgo.\u201d When I was in France in my early twenties, I was working on a very long poem, a ridiculously long poem, called Ishmael\u2019s Dream<\/em>\u2014Ishmael, the lost soul, the exile\u2019s dreams. It was a total failure. Then, during my early thirties, I wrote a long poem called The Pineys<\/em>, which goes on for almost 100 pages. It\u2019s a study of the White House, a study of the presidency, a study of our culture. The Pineys<\/em> is the name of a group of people who lived in southern New Jersey during the 18th, 19th, and part of the 20th centuries, at a distance from what we call \u201ccivilization.\u201d America is in love with this kind of living, whether it be in Kentucky or northwestern New Jersey. Except that the Pineys are not an ethnic group. It was a mixture of Indian, Irish, African-American, and English, and they happened to be remnants of the industrial culture that existed in southern New Jersey in the 18th and 19th centuries, where iron ore was \ufb01rst produced and boats were made. It was America\u2019s \ufb01rst West. People \ufb02ed the major cities, particularly Philadelphia, and went o\ufb00 into the woods and lived there in squalor. So my poem was about the Pineys running the White House. But it just went on and on forever. It was a madness. I sort of threw that poem away. In 1965, I started to get into the poems that are now \u201cmy poems,\u201d starting with Rejoicings<\/em>, the \ufb01rst book in my selected poems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In more recent years, I wrote a long poem called \u201cHot Dog.\u201d Is that an epic? What\u2019s an epic? Does it have to have a hero that re\ufb02ects the beliefs of a culture? Or a heroine? Does it have to have a tragic quality? It would have that if this were a course in the epic. We describe what an epic is by describing what they were and making generalizations about them. But that doesn\u2019t describe the epic of the future. Hot Dog was a woman, an actual person, probably dead now, a beautiful thirty-two year-old African-American woman who lived on the streets. She should\u2019ve been in an institution, but she was out sleeping on the cold sidewalks. She was the \u201chero.\u201d Right now, though, I\u2019m interested in the short poem. You\u2019re familiar with my last book of poetry, American Sonnets<\/em>, but I\u2019ve written another book called Everything is Burning<\/em>, coming out in a month or so, and I\u2019m now writing another one; I\u2019ve got twenty or so poems toward whatever that will be called. One is a long poem called \u201cThe Preacher.\u201d A crazy long poem based on Ecclesiastes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of my contemporaries are interested in the long poem: Merwin is interested in the long poem; Phil Levine has written some very interesting long poems; Ashbery has; Olson. Jack Gilbert has never written a long poem, he\u2019s not interested in that. O\u2019Hara hasn\u2019t. I don\u2019t know how to talk about it; I\u2019m not quali\ufb01ed. Somebody in some English Department in Albuquerque should talk about the distinction between the long poem and the epic. Make connections with American Indian hymns, Vedic hymns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You said Pound was an autodidact, as you also were, as far as writing\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m a follower of Pound. A Pounder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clearly. But do you think a writer can still self-educate?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, why not. There are too many writing schools, too much conformism. Too much everybody acting like everybody else. Make some mistakes, waste ten years. I wasted twenty-\ufb01ve years. I have regrets about it. I wasted a lot of time. When I was twenty-two, I could\u2019ve gone to Iowa, Stanford, Bennington, like many of my contemporaries. Phil Levine went to Iowa, Donald Justice. Some did, some didn\u2019t. Later on, everyone went to school. It just struck me and my friends\u2014Jack Gilbert and Richard Hazley, who was the third one among us, and by the way, the best poet, though he didn\u2019t have the will, the stubbornness to make it, which is really what counts, forget about being gifted\u2014that Iowa was ridiculous\u2014God gave us this talent, the muse. What, we\u2019re going to submit to a group of idiots who say, \u201cTake out the second line and make a different ending there, don\u2019t make that rhyme?\u201d What\u2019s that got to do with the price of tea in China? But that reticence comes out of shyness and arrogance. Pure arrogance. I think I should\u2019ve studied up here in Washington with Theodore Roethke, whom I really loved. I should\u2019ve done that. Jack Gilbert \ufb01nally did that, but he did it by accident. Jack went from Pittsburgh to the West Coast because his girlfriend got a job at Mills College, in Oakland, so he settled in San Francisco, in Berkeley. There were a bunch of other poets around\u2014a guy named Allen Ginsberg, guy named Robert Creeley, a guy named Robert Duncan. Gilbert was educated there by them. And I maybe should\u2019ve gone. I have some regrets I didn\u2019t do that. But, then I think, maybe I wouldn\u2019t have had what I did have. It depends on my mood, whether I regret or don\u2019t regret.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DODD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mentioned poetry schools, MFA programs, in the United States. I don\u2019t think many people consider that a major trend of education in Europe\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s started. They\u2019re imitating America now. In England and Ireland, particularly. Of course the French think we\u2019re insane to study poetry- writing in school. I see the problem as simple: the problem with MFA programs is not MFA programs, it\u2019s that they\u2019re located in universities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And a university is an institution that is always conformist, conservative, rule-driven. So, if you are studying in Montana, or Alabama, or Iowa, or Arizona, or Massachusetts, and you\u2019re in an MFA program, you\u2019re at a university, or you\u2019re a person who works for the university\u2026. What in the hell\u2019s a poet doing in a university? I got my \ufb01rst university job in Philadelphia, at Temple University, when I was thirty years old\u2014I had squandered my twenties\u2014and I decided, well, I\u2019m going to settle down and get a real job. I remember I was exiled from the main campus to a satellite campus. It was the art school. I was the one-man English Department at the Temple University Art School, which is now called Tyler School of Fine Art, one of the leading art schools in the country. My colleagues were painters, sculptors, printmakers. My students smelled of paint and turpentine. There was a freedom there that I loved. They weren\u2019t wearing three-piece suits. I remember one guy saying to me, a mentor of mine, he wanted me to be successful, get tenure, \ufb01nish my Ph.D., go to MLA, smile at the annual picnic, and spend my life writing ridiculous little articles on Matthew Arnold. He said to me\u2014I was wearing a pair of corduroy pants I\u2019d bought in Italy, I loved them; they were wide-wale\u2014\u201cYou can\u2019t dress like that.\u201d Now, you understand, in the 1960s, ten years later, you could<\/em> dress like that. You had a di\ufb00erent oppression then. He was quite serious. I couldn\u2019t understand what he was saying. Finally, I learned I had to wear a suit or a jacket and a nice shirt and a briefcase. Oppression takes different forms. Some are more subtle. You might get a provost or a dean or a president of a college who\u2019s hip. He might even say \u201cfuck.\u201d He might like rap music. God knows what. But let us not kid ourselves. [Sings: \u201cLet us not kid ourselves. \u201d] That is a problem. And I don\u2019t know the solution.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is you get a degree. Most schools use creative writing students as cash cows. They use<\/em> writers, make them study theory, or whatever you study in English Departments, take written exams, do various other compromising things they consider appropriate. There can\u2019t be such general rules for a poet. There\u2019s nothing wrong with learning two foreign languages, but what if you don\u2019t want to learn any and be that kind of a poet? Or you don\u2019t want to be a critic, or a teacher? There\u2019s nothing wrong with being a critic or a teacher. It\u2019s kind of nice. But what if you choose to go a different route? What it you don\u2019t know what route you\u2019re going to take? This is part of the problem. Maybe it\u2019s not the major problem, maybe it\u2019s the conformism. You know, before I went to Iowa, I kept getting phone calls. They asked, \u201cWhy aren\u2019t you applying for this job?\u201d And I said, \u201cWell, for two reasons: one, you\u2019re too far from New York; and, two, I don\u2019t know yet if I really believe in teaching writing.\u201d (Although I had taught it at Columbia; Sarah Lawrence) But I don\u2019t know to this day if it\u2019s a good thing. It\u2019s nice to have a community. That\u2019s the best thing about MFA programs: a community of more or less young people who exchange books and tears. That\u2019s great! And it\u2019s good to be exposed to someone a few years older than you who has a few books published who can tell you about his or her experiences. That can\u2019t hurt you. That\u2019s the general model, and in our day and age, the form it takes is the MFA. Maybe that will change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019CONNOR RODR\u00cdGUEZ<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the essay, \u201cSome Secrets,\u201d you say you admire the relationship that can form between an older writer and a younger writer. Did you write What I Can\u2019t Bear Losing<\/em> in part to connect to younger writers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Absolutely. Because I\u2019m writing out of a knowledge of something that\u2019s gone forever. You\u2019re talking about memory, and I just want to give away what I\u2019ve accumulated, my treasure trove. And isn\u2019t that what you do with poetry, give away your treasure trove? I guess I also just wanted to write it all down. I\u2019ve been going through my papers recently, and I discovered so many essays I had written and didn\u2019t publish. Twenty or so. They\u2019re very political.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DODD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the introduction to Passing Through<\/em>, Stanley Kunitz addresses the question of politics in poetry, when someone asks him, \u201cWhy aren\u2019t your poems more political?\u201d He says the very act of writing poetry is political. To what extent do you believe writing poetry is political?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He does say that. But Stanley Kunitz does not address political issues the way that Bly did in the 1960s, or Levertov, or Sam Hamill, who organized Poets Against the War<\/em>, as a kind of industry. I mean, Stanley was a conscientious objector. Stanley took enormous political stances\u2014he came from an urban environment, but he lived on a farm and raised his own food. That\u2019s a political act. It says something about rejectionism, says something about consumerism. That\u2019s a really strong political statement. He\u2019s essentially a beautiful lyric poet, a tragic poet, who celebrates certain accidents of his life: loneliness, lots of grief. I guess all the major poets today celebrate grief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DODD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do we have a choice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t have much of a choice. Anger and grief. I think we can identify poets we can say shouldn\u2019t be political, or aren\u2019t so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DODD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the most recent edition of Poetry<\/em>, Clare Cavanagh has sort of a remembrance of Milosz, and writes that when she was going through his papers shortly after he died, she found a copy of the latest Harry Potter<\/em> book on his desk. What\u2019s on your desk that might surprise us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t read light literature. A lot of my friends read murder mysteries, do crossword puzzles. I\u2019m totally a bore. I don\u2019t play games. I just get bored. That\u2019s a wonderful question, just let me think. I do a lot of drawings. They\u2019re crazy, they\u2019re pornographic, erotic, wild drawings, drawings everywhere. I collect little objects, my house is full of objects. Pottery. Putting them in juxtaposition, creating a collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GREGORY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday, you said you were a \u201clanguage poet.\u201d I wonder if you could expand on that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I\u2019m really saying is that I can\u2019t stand Charles Bernstein and others of his ilk, claiming the word \u201clanguage\u201d to describe what they do. It\u2019s so banal, absurd, and we accept it. What the fuck is going on? Language? We\u2019re doing language now. I know that term has a special meaning that\u2019s difficult to explain, but the reason it\u2019s hung on so long, the reason people still talk about it, is that no one can explain it, be- cause it doesn\u2019t really exist! I\u2019m responding to that, saying, \u201cI am the language poet.\u201d But I\u2019m also saying that I begin with language. I don\u2019t begin with ideas, I don\u2019t begin with images. I begin with words. I let the words transform me, carry me, literally, to places and experiences. Occasionally, I\u2019ll actually think of an experience, relive an experience. You\u2019ll read a poem that might describe an experience, but it starts with language. Language is everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DODD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you \ufb01nd techniques used by language poets, or elliptical poets, or whatever label we put on them, dishonest?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

STERN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a certain sense, all poetry is trickery. Dylan Thomas said, \u201cIn my craft or sullen art. \u201d It\u2019s a craft as well as an art. It\u2019s an artifice. It\u2019s a weird thing. On the one hand, it\u2019s an artifice, a very artificial construct, and on the other hand it\u2019s that which is holy and profound and for which Stalin throws you in prison. How can it be both things at the same time? Well that\u2019s the mystery. It can be a prayer, it can be used in a religious service. And at the same time, it can be a carefully constructed exercise in egotism, some Japanese poet, sitting crosslegged with his quill. It\u2019s all those things at once. And there\u2019s a reason poets should be kept out of the state, by Plato and Stalin and others: poets make people very nervous. They\u2019re \ufb01nally not just subversive, they\u2019re frightening.<\/p>\n\n

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Kate Daniels has described Gerald Stern\u00a0as a \u201cpost-nuclear, multicultural Whitman for the millennium\u2014the United States\u2019 one and only truly global poet.\u201d He may have had little choice in the matter. Born in 1925 to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine and Poland, he grew up in an ethnically diverse Pittsburgh, where he became friends with the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":2541,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36128"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36128"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36708,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36128\/revisions\/36708"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}