A lifelong agnostic who also fiercely believed in “the idea of the Jew,” the poet wrote more than a dozen books and described himself as “part comedic, part idealistic, colored in irony, smeared with mockery and sarcasm.” In poems and essays, he wrote with special intensity about the past — his immigrant parents, long-lost friends and lovers, and the striking divisions between rich and poor and Jews and non-Jews in Pittsburgh. He regarded “The One Thing in Life,” from the 1977 collection “Lucky Life,” as the poem that best defined him.
There is a sweetness buried in my mind
there is water with a small cave behind it
there’s a mouth speaking Greek
It is what I keep to myself; what I return to;
the one thing that no one else wanted
He was past 50 before he won any major awards, but was cited often over the second half of his life. Besides his National Book Award, his honors included being a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1991 for “Leaving Another Kingdom” and receiving such lifetime achievement awards as 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” and praised him as “one of America’s great poet-proclaimers in the Whitmanic tradition: With moments of humor and whimsy, and an enduring generosity, his work celebrates the mythologizing power of the art.”
Meanwhile, he was named New Jersey’s first poet laureate, in 2000, and inadvertently helped bring about the position’s speedy demise. After serving his two-year term, he recommended Amiri Baraka as his successor. Baraka would set off a fierce outcry with his 2002 poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” which alleged that Israel had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks the year before. Baraka refused to step down, so the state decided to no longer have a laureate.
Stern, born in 1925, remembered no major literary influences as a child, but did speak of the lasting trauma of the death of his older sister, Sylvia, when he was 8. He would describe himself as “a thug who hung out in pool halls and got into fights.” But, he told The New York Times in 1999, he was a well-read thug who excelled in college. Stern studied political science at the University of Pittsburgh and received a master’s in comparative literature from Columbia University. Ezra Pound and W.B Yeats were among the first poets he read closely.