Dean Young | March/April 2013

EXCERPT

Last year Gerald Stern published an electrifying prose book with Trinity University Press entitled, Stealing History. In eighty-four short, intermingling essays, he moves nimbly between the past and the present, the personal and the philosophical. Creating the immediacy of dailiness, he writes about what he’s reading at the moment, be it Spinoza or John Cage, Maimonides or Lucille Clifton, and then seamlessly turns to memories of his student years in Europe on the G.I. Bill, or early family life in Pittsburgh, or his political and social activism. Revealing a poet engaged with imagination, memory, and witness, and written in Stern’s signature, associative style, Stealing History is a significant literary achievement by one of our most celebrated poets.

Stern’s recent books of poetry are In Beauty Bright, Early Collected Poems: 1965–1992, Save the Last Dance, This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award, Odd Mercy, and Bread without Sugar. His honors include the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Award, the Bess Hoskin Award from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from the American Poetry Review, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment of the Arts. He was recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences and was the 2012 winner of the Bobbit Award for his Early Collected.

In 2005, Stern received the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry. For many years a teacher at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stern lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.

Dean Young: You are a poet who has demonstrated resourcefulness and range of poetic expression, whose work gives me faith that there is nothing that language can say or represent or feel that can’t be in poetry—why write in prose?

Gerald Stern: I’m not absolutely sure of the answer. Of course, as in Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentihomme, we speak “prose,” and you always want to try your hand at something new. If you’re a terrific baseball player, you try a little basketball. And, of course, I have been writing prose itself for a long time. I used to write articles for the American Poetry Review called “Notes from the River.” Really the truth is I don’t think prose can do much that poetry can’t do. I’m not sure what drew me to it, but at a certain point I started to collect essays—some that were published in APR and some new ones. For example, I have an essay, before this book, about Andy Warhol and about him giving me a painting and driving him to the train station in Pittsburgh, where he went to New York to draw shoes for I.B. Miller Shoe Co. That’s actually why he went there. It might come out in a poem somewhere, since it begs to be written. And maybe most poets look upon prose as a lesser order of things, and I suspect I’m with them. Many people have said it, but my prose is a kind of poetry, which is a way of praising it or dismissing it. I’m not sure which. But it is a different order, and there are things to be said in prose that have not yet been done, maybe they’re not necessary but I felt an obligation to do them, to talk about Poland for example, and about neighbors, and about particular issues and friends through a little criticism, through essays on different poets and such. But I do deeply appreciate your comments about my poetry. I’ve also written a play—in verse—I don’t know if this answers the question or not. Maybe prose gives us information and poetry gives us information plus feeling. Except there’s feeling in prose too. It’s hard to make a distinction. It’s harder to make a distinction now than it was a few dozen years ago. But either poetry preceded prose or there was no distinction.

Young: Was there anything different in terms of your practice, of how you wrote, between writing the prose that became Stealing History and writing poems? Did you go about it differently physically?

Stern: Well, I noticed a difference. You leave it to others to define what your poetry is; only to a certain degree are you aware of it. I noticed that my poetry—some of it—had become informational in a certain sense, but then transformed at the same time, so I’m getting used to incorporating more information or facts. Though in other cases, that’s not so. And it may be that some of my poetry had reached a point where I wanted to reach out more to prose, albeit that seems to make prose the end product and that’s really not the case. I’m having a hard time knowing the answer. It’s an excellent question, but I am not finding words to explain it. Knowing what it is.

Young: In many ways I don’t think it’s necessary to know what it is. It may be necessary to not fully know what it is for us to be able to do anything.

Stern: I think so. I think that’s the case. And maybe I just got started one day writing a letter. I still write letters. The first section is called “Park Bench.” It’s about bemoaning the fact that I was weighted down at the age of nineteen or twenty, and anticipating fifty more years of suffering (that’s in quotes), and I got started. There I was. And things happened to me—chance things or accidental things, but I just continued. Though I did say from time to time that I longed to end the book so I could return to poetry, though I never gave up poetry. I didn’t think that Stealing History was going to be this long. I thought it would be maybe 150 pages or 100 pages. I was shocked it became so long. And that it took over, so to speak.

Young: I think that one of the dynamics of reading the book is that the reader feels that the author’s experience of writing it is ongoing and happening simultaneously with the reader’s reading of it. And that’s a very exciting aspect. Of course, the book begins on a park bench and ends in a bus station, which is kind of wonderful as an introduction and an end to a work that is primarily about life as a series of journeys, that we have stops, both conceptual and physical, along the way. How did you, as you were writing the book—you talk about this in Stealing History—manage the book as it was going along?

Stern: In preparation for this conversation, I reread the book in a couple of hours, and I was actually kind of amazed myself with the writing, and some of the journeys, and why I chose things, albeit some were just accidental—people I met and such. It’s as if I was taken over by something else, the way you are in a poem. You use the word journey, and I think that’s it. I was on a crazy journey that lasted about a year, a year and a half.

Young: Was it ongoing—your feelings about the book and the sense of where it was going and the emerging themes?

Stern: Yes, you know that takes place for me to a certain degree unconsciously. I believe in it much more than I used to, and I trust that something is happening, that there is an arc—people always talk about the arc of a book—and I didn’t much care about that. A couple of people have said “well, what’s the book about?” They called it essays, but others have said “you’ve invented a new form.” I don’t know if either of those are true, and the truth is, I don’t care. It’s a series of comments on things. And I’ve found other writers later who were doing similar things—Lawrence Sterne for example, some Roman writers, some early 20^th century French writers—Blaise Cendrars—and I just kept to that. I guess it’s my consciousness, my vision, my vocabulary, my knowledge, my stupidity, my stubbornness, that make the book what it was, whatever it is.

Young: That sounds like a good definition of what any writer does. Let me ask you about the title. Where did it come from? Did it just emerge?

Stern: I was originally going to call it “Diary of the Mind,” but the people at Trinity didn’t think it was a hot enough title. The phrase “stealing history” occurs early on in the book. And though that is not so much in itself a summary of the whole book, the phrase in itself appealed to me, and I felt that I was sort of interfering, intervening, interrupting history, and I was really stealing it! That’s what we do, isn’t it? And that struck me as a better title than “Diary of the Mind” or “Chance Writing” or something of that sort, and they liked the title very much. It’s a little ambiguous. It doesn’t explain totally; it can’t. That’s okay with me.

Young: I like it because it has such ferocity about it. It has an active force. You have various phrases in the book that are in fact self-descriptive of the book. I think you could’ve called the book “My Black and Purple Quilt,” too.

Stern: I like that.

Young: But it still has an active impulse to it, and it also indicates the vastness of your knowledge and the depth of your humanitarian perspective.

So let’s maybe go on to talk about some of the subjects of the book that I found particularly interesting. One of them is that you write about comedy as revenge, the most human of enterprises and a comingling, as well as comedy as the most human of all enterprises because of its unexpected, almost magical nature. I’d like to hear you talk a little bit about comedy.

Stern: Well, I guess I’m a natural comedian, but let’s get away from the personal. I said in that section about comedy, as I recall, that comedy is as important, or more important, than tragedy. That’s a belligerent and extreme statement, if you consider Aristotle. But when we think of some of our writers—Roth, Auden, Stevens—we see their comic impulses, and I mention there that now there’s a reorientation, a reconsideration, of Kafka as a comic writer. Max Brod and he used to scream with laughter, according to my German editor, Hans Koch, who is perhaps the great expert on Kafka in Germany. Every year he visited Max Brod’s widow, who died a year or two ago. She was over 100 and lived in Tel Aviv. And they would laugh and laugh at the things Kafka said. Things that we take with utmost seriousness, given the translations we had, and wept over them, turning into a beetle or being in Oklahoma. And then other writers besides him are comic in the larger sense of the word. I don’t mean funny, albeit the comic includes comedians, stand-ups, and such, but comic in the sense that there’s no way of understanding reality so there’s a shrug of the shoulders. I was reading an interview with Joe Lieberman, the senator from Connecticut we all hate. You know, the one who ran for vice president?

Young: Um… Oh yeah, I’ve already forgotten his name.

Stern: He ended up telling a Jewish joke. I guess you have to be of a certain mind… he said “you’ll understand this joke in twenty or thirty years.” And it’s about… his wife had died, and he met a lovely Russian woman, and she was beautiful, and sexy, and a great cook, and just incredible, and he’s weeping. And the friend who saw him weeping said, “Well, if that happened, why are you crying?” He said “I forgot where I live.” Well it’s very Jewish—it’s pessimistic, it’s ridiculous, it’s a nonsequitur, and nonetheless there’s a kind of pathos to it. That’s the part of comedy that I love. Of course, you know, there’s ethnic comedy. And Jews did dominate comedy for a while, and I think African Americans are dominating it now, and there are some new young Jewish women—I love their presence in comedy, Silverman and others. There were great Irish comedians for a long time… and so on. Comedy expresses, I guess, the local, the particulars of a culture, whatever it may be. And I like that. I said in the section on comedy (and I’m sure this has happened to you, Dean), many times you give readings to people and you dread the questions, you want to go home and go to sleep at that point. But you have to keep smiling, right? A guy asked me at the back of the room—it was in Cologne—and I couldn’t hear him, it was half in German, half in English, so I made him come up front—“Is there a little man in the back of your head who writes your poems?” I said, “Yes!” He was furious. He wanted me to say “Well, what do you mean by a little man?” and we were going to talk about the irrational and Freud and Jung, and I just said yes! That itself was a joke.

Young: Yes.

Stern: But he was the butt of the joke. That was kind of… not very nice of me. However, I did it in self-defense.

Young: It’s a difficult question.

Stern: I know, I know.

Young: Lenny Bruce said about being a comic, “Just observe, observe.”

Stern: Oh yes. It’s all around us, isn’t it?

Young: Comedy always is. There are various things that people laugh at. People laugh when they’re surprised. People laugh at the absurd. But one of the things that has always struck me as the thing that is most funny is the truth.

Stern: Of course.

Young: Because often, whatever context we’re in, it is not a context for the truth.

Stern: The truth, if we want to know, is utterly shocking. That question about what comedy is came up in Germany, and I said in that section that my German editor, Hans Koch (who was born in 1948 and is bitter about the Nazis, who, he said, cheated him of his life) says that German humor is schadenfreude—laughing at others’ misfortunes. And I don’t know if that’s... that’s certainly an angry reaction.

Young: Freud talks about humor in that way—jokes and the subconscious—where he says we laugh at things because it’s happening to the person we’re laughing at instead of us.

Stern: Sometimes, I’m not trying to be funny. And people laugh at things in my poems that are maybe a little off-kilter, or ironic, that they see as “funny.” As we both know, people are desperate for something to cling to, so they laugh when they’re at readings.

Young: Yes! And they encounter vitality and joy, and an expansiveness in your poems. And that makes people laugh. I think of them being tickled in a way, the same way they might laugh at coming upon a waterfall. It’s an emotional response, and it hasn’t been tricked out by a joke or anything like that.

Stern: If I may push one little thing, because you’re the questioner. Was it Auden who said “the questioner who sits so sly…”? I have read from Stealing History in a couple of readings, and had to read brief sections, because I wanted to read poetry, too, so I had to pick out little sections or little paragraphs that summarized a whole lot of things. Among other things, there is a section called “Demystification,” and I’ve discovered, I had forgotten I did this, that at one point in the book, I said in plain English what I believed in, although there’s always a little irony there. It’s at the bottom of page 172, and this is after a long treatise on Spinoza and “Mystification”—the one thing I hate. You know, ringing bells, turning lights on and off, wearing uniforms, having oval offices, or square offices, or whatever the case may be. And I suddenly came to this. May I read not the whole paragraph but just a part of it?

Young: Absolutely.

Stern: Okay, and this is on page 172 at the bottom, I suddenly turn to this:

I believe human beings should pay very close attention to each other. They should reach out beyond the family and help the oppressed, the trapped, and the sick. They should insist on security for and from the larger society. They should pay attention to the past, live with grief, make charity personal, teach without end, share food, listen patiently to the young and honor their music, turn their backs on corporations, advertising, and public lying, hate liars, undermine bullies, love June 21, and, on that day, kiss every plant and tree they see. They should love two-lane highways, old cars and old songs. They should eat with relish, and study insects.

That’s about a third of the paragraph. And that paragraph gave me great pleasure; I didn’t even know I had written it. I mean, I knew on one level I had written it, but I wasn’t conscious of it. That I was able, albeit with tongue-in-cheek a little bit, to say what I believe in. And that’s kind of a great… it’s something to be relished. Not to be proud of, but to be delighted in, to be able to say “I found a place to say what I believe in” or “I finally found a way to say what I believe.”

Young: One of the things that this paragraph does, which is something that your poems often do, is it takes a momentum, and it creates a litany, and that litany has such inclusive force, even though it’s specifying, it makes the world larger as it goes along, so it includes the emotions in it, and the balances of sincerity and play are shifting a lot. I love the momentum there.

Stern: There’s a lot of shifting, right? And it does gather momentum. And it ends up “They should love New York, know two foreign languages, practice both regret and remorse, love their own cities, forgive but not forget, live in at least three countries, work in a gas station, lift boxes, eat pears, learn a trade, respect pitch pines, believe in the soul.” And so on. “They should talk to their neighbors and eat herring and boiled potatoes.” Not everybody loves herring; my dear Anne-Marie doesn’t like herring, I don’t know if you like herring, but we guys from the Baltics, we love herring, you know?

Young: Yes. Okay, maybe changing subjects, let’s move on… in the section “Education of the Poet,” you write “it was almost as if poetry then, my poetry, was in conflict with my other, my political self, and it would take me a while to combine, to coalesce the two.” How did you do that? In what ways did your poetry and/or your life change?

Stern: Well, you know, at a very young age, coming from Pittsburgh and being kind of radical, or open to radicalism (God knows I’ve never asked the FBI for my report but I’m sure it’s there somewhere), I joined groups, I belonged to a union, I belonged to several unions, I’d go hear speeches, I’d give speeches. Pittsburgh, when I grew up, was a hotbed of radicalism and change, and I was deeply involved in politics and thinking politically. I majored in philosophy and political theory as an undergraduate—I only took one English course. I was reading Montesquieu and John Locke and Godwin. But all of this time I was secretly writing poetry, so in my mind there were two different worlds. There was the political world, with its responsibility, and then there was the aesthetic world, which was a bit more narcissistic and personal and secret. At least for me. There were no other poets that I knew about yet in the Pittsburgh area and so it was a radical change for me to suddenly, on my own, encounter the incredible English and American poets. I was in a state of confusion for a while, and when I turned to the aesthetic, maybe when I was a junior in college still taking my courses in sociology and philosophy and political science, I was already deep into poetry. But I wasn’t taking English courses. I was just, more or less, reading all the time, and writing (as we all do) some terrible poems. But I was becoming an esthete.

I don’t know where you learned how to dress and how to be—there were no models for it on TV—there was no TV—or in the movies or any place else, but somehow from my reading it must have crept in. I turned away from the political. And that’s when I encountered my two friends—two other people who were writing, as far as I knew the only other two in Pittsburgh, at the time, Richard Hazley and Jack Gilbert. The three of us discovered each other, and we were into the aesthetic, and I was the only one into the political. I started to keep that part more or less secret. A reversal. And I devoted myself really purely to the… I’m calling it the aesthetic for want of a better word. And then in the course of my life, I spent a lot of time unacknowledged, let me just put it that way, though I was writing and even publishing, in my late teens and early twenties. I finally found a way, maybe in my late thirties, of putting the two together, the aesthetic and the political, and finding that they interpenetrated each other—at least for me, and they were comfortable finally, for me, and I found a way of accommodating the two presences. I even wrote an essay about it a little later, and the name of that essay was “Some Secrets.” That was in my book of essays, What I Can’t Bear Losing. I don’t know if that’s adequately explaining this to you.

Young: Yes, and it leads to another question—what do you think the role of the poet is in society? Does the poet have a social obligation?

Stern: That’s a marvelous and terrifying question. He—she—has to explain himself to himself, he has to explain himself to other people. He—she—has to teach other people. He has to entertain people, he has to convince them and show them what feeling is. I believe that. And he has to communicate his feelings. Why he feels the need to do this is another question. That comes from his own life and where he was as a child. People often ask me “Why did you become a poet?” and I keep thinking of “who’s the muse, or what the muse was.” I say it’s got to do with my family, or it’s got to do with my only sibling, my sister, who died when she was nine and I was eight, and so I really live my life in a way with her and for her. It’s got to do with my parents. It’s got to do with being a Jew, or the kind of Jew that I was. I don’t think any of it adequately explains it. I’m grateful that there’s no explanation, finally. No full explanation. Maybe I’d stop all together, if there were an explanation. I just want to say this, as far as writing the poetry is concerned.

At a certain point I remember, I suddenly switched to a different and more relaxed approach to the poem. And from that day (that may have been 1966, 65) until now I haven’t stopped being obsessed with poetry. I haven’t stopped having seven or eight poems I’m working on all the time. For example, I have fifty-eight new poems though I don’t know if I’ll keep them all, or if I’ll keep half of them or what. It’s enough for another book. The other day I told my editor, Jill Bialosky, “Jill I have some terrible news for you. I have fifty-five new poems.” She looked at me—I guess in wonder—and maybe terror. She didn’t say anything, you know? I finally found a way of doing it, and it changes, and I keep challenging myself, but I keep going. In one new poem, I compared what I do to being a mule. I love donkeys. I even love mules. In this short poem—I don’t know where it is right now or I’d read it to you—I talk about wearing blinders—some of the mules were deliberately blinded but I’m wearing blinders—and I’m going in a circle and I’m pushing a stone, grinding corn or something like that and I’m pushing, all day long I’m pushing. And that’s what I do! Only I’m writing poetry, I’m not grinding corn. Do you know this ditty?

Where do you work a’ John?
The Delaware Lack-a-Wan.
Whadda you do a’ John?
A’ push, A’ push, A’ push.

Young: Can you talk a little bit about friendship? Literary friendship and how important friendship has been to you, and in what kind of ways?

Stern: In rethinking through this book in the last day and a half, I came across a lot of sections on neighbors. Well, that’s a different issue, because neighbors can be very close or they can be temporary neighbors and such, but as far as friendship is concerned—I remember carefully reading both Bacon’s and Montaigne’s wonderful essays on friendship. Especially Montaigne, who is a very important source for me and an influence. I’ve had a lot of good and close friendships, some of which ended because of death, some from disagreement, or you just move on. I don’t know what it’s like in your life, Dean, but I find myself besieged a little too much by people. It’s because I make myself available. I’m always on the phone, and I’m always listening and I’m always willing to read manuscripts and to expose myself and extend myself. But as far as friendships in the proper sense of the word, I think of my relationships with people like Phil Levine, C.K. Williams, Eddie Hirsch, Jack Gilbert, and Dick Hazley, who died twenty years ago. New friends, Ira Sadoff, Jean Valentine, Joan Larkin, yourself. I mean, sometimes you see a friend very seldom, sometimes you see him—or her—often. I think the very important issue for me is that I want my friends to know what I’m doing, to appreciate what I’m doing, and to like what I’m doing. And I want to know about them.

The worst thing that can happen to me is if a friend disapproves of something I’m doing, you know? I don’t know what else to say on this… I’d like to hear what other people have to say, and I would nod my head and say “Yeah, yeah.” I think over the course of my life, I’ve had different friendships that ended—friendships in high school, friendships in college. There was a guy I knew in college named Nick Tankosic—I think I wrote about him in Stealing History, in a section called “War Work”—how we were both classified 4F for a while, and we were hired by the Feds as day workers because the war was on and there were very few men available. We went out and knocked on people’s doors in Pittsburgh, and asked questions on programs that the federal government had promulgated. I don’t know what happened to him, I looked him up, but he just disappeared. That was a friend who was close to me but we didn’t continue. Maybe he belonged to that political phase that I spoke about. I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s a very important question, and I find that I’m not adequately explaining it. But I constantly find myself being involved with new people and new friends as I go along, partly related to the jobs that I have at this or that place. When I was at Iowa, my closest friend was a photographer and he’s still there, Peter Feldstein; and then working for the program at Drew, the low-residency program, I’ve made some friends there.

Young: This question was the one I was thinking of asking you last, and I’ll ask it. It might not be last but… in the section, “Learning Poetry, Living Cheap,” you write “Those who become poets are those who are capable of resistance and finally create themselves not because of their world, or not that only, but in spite of their world.” As you know, the writing of poetry is a mad, lonely business. What can you say to those who do it, who wonder why they do it, and if it is worth the bother?

Stern: You wonder why people continue to do it? I don’t know. I guess stubbornness? I’m a very stubborn person, and what I did in this section was talk about the way we survive. I don’t know if I mentioned it here or elsewhere, but when I graduated from college, I had already been in the army, and I was an A student, and the field I was in offered scholarships, various kinds, and I turned them all down and rented a little room in Pittsburgh for seven dollars a week, and read books. That’s all I did. And my poor father wanted me to become a judge or a doctor, and said: “Well, you already went to college!” and I said, “Yeah but I never read a book there. I didn’t read books. Now I’m starting to read.” And he was very patient and a little embarrassed. I guess he was embarrassed when they said, “What’s your son doing?” And then that first year went into a second year and then I found my way. I lived part of the time in New York and part of the time in Europe. On the east coast. And I took ships back and forth. It was that stubbornness; it kept me going. I earned my own money in various ways, and I lucked out. I had the G.I. bill, the WWII G.I. bill that helped me out a great deal, and things were cheap in Europe.

I had taken care of myself financially since I was maybe sixteen or seventeen, but I got my first full-time job when I was twenty-nine or thirty years old, teaching at Temple University in Philadelphia. So really, the whole dream was living cheap. That’s really what it was about. But at the same time, maybe that’s the way you learn poetry. It’s certainly different than what people do today, isn’t it? I remember, maybe it was 1980 or 1979, I was teaching for a year at the University of Pittsburgh, and I was congratulating my graduate students on all the fine opportunities they had—scholarships here, magazines there, whereas I called the time that I lived in the “dark ages.” And I told them there was nothing. There was no one. There were no MFA programs. There were no poets doing readings, not where I came from. Maybe at Yale or Harvard, but not in Pittsburgh. Not in Cleveland. At our second class, the next week, they said, “Before we start, tell us again about the ‘dark ages’”—they had romanticized those times, and they wanted me to bring it up to them again. That’s the way I lived. I don’t know if I’m straying from the question. Somehow there’s a magic connection between the mode of living (I call it “living cheap”) and learning poetry. I did it on my own; I did it through reading. You know, I knocked on a few doors, and I was privileged at one time to meet Auden. He invited me down to his apartment on Cornelia St., he was living there in the Village, and I couldn’t believe my luck. He was only forty-eight years old then. And I thought, “Oh my god, Auden has asked me to come down and talk to him!” I couldn’t believe it, just to sit in his presence. Of course, nowadays it’s “Hi, Ger.” Everyone’s equal. I don’t believe in hierarchy, but the natural aristocracy, if you will, something else. Am I answering your question?

Young: Yes, and I was sort of thinking about what you could say to young poets who feel dispirited.

Stern: Well, everybody will say, “There’s a plethora of MFA programs.” There are too many people writing. But I personally think it’s a great age for poetry, I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t think it’s a bad age. There are bad poems, bad poets possibly, but so what? There have always been bad poems and bad poets. It’s great. We don’t have to suffer alone. You get somebody’s shoulder to weep on. The reason a program like yours, or the one I was at (oh, you taught at Iowa too for a while) or it could be Columbia, or NYU, Missouri… is that you have someone to lend you a book or to bring an idea up to you, or a reader, or someone to read his poems to you or talk to you at a party. What I have to say is just be stubborn, and keep at it. You know you may be throwing away your life, but what the hell. I say “what the hell,” I mean more than that. It’s one of the things you’d have to take a chance on and you do. I like to say to people “Read, read, read till you go blind.” We are readers who occasionally write a poem, that’s what I’d like to say to them. I don’t have any magic words to say to people but I keep coming across different poets, younger poets, who are terrific, or show possibilities of being terrific, and I enjoy it. There are some people in your age group, my age group, who are cynical about younger poets.

Young: I hate that position people take that seems to say that poetry’s going to be ruined by people trying to write it.

Stern: That doesn’t even make sense to me. How can that ruin poetry? It’s ridiculous. I think we should let each other be and write the way we want to. If we’re barking up the wrong tree so we’re barking up the wrong tree, and who knows what the right tree is, for God’s sake.

Young: And surely there’s not just one tree.

Stern: That’s important to be said. There’s a pitch pine. There’s a sycamore. I used to have some great trees in my backyard in Iowa, and for a couple of years I didn’t notice them. They were in the back, and they were old beautiful apple trees. The apples were all on the ground and they were kind of rotten. And then one day I picked one up and bit into it and it was the sweetest kind of greenish apple, you know? God, I could taste it. And that was a poet I had not acknowledged. And when I took that bite somebody acknowledged it. One of those trees died though. Oh well, it was the wrong tree.

Young: Is there anything you would like me to ask you about?

Stern: There’s a section called “Academy of Arts Medal,” and one called “Nut Death;” each one seems to have a little irony and a little tenderness, and a little mystery, and some greater mystery. There obviously are some very political ones, some that take up the subject of Israel and Palestine, and others—the sections on neighbors are maybe the central part of the book, for it’s all about neighbors. Maybe all of life is. And I had the pleasure of meeting different people; there’s a guy named Charlie, I’ve written three sections on him. He’s a guy with a dog, who’s a little bent over. He’s in his nineties, and he was Humphrey Bogart’s half-brother. I don’t know, I’m just wondering about the section called “Dog Eat Dog.” I love dogs so much that I have a section on dogs. It just goes everywhere, doesn’t it? This whole business about the dragonflies—I became obsessed.

Young: They eat and fuck.

Stern: They eat and fuck, right. Why did I write about dragonflies? Because they represent to me a state of being, of pure being: they are what they are. Like God. Like Popeye. And they don’t anticipate anything. Or maybe they don’t know anything, or maybe what they know is described in their behavior. They’re always in the air. They eat anything smaller than them and they’re eaten by anything larger than them. “Males fight each other up there and maneuver like WWI airplanes, many carry old battle scars, torn wings and the like. Eat and fuck, and fight.” Males that is, adult males. And then of course they live in water. And I say: “When Darwin said ‘dog eat dog,’ who or what was he referring to? What Lion and what Lamb?” And of course I talk about the prophets, particularly. Then I go off on a rant here, which is typical of me. There’s a memory of the McCarthy years: “I have, in this briefcase, the names of six card-carrying vegetables in the state department! I have, in this briefcase, the bodies of six bread-eating damselflies. I have the name of one dragonfly that has eaten all of them. I have the name of six Isaiahs! I have the husks of six ears! I have the skeletons of six nymphs. I have six nymphs in this card-carrying fish-case. I have six fishes in the bellies of each nymph. I have one tadpole. I have the discarded tails of four thousand dead and transformed proto-frogs. I have one frog for each finger. I have the mouthparts of the most efficient insect on earth. I have his six legs, his two thousand eyes. I have his brain, which is spread out over his body. I have his think! Give me a handshake and I’ll give you my hand. Give me a vegetable and I’ll give you the world! What is quicker, a buzz saw or a dragon saw?” That’s almost like a little poem, isn’t it?

Young: Yes. Yes, it’s wonderful.

Stern: When I get carried away from time to time, I forget I’m writing prose, whatever that is.

Young: I love the intensity of that. It’s that intensity that always carries you to truths. And often the truths are presented to us in ways that are nearly overwhelming and extreme.

Stern: And exaggerated a little bit.

Young: Yes, exaggerated, as all music is exaggeration.

Stern: “We should be called walks since flies (who fly) are called flies. We should be called runs. Jesse Owens outran a horse. Then he ate it. See eating habits of frogs. Keep your mouth open at long last. Speak softly and carry ten segments. Speak softly and carry a big one.” And so on. So, it’s a lot of just basic stuff in Stealing History. Eating, friendship, neighbors, neighborliness, anger, and outrages, as in that section on Poland, the town of Jedwabne, a little town of 1,600 where one day the people there who were Polish murdered all the people who were Jews, ones that they weren’t able to kill with knives and clubs they locked up in a barn and burned the barn. I know it’s very painful for someone who’s Polish or of Polish descent to hear, for it makes them sound more crazy, more evil, more mad than other people. I think this is human behavior, and any group is capable of it. I guess this book was an opportunity for me to finally say whatever I wanted to say. We talked about what the purpose of poetry is—to work to a state where you can say anything you want to say. Now keep in mind, it has to be aesthetically demanding or beautiful, or organized in an efficient way aesthetically and so on. To reach a point where you can say what you want to say, what you believe, I think is an important point. And maybe to live a long time. You know we romanticize the young poet, and of course Keats was unbearably great and young when he died, and many of the Romantics were, and those are the poets that people read in school. But a lot of poets have lived long lives and maybe we should start listening to people from the second half of life as well. Though not ignore the first half.

Young: I very much agree with you, and this notion that somehow or another creativity favors one period of one’s life rather than another seems to me to be dangerous, even. It allows us to discard people far too soon.

Stern: I’ve been thinking of Elliott Carter the last few days, he died last week. He was 103! He probably said, “Come on Angel of Death. I’m just in the middle of an opera here, I wanna finish this first. Hang on! There’s a guy across the way, take him instead of me. Give me another year, you know?” Elliott Carter, yeah, who wrote some beautiful music on Hart Crane’s poetry and Wallace Stevens, and some others. Very fine musician. The answer to your question about is there something I want to emphasize—I mentioned the sections on neighbors and what it was like, because it’s a mystery to me. I guess Eastern Europe remains a great mystery. I’ve been there, of course, and I have a book in Polish, and one in German, and I’ve read in Poland—and Germany—but it still remains mysterious and appealing because I could have grown up there. God knows what would have happened to me. I think New York is an important issue in this book also. We each have our cities, right? You have yours, and I have mine, and mine fortunately includes New York. Of course I have some crazy places like Easton, PA. There’s a section on my own childhood in New York, wandering around by myself when I was ten or eleven. There’s a section on Henry James in New York, on Henry Miller, and Simone de Beauvoir. There are many sections on the Jewish presence, one on Tourette’s, which I have. Sometimes I’m shocked at the things I do. Most people think of Tourette’s as going into a bakery and saying “Fuck!” but mine takes the form of interfering, intervening, and just talking to people, to strangers, and saying crazy things that I sometimes regret and suffer from. Oh and Haiti! The lies about Haiti, the absolute lies. The amount of money that was promised and the promises that weren’t kept. How people in Haiti were treated. The lies. Underlying this book, maybe the main issue is lies. Lies at the root of things.

Young: Yes. That makes a lot of sense in terms of the overarching theme. Certainly what we were talking earlier about comedy and comedy being truthful in a way.

Stern: Exactly, exactly. I just can’t stand lies. I mean, I tell lies like everybody else. Or half-truths, or whatever. But the big lie, which was used to influence a people’s vote or take their money—I mean, I can’t even stand advertisement anymore. And I know I’m a pain in the ass when I’m sitting in front of the TV set and looking at dumb ads. I know it makes everyone uncomfortable. Maybe that’s part of our job as poets, to make people a little uncomfortable. I think you believe that, judging from your poems.

Young: Yes.

Stern: Also, this book is about things I love: dogs, I love dogs. About my family, and about the crazy things that happened to me. There I was, in one of the chapters called “Athletes” in a Y across from the University of Pittsburgh; I used to go there three four times a week to swim, play basketball, and hit a punching bag. I boxed in the army. This was the Y that Billy Conn, who fought Joe Louis twice, trained in sometimes. Do you remember that section?

Young: Yes.

Stern: Conn was really a puffed-up middleweight and a great boxer. In the first fight, he was way ahead on points. He had out-boxed Louis for twelve rounds and he had three rounds to go. I knew his owners, he was from Pittsburgh, and they said “Stay away from him for nine minutes and you’re the champ!” and he said, “I’ll kill the bum!” He was a dumb Irishman, you know, and he tried to slug it out with Louis who floored him with one blow and that was it. I met Conn when he was getting ready for the second fight a few years later, and he asked me to spar with him for a round of two since there was no one else there. I hit him with a left hook and he fell down; I was so embarrassed, you know? I don’t think I said that in the book, but I did say I was a nanosecond away from one of the great fighters of history, Joe Louis, whom I probably would have just looked at and fallen down. Conn became a good friend of Louis’s. He said, “Why didn’t you let me become the champion?” Louis said, “You was champion, for 12 rounds.” Conn lost the second fight in four or five rounds. He was scared and just running. All kinds of crazy things happen to me! Maybe because of my Tourette’s, maybe because I reach out. Everyone in town knows me. It’s crazy! And they all call me “Ger.” I don’t know where they got that. And I don’t know them! Or I may know them, or I may know them from seeing them but I don’t know their names. I love my town. I even love the Mayor, who calls me professor because he can’t remember my name—after fifteen years he still can’t remember, but he’s a good mayor, though a little overweight—Jersey style.         

Dean Young has published many notable books of poems, including Design with X, First Course in Turbulence, and Skid, which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. His more recent poetry books are Elegy On Toy Piano, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Embryoyo, Primitive Mentor, and Fall Higher. He is also the author of the prose book The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He currently holds the Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas. He lives in Austin.

Excerpt

from Stealing History

I believe human beings should pay very close attention to each other. They should reach out beyond the family and help the oppressed, the trapped, and the sick. They should insist on security for and from the larger society. They should pay attention to the past, live with grief, make charity personal, teach without end, share food, listen patiently to the young and honor their music, turn their backs on corporations, advertising, and public lying, hate liars, undermine bullies, love June 21, and, on that day, kiss every plant and tree they see. They should love two-lane highways, old cars and old songs. They should eat with relish, and study insects. They should never stop raising children. They should fight for schoolteachers, pay them, give them tenure, let them make the rules. As Coca-Cola does. They should insist that no one be paid more than ten times anyone else, no matter what or where. They should make fun of war, flags, uniforms, weapons, pulpits, oval offices, square ones, oblong ones, circular ones; and robes, and titles, especially the titles of “Dr.” given to education degree holders in state colleges who address each other as “Doctor.” They should respect all dogs, love one breed intensely, eat fruit, eat root vegetables, read Lear endlessly, and be suspicious of Gertrude Stein—with the exception of her war plays. They should love New York, know two foreign languages, practice both regret and remorse, love their own cities, forgive but not forget, live in at least three countries, work in a gas station, lift boxes, eat pears, learn a trade, respect pitch pines, believe in the soul. They should stop throwing rubbish out the window, they should sit on park benches, marry young, marry late, love seals, love cows, talk to apes, weep for tigrons, cheer on the carp, encourage the salmon and the shad, and read twenty books a year. They should talk to their neighbors and eat herring and boiled potatoes.

—night of December 17, 2009, 1 a.m.