Gerald Stern: An interview

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 1998 by Pacernick, Gary

On Tuesday, December 5, 1995 I interviewed Gerald Stern in his temporary office at New York University filled with boxes of Galway Kinnell 's books and papers. Through the window one could see old office buildings in the Village. On the windowsill was a huge old Webster's International Dictionary. The plain white walls were decorated with Library of America posters of Ben Franklin, William Faulkner, and Mark Twain. During the interview a Mexican maintenance worker knocked on the door, came in, opened the office window, climbed out on the roof, and returned through the office. After the second trip by the worker, the poet asked him not to return and pulled the already ripped Twain poster off the wall.

Gary Pacernick: You have written many poems about Jewishness. Do you consider yourself a Jewish poet? And let's say, along with that, how would you define American Jewish poetry or should, in fact, we call it Jewish American poetry?

Gerald Stern: The hardest question of all to answer. Of course I'm a Jewish poet. Sometimes I'm consciously a Jewish poet, though rarely. This morning when you and I were walking to this office, I thought to pick some yellow, transparent leaves from an old maple tree. That wasn't a Jewish act. At least fifty years ago that would have been the case, to be so connected with nature. The poem itself, though-I picked the leaf because of a poem I'm writing-the poem itself might be construed after awhile as a species of Jewish poem, seen in context.

But quite frankly, writing that poem, I'm not thinking of my Jewishness qua Jewishness. Now I've written poems about the Holocaust; I've written poems that turn into a Jewish subject. Different ethnic groups wear their ethnicity in different ways. I guess the more beleaguered they are, the more they feel that ethnic entity. I myself sometimes feel beleaguered as a Jew. I also feel beleaguered in various other ways: as an older person, as a man, as a poet, as a lifetime subversive at universities.

But one of the subjects that's very important to me is my Jewishness and I'm interested in Judaism and have sentimental and loving as well as critical attitudes to Jewishness. As far as that question about "should it be Jewish-American poetry or American-Jewish poetry," that's a linguistic issue. I told you yesterday that I'd written an article for an encyclopedia about Jewish-American poetry and it's a complex subject. One can define it legally. According to the Talmud one is a Jew if one is the offspring of a Jewish mother. One can define it in terms of subject matter, in terms of association. In some respects poets who are not Jewish, living in a Jewish milieu, are often more Jewish than Jewish poets who don't live in such a milieu. And there are many of them. There is Jewish poetry, finally; however, it is not just Jewish poetry, obviously. But I think, from a distance, from a cosmic point of view, a slightly cosmic point of view, you could say, "Yes, he/she is a Jewish poet." Though I can name you, if we're talking about it, many well-known American Jewish, or American poets who are of Jewish birth, where the Jewish subject and taste are very slight.

GP: Let's get a little bit more specific. As far as I'm concerned, two of your best poems "Soap" and "Adler" concern the Holocaust, perhaps "Soap" more than "Adler." Can you comment about how these poems came to be written and the impact of the Holocaust and let's say Jewishness on these two in particular?

Stern: They relate, in both cases, to my way of writing, my associative way of writing. How one thing leads to another. How I begin with an image or an idea or a concept or a group of words and just move along as the spirit, if you will, takes me. God knows what that spirit is. Call it the muse, call it unconsciousness, guilt, shame, love, hope, memory. I actually remember starting "Soap" in a little store in Iowa City that was selling soap, and horrified by the kind of graceless accumulation of soap for its own sake, and I may, I don't remember, I may have been thinking about something or remembering something or had read something or, in my gruesome, ironic way had connected soap with the camps and the poem came into being.

But as the poem came into being, as I got into that animal, that poem, it took over, my memory took over and my horror and my anger and my pity and, most of all, my guilt as an American Jew of a certain age who, if I'd been in Europe, would probably have been dead. A very common subject for American Jews in my generation. So in the poem itself, I talk about my other, my spirit, who would have been born in Europe-how I would have thrown gasoline bombs at German trucks. That's how that poem got started, that's how it works.

The other poem, "Adler," is about a famous Jewish actor, Jacob Adler, one of the great actors of the century He wrote a play called "The Jewish King Lear." I think it had a happy ending, if you can imagine such a thing, or not such a morbid ending as poor Shakespeare. But that poem also worked its way through its own destiny, if I can put it that way. One of the critical issues in that poem was the issue of daughters. I was living with a woman at the time. Diane Freund, her name is; she had a daughter who was then fifteen years old, Heidi, whom I've written several poems about, who ran away from home eleven times. To Harlem, to Newark, to God-forsaken, horrible, threatening, overwhelming places. And my own daughter, who was six or seven years older, was going through an eating disorder. We were lying in bed on our backs, holding hands, our eyes open, staring at the light fixture, both of us.