https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gerald-stern
(profile)

https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/gerald-stern
(some articles by Stern)

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/30/1132653802/gerald-stern-prize-winning-and-lyrical-poet-dies-at-97

Associated Press in New York

First paragraphs:
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. He was 97.

Stern, New Jersey's first poet laureate, died Thursday at Calvary Hospice in New York City, according to his longtime partner, Anne Marie Macari. A statement from Macari, released Saturday by publisher WW Norton, didn't include the cause of death.

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.

Stern was shaped by the rough, urban surroundings of his native Pittsburgh, but he also identified strongly with nature and animals, marveling at the "power" of a maple tree, likening himself to a hummingbird or a squirrel, or finding the "secret of life" in a dead animal on the road.

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...

(snip)

https://poetryarchive.org/poet/gerald-stern/
(not sure what year this was written - possibly post-2006)

Son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Gerald Stern grew up in Pittsburgh, in a house with no books. It wasn’t as if being a writer was discouraged, he says, it just wasn’t considered something that anyone in his family would aspire to become. The death of his sister Sylvia, when he was eight years old, and the inability of his family to openly acknowledge their grief, led him to turn later to the written word as a means of self-expression.

Of his college education, Stern says: “I went to the University of Pittsburgh, but I didn’t even know as a boy where the university was. I discovered it literally by accident. I saw some people lined up on the lawn outside the university registering for courses, and it was the War, and anybody could get into college. And I decided, ‘Hey, I’ll take classes!’ And I became a college student. No one ever advised me. No one at home ever talked to me about college.” Although he started writing poetry in college Stern didn’t know any other poets, had no mentor, so did not consider sending his work away for publication. In 1951, he became an English teacher and taught in schools and universities for almost twenty years before he began regularly writing poems. Since then, he says he has been “practically besieged by poems”. He published his first collection, The Pineys, in 1971, and has gone on to produce a further fourteen collections, and several books of essays.

Stern’s Jewish heritage enables him to write from a very distinct viewpoint. His America is a surreal place, alive with biblical intensity and shaded by themes of Judaic loss, and his tone – sometimes chatty, sometimes streetwise – takes the reader into a landscape where grandeur combines strangely with the everyday. As Hayden Carruth has said: “It is extremely difficult to bring off the kind of poem Stern writes, doomsday among the tricycles and kittens.” Stern himself has said that he rarely thinks of himself as a Jewish poet, yet is quite open to the idea that his poems might be construed as Jewish in nature...

(snip)