Read the Full Interview (.PDF)
Return to Issue 56
Return to Author Interviews

Kate Daniels has described Gerald Stern as a “post-nuclear, multicultural Whitman for the millennium—the United States' one and only truly global poet.” 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 first teaching job in the mid-1950s.

In the five decades since, Stern has published fourteen volumes of poetry, including Everything is Burning (2005), American Sonnets (2003), and 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, What I Can't Bear Losing (2003). He has taught at Temple University, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and, before retiring in 1995, the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa.

“You read between the lines,” Stern says, “and discover what the character and personality of another writer is.” Reading between the conventional rhythms and understated images of his own lines, we find 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.

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.