Gerald Stern (1925-2022) wrote poetry known for its lyricism and sensuality, and the way it wedded the physical world to the greater cosmos. Stern, who identified strongly with nature and animals and was a longtime political activist, wrote more than a dozen books and his poems often spoke about his immigrant parents, long-lost friends and lovers, and the striking divisions between rich and poor and Jews and non-Jews in his native Pittsburgh. He regarded “The One Thing in Life,” from the 1977 collection Lucky Life, as the poem that best defined him. He was in residence in 2011. Stern studied political science at the University of Pittsburgh and received a master’s in comparative literature from Columbia University. His creative development came slowly. Only during free moments in the Army, in which he served for a brief time, did he conceive the idea of writing for a living. Then, once approaching age 40, he finally found his voice as a poet. He was past 50 before he won any major awards, but was cited often over the second half of his life. His accolades include a 1998 National Book Award, being a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1991, being New Jersey’s first Poet Laureate, and receiving the Ruth Lilly Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2013, the Library of Congress gave him the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Early Collected Poems. He also authored Save the Last Dance (Norton). At MacDowell, Stern worked on a long prose book that is a kind of diary of the mind.
Gerald Stern
Studios
Monday Music
Gerald Stern worked in the Monday Music studio.
Given to the residency by the Monday Music Club of Orange, NJ, Monday Music Studio is sited next to an enormous boulder deposited by glaciers thousands of years ago. A small dormer once pierced the east slope of the roof, but after damage suffered in the 1938 hurricane, the roof was rebuilt without the dormer. The interior…