The Man Who Saved My Life
For National Poetry Month, TFP revisits my 2022 tribute to my teacher Gerald Stern. Others knew him as “one of the country's most loved and respected poets.” I knew him as the man who saved my life.
By Michael Judge
“It happens to the best of us.” That’s what Gerald Stern would have said upon news of his own death, if, somehow, miraculously, he had outlived himself.
And, like all great poets, he has.
Jerry, as he was known to his family, friends, and students—including me—died last Thursday at the age of 97. I keep looking at that word died in disbelief. It’s hard to associate the word with Jerry, a man who described himself and his work as “part comedic, part idealistic, colored in irony, smeared with mockery and sarcasm,” and whose poems and essays are so alive you can imagine sharing a beer or a pastrami sandwich with them.
Born in 1925 in Pittsburgh—“beautiful filthy Pittsburgh,” as he calls it in his 19-line masterpiece “The Dancing”—to immigrant parents, a father from Ukraine and a mother from Poland, Jerry published 20 collections of poetry and four books of essays, receiving nearly every award possible for a poet, including the National Book Award in 1998 for “This Time: New and Selected Poems,” and in 2005 the Wallace Stevens Award for a lifetime of outstanding artistic achievement.
In a recent obituary, the AP described Jerry as “one of the country’s most loved and respected poets who wrote with spirited melancholy and earthly humor about his childhood, Judaism, mortality and the wonders of the contemplative life.” He was all that and more. In a workshop I had with him in the early ’90s, he said of the poet Alan Dugan, “He held nothing sacred. That’s what made him holy.” The same held true for Jerry. He’s been described as “Whitmanesque,” “an American original,” “a sometimes comic, sometimes tragic visionary.” His good friend, poet Stanley Kunitz, famously described him as “the wilderness in American poetry.”
But I will always remember him, and hold him dear, for one simple reason: He saved my life. That’s not hyperbole or romanticism. It’s a fact, and one I wish I had shared with him in the more than 30 years that I knew him. He never knew he saved my life—well, who knows, maybe he did—but it happened back in the winter of 1989, when he included my name on a list of 12 young poets he had accepted in an undergraduate workshop at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Like Auden said of Yeats, Jerry was “silly like us.” Perhaps the greatest lesson he taught us young poets—who often took ourselves and our little poems far too seriously—was to lighten up, feel the music in language and life, enjoy the ride.
Just 23 at the time, I had dropped out of the University of Iowa the year before to travel, write poetry, and get my head screwed on straight, as the saying goes. My two oldest brothers, Steve and John—the great heroes of my childhood—had been diagnosed with schizophrenia just a few years earlier, shattering our family.
John, a football star and outdoorsman, had taken his own life when I was a sophomore in high school. Steve, a former cadet at the Air Force Academy, was in and out of hospitals and institutions, saving his own life every day while suffering from psychosis and delusions, including voices telling him that he must stab himself in the heart to “let the bad spirits out” and join his brother John in heaven.
It was in this environment that I found school utterly useless. Except for one subject: Poetry. An Intro-to-Lit class, taught by a young poet in the Workshop named Jeff Likes, turned me on to Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, W.S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, and a host of contemporary poets like Denis Johnson, Louise Glück, Larry Levis, Marvin Bell, Jorie Graham, James Galvin, and Gerald Stern. I read Hardy’s “Hap” and caught fire. It was as if he was not just speaking to me; he was me, when he wrote:
If but some vengeful god would call to me From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!” . . . But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? —Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
My pilgrimage had taken me as far away from academia as possible, to Keflavik, Iceland, where I worked in a fishery in the summer of 1988 and wrote poem after poem in a tiny basement apartment. That fall I used my savings to fly to London where I worked as a bartender and continued to write poems. When I returned to the University of Iowa I had a slender manuscript of poetry, but little confidence.
A friend of mine (thanks, Tommy) forced me to submit a handful of poems I’d shared with him, literally driving me to the bunker-like English-Philosophy Building and waiting until I returned without them. About a week later, I returned to the EPB with sweaty palms. I’ll never forget the mixture of disbelief, euphoria, and confirmation I felt when I saw my name, neatly typewritten, on the list of students accepted into Gerald Stern’s Undergraduate Poetry Workshop.
“I guess I’m not crazy,” I said to myself, because I really wasn’t sure back then. At 21, I had devoted myself entirely to writing poems—and in the writing of them had found a way to continue, a way to take in the world with all its horror and grandeur and write it into rhythm, music, form, meaning. With poetry I had found what I needed most—form, ritual, tradition; a community of poets living and dead, all who, as Whitman wrote, “suffered” because they were “there.”
Jerry’s confirmation was a door opening on a great tradition dating back to Ancient Mesopotamia and “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” to Ancient Greece and Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey.” To borrow from Hardy, it wasn’t a vengeful god calling to me from the sky, but the opposite—a living, breathing poet singing of our common suffering, our common joys and foibles, right here among us.
My name on that list was the beginning of a long mentorship with Jerry, who, in his mid-60s then, played the roles of critic, clown, rabbi, and comedian with ease. One of the first poems I had workshopped in his class was called “Crow Dream,” and it ended with a superfluous line like, “And then I woke up.” As soon as I was done reading, Jerry burst into the old Johnny Mercer standard, “Dream (When You’re Feeling Blue)” singing the entire lyric.
Like Auden said of Yeats, Jerry was “silly like us.” Perhaps the greatest lesson he taught us young poets—who often took ourselves and our little poems far too seriously—was to lighten up, feel the music in language and life, enjoy the ride. He liked to climb on the library table in the center of the classroom and dance. Once, when I told him to get down because, wiseass that I was, he might “break his hip,” he barked back, “Fuck off, Judge!” and continued his soft-shoe, with a wild grin. Another time, when we were reading Frederico García Lorca, whom he admired greatly, he said, “Lorca was a fabulous poet until the FF got him.” When we asked who or what the FF was, he shouted, “The Fucking Fascists!”
Jerry’s sense of humor was equaled by his sense of social justice. As he wrote in his 2004 book of essays, “What I Can’t Bear Losing,” growing up in Pittsburgh “the ‘natural’ sentiment for me and my friends, was for the left, and the left then meant two things only: a pro-labor stance and an anti-fascist stance. Our position was rather dreamlike and sentimental. We hated the bosses, whom we never saw, and we loved the workers, whose children, if we were Jewish, often treated us with contempt, hatred, and violence.
Jerry’s sense of humor was equaled by his sense of social justice. As he wrote in his 2003 book of essays, “What I Can’t Bear Losing,” growing up in Pittsburgh “the ‘natural’ sentiment for me and my friends, was for the left, and the left then meant two things only: a pro-labor stance and an anti-fascist stance. Our position was rather dreamlike and sentimental. We hated the bosses, whom we never saw, and we loved the workers, whose children, if we were Jewish, often treated us with contempt, hatred, and violence. I understood the nature of state barbarity and institutionalized Jew-baiting when I was eight, and I knew some songs from the Lincoln Brigade when I was fifteen. I made a kind of package out of my belief in justice, my unspeakable naïveté, and my hope for perfection.”
In all, I had three workshops with Jerry, one as an undergraduate and two as a graduate student. He called his students “his lovelies” and eventually, tired of the oppressive brick walls and fluorescent lighting of the EPB, held class at his home where we were free to drink wine or beer, smoke on the lovely front porch, or eat the snacks he provided for us, usually a meat-and-cheese plate.
One afternoon, my friend Aaron Anstett and I showed up early for class so we could sit on Jerry’s porch and drink a few beers before it began. A few minutes later we heard Jerry whistling and singing toward us on the sidewalk, welcoming us with “My lovelies! My lovelies! I’m so happy you’re here!” He then asked us to come inside and help him record a message on his new answering machine—the perfect opportunity for more silliness and shenanigans: “This is Jerry Stern. Please… please… help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” “This is Jerry Stern. Please fuck off.” “This is, uh, Jerry, uh, Stern … leave a fucking message!” It went on like that for at least 20 minutes, Jerry recording hilarious messages and shouting full-throated profanities, and all three of us laughing hysterically.
I only saw Jerry lose his temper once. It was over a line a young poet had written that went something like, and I’m paraphrasing here, “the wrathful God of the Old Testament, not the forgiving God of the New Testament.” Jerry couldn’t contain himself. He saw in the ignorance of that line, I believe now, the very foundations of antisemitism and the horrific violence it unleashes. I can’t remember his words, only his anger and the blood that rose to his face, and the student’s tears.
As NPR wrote recently, Jerry was “a lifelong agnostic who also fiercely believed in ‘the idea of the Jew.’” As he wrote in “What I Can’t Bear Losing,” “Maybe ‘Jew’ is my class, and that should be stamped in my passport, as in Mother Russia, although I am as unforgiving of that community—my community—as I am of the others, in its own bigotry, shortsightedness, betrayals, and spiritual forgetfulness. I think what I have to defend, what I can’t bear losing, is either contained or symbolized, in a significant way, in that idea.”
I recently learned, though I may have known and forgotten, that Jerry too lost an older sibling at a young age. When he was 8, he lost his sister Sylvia, just 9, to spinal meningitis. “Sylvia in a way was my muse,” he said in the 2009 short film, “Gerald Stern: Still Burning,” made in association with the Poetry Foundation. “In a way her death became the motif and the stimulating force—that sense of loss.”
The same could be said of my own poetry, and the loss of my older brother John when I was 16. Perhaps that’s what Jerry felt in my poems at the tender age of 23, “that sense of loss.” Perhaps that’s what we feel in all poetry, our fleetingness, and the permanence of the word written and spoken and sung among it. No matter the reason, I’m eternally grateful. And I’d like to end this piece with Jerry’s poem for his sister, from his 2005 collection “Everything Is Burning”:
Sylvia
Across a space peopled with stars I am
laughing while my sides ache for existence
it turns out is profound though the profound
because of time it turns out is an illusion
and all of this is infinitely improbable
given the space, for which I gratefully lie
in three feet of snow making a shallow grave
I would have called an angel otherwise and
think of my own rapturous escape from
living only as dust and dirt, little sister.
Oh, Michael, thanks for adding to my continuing education!!! so appreciate your personal sharing. Please give my regards to your mom.
Wonderful tribute! You did make him alive again. Thank you.