Prize-winning poet Gerald Stern dead at 97

NEW YORK — Gerald Stern, a prize-winning poet and New Jersey’s first poet laureate, died Thursday. He was 97.

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Stern died at Calvary Hospice in New York City, his longtime partner, Anne Marie Macari said, according to The New York Times. A statement from Macari, released Saturday by publisher WW Norton, did not include the cause of death.

Stern won the National Book Award for poetry in 1998 for “This Time: New and Selected Poems,” according to the newspaper. He published his first poem, “The Pineys,” in The Journal of the Rutgers University Library in 1969, when he was 44, the Times reported. His first collection, “Rejoicings,” was published four years later.

“I describe myself as a mule, they used to blind them,” Stern told NJ.com in a 2012 interview. “I am a mule who goes in a circle -- only I don’t grind corn, I write poems.”

Stern was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his poem “Leaving Another Kingdom,” according to The Associated Press. He also received a pair of lifetime achievement awards with the Ruth Lilly Prize in 1996 and the Wallace Stevens Award in 2005.

In 1977, Stern’s second collection, “Lucky Life” was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award as the year’s best poetry book, according to the Times.

In 2013, Stern was awarded the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for “Early Collected Poems,” the AP reported.

Stern was born on Feb. 22, 1925, in Pittsburgh. His parents were Jewish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. in 1905. His father came from Ukraine and his mother was born in Poland, according to the Times.

Stern graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School in 1942 and enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh. After a two-year stint in the military, Stern resumed his college career, the newspaper reported. He earned his bachelor’s degree in political science at Pitt in 1947 and a master’s degree in English at Columbia University in 1949.

He loved poetry while growing up.

“I just adored Dylan Thomas. I used to meet every night with two of my friends,” Stern told NJ.com. “We thought we were the only three people in Pittsburgh writing poetry.”

A lifelong agnostic who believed in “the idea of the Jew,” Stern wrote more than a dozen books and described himself as “part comedic, part idealistic, colored in irony, smeared with mockery and sarcasm,” according to the AP.

He was named New Jersey’s first poet laureate in 2000.

Stern told NJ.com that his advice for aspiring poets was simple.

“To read until they go blind and not to rush into print, and to realize that every act of theirs goes into the poem and the poem is not just an exercise in linguistics but an exercise in life,” he said.

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