Jerrele: On Being the Personal Assistant to Gerald Stern

Each month we feature a guest post from a contributor to Poetry’s current issue. Chase Berggrun’s poems “Battery Park in Winter,” “Nostalgia,” “Trigger,” and “Palmistry” appear in the December 2019 issue. Previous posts in this series can be found on the Editors’ Blog.

I first encountered the work of Gerald Stern at the age of 14. That is to say: since I started reading poetry, I have been reading Jerry’s poems. Lucky Life, his second collection, paved the way for a relationship to gratitude when, years later, gratitude became the bedrock I had to rebuild my life on in order to stay alive. The beginning of my work with Jerry coincided with the end-days of my alcoholism. A year after the end of my MFA, I was jobless and desperate. Matthew Rohrer, my professor at NYU, reached out. Jerry had told him that he was looking for an assistant, and Matt thought I might be perfect. I went to meet Jerry at his home in Manhattan, and we clicked immediately.

As Jerry’s assistant, I’ve had the opportunity to be beside him in his still-boisterous late years (he turns 95 in February), to explore poems with him, to listen to his stories—more than half a century’s worth of gossip. Jerry’s whimsy knows no limit. It’s not unusual to find him bursting into song, crooning for the audience of Clarissa, his beloved plaster pig, the athletic fight anthems of collegiate institutions he’s never once had any affiliation with his whole career. Jerry’s prone to greeting me at the door with perfectly reasonable questions: “Hi sweetheart. Do you think Joseph Campbell was a Nazi?” Or excitedly calling to inform me: “I’ve written another poem about baby goats!”

Sometimes the most direct path to healing is alongside another in need of help. Struck by the heartbreaking pathos of a hungry cat, Jerry writes in his poem “Another Insane Devotion”: “I think I gave the cat/half of my sandwich to buy my life, I think/I broke it in half as a decent sacrifice.” As I made my way toward recovery, it was the small moments of our days together that kept me afloat—cooking a meal, reading poems out loud to each other, making Jerry a cup of tea, and leading him through deep breathing in an anxious moment. Reorienting my thoughts and muscles toward care, I was able to quell the compulsion devouring my life and make room for change by the pouring of myself into responsibility for another.

Jerry Stern elicits from me the same kind of “insane devotion” he felt for that cat—not hero worship, which entails an erasure of a person’s flaws—but a commitment: to soak up the sunlight sitting together by the side of the pool, to look at the still water; to feel entirely and move intentionally through pain, to offer each other guidance and comfort during that process; to try to see the other side. Jerry’s poems make me want to look at the world even a little bit as generously as he does. He writes:

Let me please look into my window on 103rd Street one more time—
without crying, without tearing the satin, without touching
the white face, without straightening the tie or crumpling the flower.

 

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Let me wake up happy, let me know where I am, let me lie still,
as we turn left, as we cross the water, as we leave the light.

These moments—in which the act of intimate noticing becomes an encounter, a single moment that holds all of time—are a defining feature of Jerry’s poems. As Simone Weil writes in Gravity and Grace: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” This poem teaches me that sometimes prayer is answered in the asking—that the process of discovering the question lets me realize the strength I’ve been begging the divine for: to be wholly present for attentive moments and try to direct myself toward waking up happy, even when it seems so dreadfully unlikely. Jerry’s poems show me how to hold the horrible and the gorgeous in the same weak palm, to recognize and struggle with these dissonances.

Jerry’s lived a lifetime of simultaneity in word and deed—civil rights activism in Pennsylvania in the ’60s, leading and organizing labor unions, protesting university investment in apartheid-era South Africa—and in the poems there are the same political concerns, the same foregrounded urgencies. Refusing to look away, he demands a dedication to justice as a fundamental element of an honest life:

—I am going to be unappeased at the opossum’s death.
I am going to behave like a Jew
and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,
and pull him off the road.
I am not going to stand in a wet ditch
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and praise the beauty and balance
and lose myself in the immortal lifestream.

Again, Jerry turns to prayer. When the speaker says “I am going to” (or “not”), this is an appeal: give me the strength to act. This ethical commitment—to look the hard true thing in the eye and honor it—points directly toward action. To “be unappeased” is to reject a Panglossian worldview. In prioritizing the world’s repair, he insists that compassion is an imperative verb. A special attention to dead or dying animals is characteristic of Jerry’s poems—and of Jerry himself, “that lover of dead things […] with his pencil sharpened and his piece of white paper.”

One evening with Jerry, after working on poems and eating dinner together, we decided to watch an old movie. He asked if I could grab us some ice cream to share from the freezer. Beside the cartons I found a little yellow bird in a Ziploc bag. We learned later that Anne Marie Macari (his partner of more than 20 years, herself a wonderful poet) had discovered it while walking in the park and was storing it temporarily before bringing it to her son, Luke, an ornithologist. Delighted at this weird find and saddened at the same time, Jerry immediately wrote a poem:

The dead warbler started to sing
as she whom I love
bent down to pick him up with two reluctant fingers,
maybe the small finger (of the left hand)
curling.

I’ve witnessed the tendrils of tenderness that lead away from and back to Jerry. At a recent tribute reading in celebration of his life and work there was a whole intergenerational interconnected web of students and colleagues whose lives have been immeasurably lifted by his generosity. I’ve had the particularly special pleasure of seeing the almost visible aura of joy that floods any room Jerry and Ross Gay (his former student) occupy together, the way they light up like binary stars when their smiles are in close orbit. From his total acceptance and capacity to evolve his worldview, I’ve seen that the process of growing and learning does not have to slow or end in old age.

To flip around Marina Tsvetaeva’s great line “A kiss on the forehead—erases memory”: to kiss Gerald Stern on the forehead is to receive memory. Once, midway through watching Marlon Brando’s Last Tango in Paris, Jerry paused the movie to reveal that he had in fact seen it before—in 1972, when it premiered—and could recall who he watched it with, his date’s reaction, and the plot of the rest of the film. His memory is astonishing—sharper than mine at 29. The crystalline detail of his recollecting never ceases to impress me. Speaking with Jerry is a peripatetic stroll through history, along love’s long avenues. To hold his hand toward the future, the uncertain and the certain, is an incomparable gift. Undoubtedly, I’ve learned a great deal about poems simply being in the presence of a great teacher. Perhaps more importantly, I’ve learned about the stuff of poems—the emotional and interpersonal moments that accrue as we learn with and about each other. Sitting with him, it is impossible to forget how truly lucky we are. There is endless singing here. The past, rescued from stone, collides with the polychromatic present: a walk through the forest, a noisy deli, a hot dog heaped with sauerkraut, a kiss on the cheek, “a sweetness buried in my mind.”