On Death: Gerald Stern Considers Last Words

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette checks in with poet Gerald Stern, born in Pittsburgh, whose recently published collection Death Watch: A View from the Tenth Decade mulls the power of final verses. "Through the ages a writer’s dying words have been paid special attention," Kristofer Collins explains. On, from there:

Sometimes those words offer solace, such as the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Beautiful.” Sometimes those words are filled with pathos, as are Eugene O’Neill’s “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room, and God damn it, died in a hotel room.” And still again sometimes a writer’s parting words are simply confounding, like Henry David Thoreau’s “Moose … Indian.”

Pittsburgh-born poet Gerald Stern’s latest collection of essays, “Death Watch: A View From the Tenth Decade,” concerns itself almost exclusively with Mr. Stern’s impending passing. Now in his 92nd year, Mr. Stern, who was born and raised on Wylie Avenue in the Hill District, understands there are more days behind him than ahead. But this shouldn’t deter the reader by implying Mr. Stern’s musings on his own mortality are lugubrious or self-pitying. As in his poems Mr. Stern here is as gimlet-eyed as ever.

From the outset his self-awareness shines through, as he notes in the preface, “I am saying to myself that I’m writing about a final journey. But it seems too ridiculously pompous and sentimental. It makes me think of Tom Mix or Gene Autry riding a piebald into the mountains at sunset, the strings playing ‘I’m Heading for the Last Roundup,’ which unfortunately I know all the words to.”

Instead Mr. Stern’s essays are as much a note to himself as they are to his readers. Think of this book as an external hard drive on which the author is intensely trying to save those thoughts and ideas that would otherwise be lost to himself. “In my case, what I should read in the short space of time remaining to me, where I should be buried, what I should decide — if the choice is given to me — to remember, what I should do about being a Jew, what I should teach my grandchildren, if I’m given the opportunity, should I adhere more to truth than to fiction, what the difference is, if my own life had any significance among the billions and billions more to come, what I should celebrate.”

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