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.

Gerald Daniel Stern (Feb. 22, 1925 - Oct. 27, 2022) Photograph ©Mark Ludak 2022

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 pos…