February 22: Gerald Stern

Gerald Stern, who has been described as “a post-nuclear, multicultural [Walt] Whitman for the millennium — the U.S.‘s one and only truly global poet” (Kate Daniels), was born in Pittsburgh on this date in 1925. He was already 50 when his poetry first received critical acclaim, and his many awards since then include a 1998 National Book Award for This Time: New and Selected Poems. Stern was poet laureate of New Jersey from 2000 to 2002. His “Jewish heritage,” says the Poetry Archive, “enables him to write from a very distinct viewpoint. His America is a surreal place, alive with biblical intensity and shaded by themes of Judaic loss, and his tone -- sometimes chatty, sometimes streetwise -- takes the reader into a landscape where grandeur combines strangely with the everyday.” To see Stern reading his poem, “The Dancing,” click here.

“We’re destroying the earth! We live in a country that’s governed by confusion and lies and that operates through greed and selfishness and cruelty. We’ve killed or forced into exile two million Iraqis. Where is the poetry? What are our important poets doing?” —Gerald Stern