Gerald Stern (1925), Amerikaans dichter en essayist, schreef een fraai gedicht over #Spinoza

Hij is een werkelijk groot en breed gekende dichter van zo’n twintig dichtbundels en zeker vier essaybundels. Stern doceerde literatuur en creatief schijven aan verschillende universiteiten en ontving meerdere prestigieuze prijzen. De dichter Toi Derricotte zei over zijn werk: “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.” [cf. poets.org]

Het tijdschrift Poetry van aug. 1984 had van hem het gedicht “Of Blessed Name” [van hier: poetry foundation]

        OF BLESSED NAME

Here in this huge dining room
with its crimson and gold-flocked wallpaper
and its etched glass and nude paintings and brass trimmings
I think of Spinoza sitting at his own table,
practicing what he believed in,
the good days.

And over there in the fish tank
with the pipe of white oxygen
going in and out of the lobster's last redoubt
I think of the red salmon and the pink flounder
as a backdrop to his thought.

Water was his main element.
Only then could God be understood
in all his modes.
The salmon loved him for this;
the lobster in all his fury grudgingly acknowledged his genius.

He dragged God into everything.
It give him his distance.
It made him dream and figure twenty-four hours a day.

It kept the world at bay,
the carp going over and under
the bamboo bridge,
the mussels in white gravel,
the living grasses.
It kept it wonderful and flowing.

No one was ever more pure
or logical.
Even the crab loved him,
the bow-legged crab,
eternal enemy of the lobster.

I think of him here in Florida
under the boring chandelier,
a thousand little glass tassels going this way and that,
a carpet to keep him warm,
a fish tank to amuse him;

and I save him for the shameful end,
his lungs half filled with glass,
his body weak with fever,
carefully sealing a letter,
wisely adding a word here and there,
saying something terrifying,
saying something perfect and good and exact
as always.

                                   Gerald Stern

 

David Kirby op 25 aug. 2017 in de New York Times over Stern’s laatste bundel "GALAXY LOVE": "A New Poetry Collection Proves Gerald Stern Is Still Hungry at 92". Daarin deze alinea:

The poem in “Galaxy Love” that describes Stern’s hunger best is his hymn of praise to, fittingly, Orson Welles, filmmaker and trencherman. “Orson” begins with a beautifully quintessential Sternian stanza that in its mix of passion, flippancy and scholarship is a snapshot of the poet’s mind in action: Welles is a philosopher, Stern says, and even if he “doesn’t really have a system / as Spinoza did or Anaxagorus, he / at least is consistent even if some of the things / he talks about are immensely unimportant / except to actors maybe or gossipmongers.”

In een volgend blog laat ik zien dat Gerald Stern studie van Spinoza maakte.
Hier leest hij zijn gedicht 'The One Thing in Life'.

“If I could choose one poem of mine to explain my stance,” Stern told Contemporary Poets, “it would be ‘The One Thing in Life,’ which appears in Lucky Life.” [Cf. Poetry Foundation]