![]() ![]() His marriage to Patricia Miller ended in divorce. "I was able to let go and finally become myself and lose my shame and pride." ![]() "It also had to do with a realization that my protracted youth was over, that I wouldn't live forever, that death was not just a literary event but very real and very personal," he wrote in the essay "Some Secrets," published in 1983. He spent much of his 30s working on a poem about the American presidency, "The Pineys," but despaired that it was "indulgent" and "tedious." As he approached age 40, he worried that he had become "an eternally old student" and "eternally young instructor." Through his midlife crisis, he finally found his voice as a poet, discovering that he had been "taking an easier way" than he should have. Only during free moments in the Army, in which he served for a brief time after World War II, did he conceive the "sweet idea" of writing for a living. Stern lived in Europe and New York during the 1950s and eventually settled in a 19th century home near the Delaware River in Lambertville. Ezra Pound and W.B Yeats were among the first poets he read closely. Stern studied political science at the University of Pittsburgh and received a master's in comparative literature from Columbia University. 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, 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. Baraka refused to step down, so the state decided to no longer have a laureate. 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. After serving his two-year term, he recommended Amiri Baraka as his successor. Meanwhile, he was named New Jersey's first poet laureate, in 2000, and inadvertently helped bring about the position's speedy demise. 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." ![]() 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. He was past 50 before he won any major awards, but was cited often over the second half of his life. It is what I keep to myself what I return to There is water with a small cave behind it Winner of the National Book Award in 1998 for the anthology "This Time," the balding, round-eyed Stern was sometimes mistaken in person for Allen Ginsberg and often compared to Walt Whitman because of his lyrical and sensual style, and his gift for wedding the physical world to the greater cosmos. A statement from Macari, released Saturday by publisher WW Norton, didn't include the cause of death. Stern, New Jersey's first poet laureate, died Thursday at Calvary Hospice in New York City, according to his longtime partner, Anne Marie Macari. NEW YORK - Gerald Stern, 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, has died. Stern, 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, has died. Gerald Stern speaks to the audience during the National Book Awards in New York Wednesday, Nov. ![]()
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