The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Sun 7/27/2008)

[RetroLounge]

Click here to hear the poem read: http://www.slate.com/?id=21350

Larry Levis Visits Easton, Pa., During a November Freeze

I said, "Dear Larry," as I put down his book, Elegy,
across the street from the Home Energy Center
and its two embellished secular Christmas trees
and its two red wreaths over red ribbon crosses
enshrining a thirty inch stove in one of its windows
and a fifty gallon water heater in the other,
knowing how wise he would have been with the parking lot
and the tree that refused against all odds and all
sane agreements and codicils to let its dead leaves
for God's sake fall in some kind of trivial decency
and how he would have stopped with me always beside him
to watch a girl in a white fur parka and boots
build the first snowball on Northampton Street she collected
from the hood of a Ford Fairlane underneath that tree
and throw it she thought at a small speed limit sign
although it landed with a fluff just shy of the twin
painted center lines inducing the three of us,
her lover, Larry, and I to make our own snowballs
from the hoods and fenders of our own Fairlanes although
she threw like none of us and to add to it
she was left-handed, so bless her, may she have
a good job and children and always be free of cancer
and may the two of us scrape some roofs before the
rain relieves us, and may we find gloves for our labor.

Gerald Stern

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Gerald Stern was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1925. His recent books of poetry are Everything Is Burning (Norton, 2005); American Sonnets (2002); Last Blue: Poems (2000); This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), which won the National Book Award; Odd Mercy (1995); and Bread Without Sugar (1992), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize.

His other books include Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems (1990); Two Long Poems (1990); Lovesick (1987); Paradise Poems (1984); The Red Coal (1981), which received the Melville Caine Award from the Poetry Society of America; Lucky Life, the 1977 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and Rejoicings (1973).

About his work, the poet Toi Derricotte has said, "Gerald Stern has made an immense contribution to American poetry. His poems are not only great poems, memorable ones, but ones that get into your heart and stay there. Their lyrical ecstasies take you up for that moment so that your vision is changed, you are changed. The voice is intimate, someone unafraid to be imperfect. Gerald Stern’s poems sing in praise of the natural world, and in outrage of whatever is antihuman."

His honors include the Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Award, the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, the Ruth Lilly Prize, four National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Pennsylvania Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2005, Stern was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry.

Stern was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2006. For many years a teacher at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Stern now lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.


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:hi:

RL

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. My dear Retro!

Wow!

Here's a fearless poem!

I love it...

Thank you so much!

:hi:

[RetroLounge]

2. I love hearing the poet read his own work too...

glad you liked it.

:hi:

RL

[RetroLounge]

3. kick

:kick:

RL

[BlueIris]

4. Kick.