Interviews
On Politics and Poetry: A Conversation with Gerald Stern
Kate Beles
When I first went to phone Gerald Stern about scheduling an interview on the topic of “Poetry and Politics” for The Bellingham Review, all I knew was that I was a lowly graduate student about to talk with a man who is one of the best known, loved, and accomplished American poets alive today. I knew Gerald Stern had three NEA’s, a Guggenheim, a National Book Award, a fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lamont Prize, and the Ruth Lily Prize—among many other awards. I also knew he had a very long list of books including American Sonnets (2002); Last Blue: Poems (2000); This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), which won the National Book Award; Odd Mercy (1995); Bread Without Sugar (1992); Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (1990): Two Long Poems (1990); Lovesick (1987); Paradise Poems (1984); Red Coal (1981) which received the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of America; Lucky Life, the 1977 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets, which was also nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and Rejoicings (1973). I was also aware that he had taught at countless universities, including the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Although I had just finished reading his book of memoirs What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes from a Life, and had found his voice forthright, emotionally honest, forgiving, and quite funny, I still expected a somewhat formal introduction. However, “Call me Gerry” was the first thing he told me after I introduced myself, and he then launched us into an energetic and engaging political discussion about the current Bush administration and the war in Iraq. After hanging up the phone, I felt like I’d both made a friend and learned a great deal about current events.
On the day we were to meet for the interview, I got up much earlier than I was accustomed to (Stern is an early riser), collected my recording equipment, and drove to the prettiest old Victorian bed and breakfast in Bellingham Washington. After climbing the hundred-plus steps to the top of the hill, I was led up more indoor stairs by the innkeeper and into a room with huge bay windows overlooking all of the small Northwest town, the Bellingham Bay, and the San Juan Islands beyond—upon which the sun was just rising. Mr. Stern made me feel right at home—joking mainly about the age difference between us (nearly sixty years). In the course of our two mornings of discussion—I joined him for a lovely breakfast buffet the next day—Stern taught me about the history of Pittsburgh, Bavarian Motorworks, and the evolution of MFA programs—among other things. He also asked to see some of my writing, and was immediately attuned to my inchoate attempts at craft. He had me talk on the phone with other professional poets with whom he thought I should be acquainted, and even laid out for me the entire course of how my poetic career should progress—ironic for a man who was entirely without mentors or community during his early writing career. Like the people I most love, I found Gerry Stern opinionated and kind; ironic, exuberant, and humanizing, much like his work; and I hope this interview will give you a small sense of the man behind a distinctly American poetic legacy.
Kate Beles: As we’ve agreed to focus on poetry and politics, the first thing I’d love to hear about is your formative years, and how the left influenced you when you were young.
Gerald Stern: Good question. When I was in high school I discovered a number of things. Pittsburgh is where the Carnegie is you know, and I used to raid some secret shelves where they had the real history of what went on in that city, in that culture--like the homestead steel strike, like how the Pinkertons were first used as an organized police force. They came down in barges to fight the workers in homestead who worked for the steel, it later became U.S. Steel, this is Homestead, this is Squirrel Hill where I lived. And the Pinkertons actually lost that war; and it was a war, a battle, and the Pinkertons actually lost it. Most people don’t realize that.
So I don’t know where all my leftist influence comes from; maybe it was just in the air, but I identified with them, I was a socialist. I probably joined several communist organizations. But I’ve never looked up my record, it would be kind of fun to do that.
KB: To see if you have an FBI file?
GS: Yes, if I have a file. And, where did these leftist politics come from? From obvious places. Old testament prophets, Isaiah, with his vision of social justice. From the newspapers of the day. From Theodore Roosevelt and the New Deal. He wasn’t far enough to the left for us, but we loved him.
It came from a flirtation, an ignorant flirtation, with the Soviet Union that extended for a long time, and many others with me, many of my teachers at the high school I went to, were communist front people. They were innocent, underpaid school teachers who believed that Russia was a place of social justice and happiness, and they didn’t believe what was told in the newspapers or the magazines or the churches. My politics came from the Jewish sense of justice too. And there was always in me this kind of furious anger, a desire to, what shall I call it?—a desire for rectitude, a desire to make things right, you know, a fury, an anger, which I later translated in my twenties and thirties and forties and even to this day into various activities, such as civil rights activities, anti-war activities. But that’s how it started, in Pittsburg.
When I got to be nineteen or so I started to get interested in something crazy called poetry. There were no books in my house, I never took an English course, I had no community. I moved away from the political and into the aesthetic, as I’ve talked about from time to time. And I put politics on the shelf for awhile while I pursued aesthetics, but then I came back to politics and I merged the two actually, and that’s where I am now.
KB: What would you say to poets right now who claim we should keep our politics separate from our poetry?
GS: I’m different than I was when I was 19, I’m a little more cynical, a little more realistic, a little more ironic, I know a little bit more, I’m not as naïve as I was. Of course, it’s pat and easy to say that politics should rule a poem. Who knows what should rule a poem? Whatever should rule a poem is what’s in the poet’s heart. If it turns out that his foremost impulse is justice and politics in one way or another, and that’s where the aesthetics come from, then the poem might work. If it turns out that it’s contemplation of flowers, well then it will work somewhere else.
I remember in the late sixties I was teaching in the university, kind of an absurd place in western Pennsylvania called Indiana University of Pennsylvania, near Pittsburg. There was an anti-war reading and I was asked to participate, and it was 1966 maybe, or ’67. And a guy that I shared an office with, he’s dead now, his name was Will Stubbs, he read this loud, loud poem; he was screaming in five different made-up languages and people were applauding him. I didn’t have any anti-war poems as such, but I wrote one which was terrible, and I just rediscovered it about a week ago, because I’m going through my papers. I couldn’t write an anti-war poem as such, but I always have been political in some way.
With me the politics combines the personal and the political in the peculiar way I write. Although sometimes I address myself to things directly, sometimes it’s not so simple. In this new book of mine, there is a poem called “The Trent Lott, the McNamara Blues.” You know what I’m talking about, of course, with Trent Lott, who was the Speaker of the House, and on the hundredth birthday of the southerner who ran in 1948 on a Segregationist plate, Trent Lott praised him, and for that he lost his job. Of course I didn’t sit down to say I’m going to write a political poem. I was angry about something. And I don’t know what I’m going to think about this poem myself five years from now, but right now I like it.
So that’s the sort of thing that I’m into now, but I’ve always been into that in one way or another. The issue of should poets write politically—I suspect that I was turned on to the political because finally I got fed up with the bullshit and finally I decided to just write directly. I have the skill of doing this, of writing directly about my feelings as I feel them.
And there are a lot of very, very bad political poets out there. Maybe they serve some good, and maybe not. It’s like poems on the Holocaust—people get very embarrassed and very angry about bad books of poems on the Holocaust. And there are a lot of bad books on the Holocaust. Maybe it’s because it’s such a serious issue, a bad poem trivializes it. And one feels especially sensitive about that. And I respect that.
I could show you some wonderful anti-war poems and political poems though. I discovered in some papers just yesterday morning some poems by the Turkish poet Hikmet, do you know Hikmet?
KB: Yes, I’ve read a bit of him.
GS: He’s the major Turkish poet, and he was in prison for twenty or thirty or forty years. The last time he was put in prison it was because a young cadet was reading his poems. And there is a poem called “Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison” by Hikmet and it’s a political poem, but it’s a quiet poem—it’s not a raging poem, it’s an indirect poem. He says, forget your rage, watch out for lice, and for spring nights, and always remember to eat every last piece of bread. People that have been in jail always say that.
I’m reading a book now called “My Century” by a Polish poet named Alexander Watt. And the book consists of 400 pages of interview between him and…at Berkeley, the poet laureate, Polish poet, famous poet, who just died…Czelaw Milosz. And they’re talking together, and he ends up talking about being in prison. He was thirty years in Polish prisons, German prisons, Soviet prisons. The bit about the bread, it’s true. They were sometimes in a room this size, in a cell this size, with forty or fifty people, no place to shit, no place to do anything. Talk about privacy, you know. And bread was a very important issue. He will talk endlessly about the bread, how much water was in it, was it more like clay, or was it not, it was a very big issue.
There are other poets who make good political poetry, and the tradition among the South American poets, the Spanish poets, and many of the French poets, German poets, ….and the German women poets who have been ignored. The poetry, most of which is political, is a mixed bag.
KB: I was reading the other day William Heyens’ book Shoah Train…
GS: Shoah Train, I know the book, yes.
KB: There’s a comment on the back by Carl Shapiro and his claim was that to write about the Holocaust you have to have the right credentials. And he says that William Heyen, even though he’s not Jewish, has the right credentials.
GS: What credentials does he have? Well, in his case, his relatives were Nazis.
KB: I guess that’s probably what Shapiro meant by “the right credentials,” at least in part…
GS: I guess that gives him the credentials. Bill Heyen’s poetry is a kind of penance he’s doing for the German people. It’s a very complicated matter. But you know to be a Jew in Poland, in Russia, in the twenties and thirties and forties was something that American Jews, unless they know about it, can’t quite understand let alone Americans. Jews were in parts of Poland, in parts of Romania—it wasn’t just a majority, some places were 100% Jewish. So the Jews were omnipresent. It was a cultural issue, and it was a very complicated thing, just to start talking about the Jews between 1920 and 1940 in Poland, you know.
I try to stay out of Germany. Melush is a wonderful man, wonderful poet, I think a better essayist than poet. I’ve been over there, in Europe a couple of times, I lived in Europe for about 4 or 5 years; I’ve been to Germany briefly, and I remember a couple of years ago, Charlie Williams…..he had a kind of a schtick, a job in Berlin, and he wanted to turn it over to me. You know, I excused myself, I said I don’t want to go to Berlin. And he had just written a beautiful essay, Charlie, about a letter to a friend, about Jews—he’s Jewish, a Jew in Germany. It’s a very complicated matter. A person your age, how old are you may I ask?
KB: Twenty-seven.
GS: So a person who’s twenty-seven and German, is that person a Nazi? Well, they speak German you know, I mean the forbidden language, and so on, I don’t want to get into it, you understand how complicated it is. There’s a guy I know who’s German, in his thirties, he’s a poet and critic, and scholar, and he did his PhD on me, and translated all my poetry—I’m sort of his mentor. I like him very much, and I’ve read his poems. It relieves a little bit of my anxiety about Germans, to read what he says.
KB: That makes me think of Celan and his troubles with his mother tongue…
GS: Sure. Celan was doomed to write in the language of the enemy, because he lived in a section of Romania—his family was from a section of Romania—where German was the lingua franca of the Jews. But it’s so hard again for Americans who don’t speak foreign languages to understand this. Alexander Watt spoke in eight or nine languages. He spoke perfect Russian, perfect Polish, perfect German, he spoke Yiddish, he spoke English, he spoke French. My grandmother did. So here is Celan, one of the great poets of the last century, and maybe the greatest German poet since Rilke, who’s family was wiped out, his country, his people were destroyed by the Germans, and having to write in their language. So sad of course. When you’re a poet you do what you have to do, you can’t control it. If you’re oriented that way, if political things obsess you, then you do that. And I have written a lot of poems that can be in one way or another related to it. Poems about war.
I never tried to, never set off to do it, I resisted it, I always prefer writing about a walk on the canal, about a turtle, or a frog, I like to write about carp, frogs and geese, but it always turns out to be about something else. So I’ve willy-nilly done that. And I’m embarrassed by terrible poems.
KB: Do you think that good poets today in the U.S. still have any political influence?
GS: No. They have none.
KB: Is that because …?
GS: The great poetry from eastern Europe, from behind the Iron Curtain it was called…when the Iron Curtain was pulled down, or whatever you do when you end an Iron Curtain, at that time you used to have a hundred thousand people come to a poetry reading. But now, very few people read poetry, or even think it is for them. This is the problem that’s put to us.