Galaxy love Poems

THE BEST EXPLANATION of why anyone would want to take up the lonely, unglamorous and generally ill-paid business of writing is voiced by Tom, the narrator of Tennessee Williams's story "The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin." Tom is a 12-year-old boy who is both jealous of his older sister's boyfriend and attracted to the boyfriend himself. From the heart of his predicament, Tom says, "And it was then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him." Theories about why writers write abound, pointing to every possible cause from trauma (Edmund Wilson's "The Wound and the Bow") to jealousy (Harold Bloom's "The Anxiety of Influence"). But most writers I know are simply people who put down their cereal bowl from time to time and look out the window and say to themselves something along the lines of, "Gee, I wonder how all this would look if I moved this here and put that there." That's how one best reads the poems of Gerald Stern. True, an author's note at the beginning of his "Early Collected Poems, 19651992" refers to his anger as a young man at the oppression of the working class and abuse of minorities as well as the death of a sister, Sylvia. But a Stern poem, then and now, is less a matter of catharsis and more one of shoving life's component parts around until a new structure emerges. That way of writing is going to create problems for some readers. Stern's technique is essentially one of what English professors call "defamiliarization," or presenting the familiar in an unfamiliar way so as to allow for a fresh perspective, and nonspecialists call "telling stories around a campfire." Either way, you end up often with a Cubist sort of view, and Cubism isn't for everyone. Add to that the fact that Stern is enormously prolific - those early poems alone amount to nearly 550 pages, where the entire collected work of his contemporary Jack Gilbert runs to fewer than 400 - and it's little wonder that Stern isn't identified with a single iconic poem like Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour" or James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" or Sylvia Plath's "Daddy." No, what you get instead from Stern is no single poem standing statuesque in the quad but energy, motion, appetite. Many of the early poems are built around propulsive lines, ones that begin "it is," "we will," "I want," "you should," over and over, but the poems in his latest book, "Galaxy Love," no longer do that. At this point in his life (Stern turned 92 in February), the poet has settled into a serenity reminiscent of his old master Whitman. The poem "Decades," for example, ends, "I loved to watch men working, I loved to sit / and eat with them, and see them smoke and listen / to them talk, they were my first prophets." Yet the appetite's still on duty. Thus there is in this new book a poem called "Ravenous," in which Stern traces the word back to its roots when he says, "I'm a hungry - and curious - raven." And there's a poem called "Gelato," in which a couple of young fans visit the poet to talk poetry, pausing to sample the creamy Italian treat of the title ("and since we were poets we went by the names, / instead of the tastes and colors"). It's safe to say that, no matter how his poems have changed over time, appetite for the world and all its riches is the driving force of Stern's career, from his earliest books through this one. THE POEM IN "GALAXY LOVE" that describes Stern's hunger best is his hymn of praise to, fittingly, Orson Welles, filmmaker and trencherman. "Orson" begins with a beautifully quintessential Sternian stanza that in its mix of passion, flippancy and scholarship is a snapshot of the poet's mind in action: Welles is a philosopher, Stern says, and even if he "doesn't really have a system / as Spinoza did or Anaxagorus, he / at least is consistent even if some of the things / he talks about are immensely unimportant / except to actors maybe or gossipmongers." This poem tells of a chance encounter with Welles in Paris during which the two men discuss favorite writers: just Dylan Thomas for the director but Stevens, Hopkins, Pound and Crane for the excitable poet. The poem ends with an early morning steak and potato dinner during which, presumably, Welles makes up for his second-place showing in the earlier conversation. In "Orson," Stern's eye rolls in a fine frenzy, glancing from heaven to earth and back again, but it does that in all his best poems. In "Galaxy Love," one of those is "KGB, The Reading," in which the poet describes the renowned KGB Bar on the Lower East Side, a no-nonsense groggery where many of the best as well as the most pretentious poets of the last 20-plus years have strutted the stage (such as it is), fortifying themselves with alcohol, gossiping about other poets, slipping next door for a plate of spaghetti, availing themselves of the inadequate toilets and generally reminding themselves that, in James Dickey's words, "poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe." For decades, and in every overcaffeinated and rumbustious line, Gerald Stern has been telling us that the best way to live is not so much for poetry but through poetry, and he underlines that idea here again in "Galaxy Love." I believe him. ? Stern at 92 hits settled into a serenity reminiscent of Whitman, but the old appetite is still on duty.

Prolific poet Stern, winner of such accolades as the National Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and the Robert Frost Medal, among others, sticks to form in this latest. Stern's speakers-mostly his celebratory, verbose, digressive self, in the Whitmanian tradition-look backward, as the eponymous poem clearly articulates in its opening lines: "There's too little time left to measure/ the space between us for that was/ long ago." The framing devices remain mostly in the past tense, as in "Dead Lamb" ("For some reason there was no more sea") and "Silence" ("I once planned a room for pure silence"). Verdict Although this book quickly follows In Beauty Bright, which might leave readers wondering how fresh these poems feel, these ultimately thoughtful narrative recollections from and about the poet himself should do well in most general poetry collections. [See Prepub Alert, 10/24/16.]-Stephen Morrow, Hilliard, OH © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.