Steerage, by Bert Stern

Steerage, by Bert Stern,published by Ibbetson Press 2009 http://ibbetsonpress.com
Review by Anne Brudevold

Bert Stern’s, Steerage, like a good wine or violin, is best savored, sipped, tried out and conversed with as you experience it, for a long time. Few authors invoke that involvement—the conversational mode. Stern is one. You are on the page with each speaker, dispassionately looking life right in the eye from different points of view. Stern takes on the world, and the world answers back, in infinitely engaging moods and plain, evocative language, often near-rhymed. “As I cross the yard,/ rope scrap hanging /from maple limb/hootchy-kootches/ in the wind,” (Country Cow)


Stern is not intrusive. He’s the fly on the wall.

Didn’t want to be born, this child,
herself back, upside down, Aunty
could not get her turned, afraid, mother
screaming, did God know what He was doing,
was this to be chosen, crying out
under leaden skies among enemies,
without meat, making soup from barley
and bad potatoes, maybe a shank bone?
For this the muzhiks had spared her,
God in his eye. (Lotty is born)


His transparency strengthens the images he evokes. His graphic description of experiences of his ancestors during and since their emigration, and their experiences in the New World is so involving that I found myself muttering as I read, and my friends saying, “What? Oh, you’re talking with Bert.”


His language is plain. Especially in Part 1: Changing Places the many inversions give a Jewish or foreign cast to some of the poems. “A gold star we embroidered/ on black to lay over the coffin/bright star, to shine under the dirt.(Hannah remembers) The language becomes more American in the second part, but echoes of inversions and accents remain. Part 2: Spring and Fall “Always a white-throated sparrow/singing on a mountain top, and somebody/there listening to it for the first time.” (White Throated Sparrow)The progression of language characterizes the speaker, first invoking the steerage of the boat, then settling in the new country.


Stern, as well as being a large-scale poet recording the historical generations of emigrants, is a master of the pithy statement. “No, make the heart/ walk the streets with a rice bowl/.”

Many times he walks the line between death and life, tragedy and humor, as in Last Things
Summer ended. We packed up, we packed it in.
Tomorrow might have been another day, but now, not.
We packed the room in in, and stashed it in a matchox.
She said, there’s nothing much to do
with the sea wind ruffling the curtains
I said, leave the clouds alone, they belong here.
Back and forth about the sky and weather.
What shall we do with the children?’Not pack them off to camp, but pack them into boxes
like machine gun slugs…..


This chapbook sticks close to its theme; the effect is somewhat novelistic and can be compared to Dickens, close observation combined with descriptions of social conditions and change.

The central metaphor, steerage, is presented as individual poems, but I experienced it as a long poem cycle It is a handsome book with plain, elegant front and back covers by Joan Braun. The poems might represent the bottom hull boards of the ship where the immigrants were herded for the long voyage overseas, and the hard conditions that prevailed once (and if) they survived. They speak to the plain, the hard and the human. On another level, the metaphor speaks to steering through different ages and stages of life. In Parts 3: How Re Katzman got to Heaven, Part 4,Last things, Part 5: Wait, and Afterword, a religiosity beyond specific doctrine calls on Biblical references, stories of Jacob, Abraham killing his son, Jewish food and customs, on how a pretty dirty man got to heaven, and ponders the death of others and his own to come.
“Steer me, steer me, flutters from us
board me and steer me, for I’m adrift
in my life…

This rich chapbook can take you far and near. So many layers. Get Steerage it and let it steer you a while.


“Hannah Remembers”

But my mother was under earth.
They had washed and wrapped her
in linen, white, without knots,
so when the time came, Messiah
could unwrap her and sweep her naked
back into the light.


Steerage
Six apples my mother bought on the pier and wrapped in her shawl with things we’d need every day.
The things we didn’t—three linen napkins, a handful of silver spoons my mother got from her mother
when she married---these we kept in a hamper with handles we’d schlepped up the steep plank.
Steerage stank, even before we went down iron stairs with no railing. Babies were crying.


** Anne Brudevold is the founder of the Eden Water Press. She is the editor of the "Home Journal Anthology"

Steerage by Bert Stern / Review by Hugh Fox

Steerage by Bert Stern
Ibbetson Street Press
25 School St.
Somerville, Ma. 02143
$15
http://ibbetsonpress.com


Order: Amazon.com: Go to: http://tinyurl.com/no8dhz




Review by Hugh Fox


A vital part of the Somerville-Boston literary scene, on the surface Stern’s work just seems like part of the usual poetry game of taking daily reality and turning it into post-modern puzzles: “This morning, otherwise idle,/I stir milk into sunlight./At once, the maple leaves/seem to come from another planet/though they sigh to me as before,/roused by wind and as real as my fingers.” (“Wings,” p.30).

But don’t be fooled, the word-reality games are just part of the much larger world view. Stern is a twentieth century Jew who is torn between contemporary secularism and reformed Judaism that is light, practical and easy-going, and ancient Judaism that dominated and controlled the totality of life, from which nothing escaped. Part of him longs to go back to ancient times and turn his life into all-inclusive sacredness and discipline. I even suspect that the whole last section of Steerage about Jacob is a kind of re-working of the story of Jacob in the bible:

“Jacob was holding her and she felt like fire./Death stood to the side, embarrassed./The girl hugged Jacob with her week arms./She said now. She said this. The girl said this/now was always as it is now.....//God is sleeping but He is coming./Now./Wait./Remember a leaf....Say how the stars live,burning./How the stony icicles of this grotto live,/drip, drip, as if breathing. “ (p.88).

Not the whole Jacob story, but always the sense of The Divine off in the background, waiting to return. As Roger Mitchell points out in his introduction to Steerage, there is a constant awareness in Stern’s mind of the paradoxically absence-presence of his ancient Jewish heritage, and he quotes the end of “Blackberries,” which I see as the key that opens Stern’s whole complex world-view:

"...I smell my elders almost benignaround me, and I eat the berries they send forth as seed. (p.36)

I mean here we are in a secularized, cyberneticized world that all but ignores not just scripture but whole lost ways of daily life, ways of life that forced us into vivid perceptions of the reality that surrounds us, not abstract but very much an almost buddhistic sense of total Nowness.Testament is full of memories of the past that are keys to opening up the perception of the present. It’s a meditative exercise in scriptural perception that opens up to the voices of the much too ignored past that keeps the Now from turning into the Eden that it should be:

"Words redden the skin of things,he sang to the wren at the door,I soothe them with silence I gatheruntil prayer cries out from my bones.But words buzz like flies in swarms,Oy, Adonai, strike down these burning angelsthat guard Eden’s gate(“How Reb Ketzman Got to Heaven,”) p. 43

**************************************************************************************


*Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932. He spent his childhood studying violin, piano, composition and opera with his Viennese teacher Zerlina Muhlman Metzger. He received a M.A. degree in English from Loyola University in Chicago and his Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He met his first wife, a Peruvian woman named Lucia Ungaro de Zevallos, while at Urbana-Campaign and was a Professor of American Literature from 1958-1968 at Loyola University in Los Angeles. He became a Professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University in 1968 and remained there until he retired in 1999. It was at MSU that he met his second wife Nona Grimes. They were married in 1970. He received Fulbright Professsorships at the University of Hermosillo in Mexico in 1961, the Instituto Pedagogico and Universidad Católica in Caracas from 1964 to 1966, and at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil from 1978-1980. He met his third wife Maria Bernadete Costa in Brazil in 1978. They've been married for 28 years. He studied Latin American literature at the University of Buenos Aires on and OAS grant and spent a year as an archaeologist in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 1986.

Bert Stern's "Steerage " A classic poetry collection with a classic theme!

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Review by Miriam Levine:

Bert Stern
Steerage, paper, 93 pages
Ibbetson Street Press

BURNING STARS, JADE SILK, CAMARROS

We’ve heard a lot about American individualism; and, in American literature, about writers like Melville, who have what one critic has called, the voice of “the imperial self,”: majestic, heroic, grand. In “Walden,” Thoreau, though a less imperial writer than Melville, still creates a narrator who lives heroically alone in his tiny cabin in the woods and sees few people. He’s a man without family. In actual life, Thoreau walked daily to Concord village to see his mother. In contrast Bert Stern writes about his deep connection to the living and dead. He sheds his ego and takes on the voices of his ancestors who immigrated to America from Eastern Europe. Though him, we hear his dead mother’s account of the voyage. The family is out to sea; order falls apart; the family loses its center. Sailing in limbo, his mother says, “Nobody talked. We could not look at the sea or the dead sky/ above us. We hung between these. We would be here always.”




In “Lotty is Born” Stern bears the weight of generations: “All suffered to bring me here to this room/ where I write, bigger than the house/ my mother was born in.” Beautifully, in fluid lines, he registers a dissolving self: “I am somebody’s dream . . . let them tell me if they can/ if I am recompense for what they endured.”




A descendent of those who in steerage endured the stink of “of seawater and piss, animals and human sweat,” Stern brings his ancestors into the light. His mother says, “my spirit was waiting for me, dancing on the shore.” The spirit is feminine, like the Shekinah: the principle of immanence, the divine showing itself. I’ve heard the Shekinah described metaphorically as a single green leaf that keeps falling to earth but is never seen to land. Stern refers to the Shekinah in “Hannah Remembers,” notable for its sense of shining, never-ending time: “Evenings that went on forever/ still unfolding.” In “Driving Home from Elizabethtown” the poet is gathered into transcendent light:



. . . I am ready to fall
with the turnings of poplar
and oak. Through the windshield
even the thin rain that takes on
gold light from the sun in its falling
is fuel for the burning.



Stern’s “Wait,” the long poem, which comprises part five of “Steerage,” is a triumph, sweet and mysterious. The Shekinah takes the form of a dying girl who lives inside the man Stern calls “Jacob.” “He called out to her as one might/ throw a flower at a star.” The girl keeps falling, imperiled, but she comes back to life: “she’s close as your skin, still humming her tune.” Stern gives the girl a voice: “She said this. The girl said this now was always as it is now.” Nothing is lost. Time is eternal. The poem ends by connecting a tender earthly image—“the turnip’s sweet spheroid,/ its little tail”—with an image of fire and living water: burning stars and icicles dripping as if they were “breathing.”


Besides water-fire-falling-burning poems in which Stern invokes a self’s dissolving in radiant never-ending time, there are poems about closely observed everyday life. (I prefer the spirit-Shekinah and daily-life poems to the fable poems, “What the Teller Knows” and “Early autumn in the Mountains,” which seem unreal to me.) Stern writes about his neighbor, Kenny, a Vietnam war veteran; he watches him capably “sizing boards with a handsaw,/ setting them snug.” But at night, in his dreams, he keeps shooting at a girl who is “hardly a shadow.” He describes Kenny’ son, “washing his car,/ a black Camarro/ with V8 engine,” and the everyday of American life with its skateboards and televisions playing all night in store windows.


“Tea,” which I’ll quote in its entirety, demonstrates the lyrical beauty of Stern’s poems. Here, the feminine appears as a muse. “Tea” is also a love poem that recognizes the separateness of the beloved:


That clear song—
was it you while I slept,
slipping down in your jade
silk to feed the stove
with pine and drink your tea
alone, at down, as you like to do?


Stern could be describing his own clear song: tender, lyrical, beautifully phrased.

*Miriam Levine's most recent book is The Dark Opens, winner of the 2007 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is the author of In Paterson, a novel, Devotion: A Memoir, three poetry collections, and A Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among many other places. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship and grants from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, she was a fellow at Yaddo, Hawthornden Castle, Le Château de Lavigny, Villa Montalvo, Fundación Valparaíso, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Prologue: A Poem ( From Bert Stern's poetry collection "Steerage")

PROLOGUE: A LITTLE POEM

Oy, Gott, send me a little poem,
you’ll never miss it.
Sweet gottenyu!
You know how I could use it.
Not Paradise Lost or the book of Job I’m asking,
only something normal,
a little poem proper to me.

I want voices of things chattering in it
like it has rolled around with the earth a while.
Let it smell of something,
smoked fish, a woman’s skin,
a gedile mid grivn,
red wine under the nose
just before you drink.

Did I ask to hear the earth thumping in it,
like on the third day?
Or for peace, happiness, justice,
the wicked withering away?

No, a little poem only,
to watch water flowing through rocks,
fishes still in the current,
geese flying over,
noisy, like children.

Bert Stern: To publish his poetry collection "Steerage" with the Ibbetson Street Press.

I am proud to announce poet Bert Stern will be publishing his poetry collection "Steerage" with the Ibbetson Street Press. Bert is a Somerville poet, a Bagel Bard, among other things. A poem from this collection was published in a recent issue of the American Poetry Review. Bert has been published widely over the years and is a Wallace Stevens scholar. See below for more information about Stern and his upcoming book.




Born in Buffalo, New York in 1930. Bert Stern was was educated at the University of Buffalo, Columbia, and at Indiana University, where he earned his Ph.D. in English.

Stern taught for forty years at Wabash College, where he is now Milligan Professor of English, Emeritus. He also taught from 1965-67 at the University of Thessalonica and from 1984-85 at Peking University. He presently teaches in the Changing Lives Through Literature program.

His poems have been published in New Letters, The American Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Poetry, Spoon River Poetry Review, among others, and in a number of anthologies. His chapbook, Silk/The Ragpicker's Grandson, was published by Red Dust in 1998. His essays and reviews have appeared in Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Modern Language Review, The New Republic, Southern Review, Columbia Teachers’ College Record, Adirondack Life, and in a number of anthologies. His critical study, Wallace Stevens: Art of Uncertainty, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1965.



Advance Blurbs for Steerage:

This is the voice of a wondrously common man. By common, I mean generous, inclusive, and able to dance, at times alone if necessary, with God and with life. Heart, and the words thereof, require expansive courage that can regard both death and immeasurable sorrow without dread. The poems in Steerage, whether they are sensuously peasantlike and ethnic, or contemplative and spare, are crafted like indestructible carpentry.


-----Frannie Lindsay



I am somebody's dream," writes Bert Stern, thinking of his immigrant ancestors and of his debts to them "for what they dared and endured." Steerage settles those debts, but that isn't all it does: Stern's great gift is his ability to lighten family history by knitting it into the larger tissue of the life we all have in common. From the heaviness of history, these poems take flight.

------ Lewis Hyde




Like all true art, this book leaves us better prepared to lay it aside and look for ourselves out that wondrous window it opens for us.

-------Taylor Stoehr


For Bert Stern, the poem is an amazing elixir, its secret ingredient brings back the dead, slows time or steps out of it completely. One drinks it to enter myth, fable, memory, and before that, what makes memory: crossing great waters by boat, sharing supper with the one you love, losing everything, watching fish and geese, remembering the smallest treasure--”the turnip's sweet spheroid, its little tail.” These poems hold forth and hang back. They trouble and soothe, open and grow large, grow odd. “I was spirit, stunned. Nobody said/come into the world,” Stern writes, “I was woven.”

------- Marianne Boruch





Steerage


from Roger Mitchell’s Preface

Steerage, in which class Stern’s parents came across to the United States, is where this remarkable book of poems starts, with such memory as Stern can piece together, or imagine, of what brought his ancestors, driven out of Russia by pogrom, to a life in Buffalo. All suffered to bring me here to this room where I write, bigger than the house my mother was born in. “I am somebody’s dream. Let them/ tell me if they can . . . if I am recompense for what they endured.”

“Steerage” also plays on the verb, to steer, to guide. This is the defining act of
these poems. In the long absence of those who “suffered to bring me here,” late in
life, with death almost a friendly companion, the poet moves gingerly but expert-
ly between his fears and longings, between then and now.

“Myself,” he says in
“Blackberries,” “I don’t go back much further / than last Tuesday’s two a.m.,
but I smell my elders almost benign
around me, and I eat the berries
they send forth as seed."