What I Can't Bear Losing Notes from a Life

by Stern, Gerald

• ISBN13: 9780393058185
• ISBN10: 0393058182
• Edition: 00
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-11-17
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

In a series of freewheeling rambles that combine autobiography and meditation, Gerald Stern explores significant and representative events in his life. He describes the dour Sundays of Calvinist Pittsburgh, punctuated by his parents' weekly battles. We have glimpses of him as a wilderness camp counselor, and later, having been declared 4-F, as a postwar draftee (a stint that includes jail). In the 1950s he savors the romance of Paris. Stern also tells of being shot in Newark'”the bullet is still in his neck to prove it. Other scenes include being mistaken for Allen Ginsberg and encounters with Andy Warhol. And in the ineffably tender "The Ring," Stern recalls his mother's second engagement ring, "when they were a bit richer, if a bit broader and a bit more weary." As in his poetry, Stern discovers his subject as he goes along, relishing that discovery and expanding on it. There is no other voice like Gerald Stern's, funny and reflective and opinionated'”and forgiving.

Author Biography

Gerald Stern has written thirteen books of poetry, the most recent of which was American Sonnets: "Stern sonnets," of twenty or so lines rather than the traditional fourteen. This Time: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1998. Other collections include Last Blue, Odd Mercy, and Bread Without Sugar. Stern has received the Lamont Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, three NEA grants, a fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ruth Lilly Prize. Until his retirement in 1995, he taught at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa; he has also served on the faculty of Columbia University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of Pittsburgh

Table of Contents

Introduction	13	(17)
Sundays	17	(17)
The Beacon	34	(8)
Remorse	42	(11)
First Rites	53	(6)
Some Secrets	59	(15)
Hotel Du Centre	74	(9)
Vow of Silence	83	(13)
Paris Post	96	(8)
Blessed	104	(17)
The Sabbath	121	(14)
Bullet in My Neck	135	(13)
Ginsberg and I	148	(8)
Andy	156	(8)
Caves	164	(17)
Charity	181	(10)
Tree of Life	191	(12)
The Ring	203	(8)
Salesman	211	(20)
A Day Without the Jews	231	(19)
What I Have to Defend, What I Can't Bear Losing	250	(19)
Acknowledgments	269