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What I Can't Bear Losing: Notes from a Life
A time now almost lost―America and Europe of the 1940s and 1950s―indelibly recalled in prose pieces by a celebrated poet. 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.
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.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2003
3 people are currently reading
93 people want to read
About the author
Gerald Stern
67 books34 followersGerald Stern, the author of seventeen poetry collections, has won the National Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and the Wallace Stevens Award, among others. He lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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July 22, 2024Read "What I Can't Bear Losing"
Read "Some Secrets," about his lack of a mentor throughout his literary career. Very interesting.
Read "Some Secrets," about his lack of a mentor throughout his literary career. Very interesting.
November 18, 2022
A collection of autobiographical essays by one of the two most famous poets who grew up in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh, the other being Lucie Brock-Broido, who was just a year or two younger than me and sadly died young. Stern recently died after a long, productive life. His early essays about growing up in Pittsburgh during my parents’ time (he was a year younger than my mother) were of most interest to me, but some of the later essays in the book were special: “Tree of Life” (no mention of the synagogue of the same name), “The Ring,” and the title essay.
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October 31, 2022A hero and friend of Christopher Hedges. c 2003. Author 1925-2022
Bits of Hedges's eulogy:
Jerry’s rebelliousness colored his life. There was, for him, no other honest way to live. He donned bathing trunks to join Black students desegregating a swimming pool in Indiana, Pennsylvania. When, in the 1950s, Temple University, where he was teaching, built a six-foot wall around its campus to separate it from the surrounding Black neighborhood, he refused to walk through the entrance and climbed over the wall to get to class. The university fired him. He knew that any concession to power — and he saw universities as bastions of corporate power — eroded your integrity. He was unyielding. He told me, but perhaps more importantly showed me, that I must also be unyielding. We would not, he assured me, be rewarded by the wider society for our obstinacy, nor would we often be understood, but we would be free. And there would be those, especially the marginalized and oppressed, who would see in our defiance an ally, and that, in the end, was all that truly mattered. He called himself an agnostic, but he came as close to embodying the qualities of an Old Testament prophet — Biblical prophets were regarded at best as eccentrics if not insane — as anyone I ever met. He tied the most mundane moments of existence to the eternal mystery of the cosmos.
He grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, living in the shadow of the Carnegie and Mellon oligarchs who resided on the hills above the city on their estates, escaping the fetid air the working class breathed below. The social inequality of his childhood instilled in him a lifelong hatred of the rich, as well as the religious institutions that bowed before them. Drafted into the army at the end of World War II, he ended up being charged for a crime he did not commit and working ten- or eleven-hour days in a rock quarry with other convicts, most of whom were Black. He was later exonerated and given an honorable discharge, allowing him to collect seventy-five dollars a month from the GI. Bill and study for a doctorate, which he never completed, at The University of Paris. He lived in a cheap hotel in Paris where he had an affair with the owner’s wife, leading the husband to slip rat poison into his food, which nearly killed him. He walked across the northern half of Italy in remnants of his old uniform, visiting cities such as Venice and Bologna. He taught at many colleges and universities, some of which terminated his contracts because of his radicalism and outspokenness. He once fell asleep and started snoring during a poetry reading by Donald Hall, who never spoke to him again, an incident Jerry found uproariously funny.
Bits of Hedges's eulogy:
Jerry’s rebelliousness colored his life. There was, for him, no other honest way to live. He donned bathing trunks to join Black students desegregating a swimming pool in Indiana, Pennsylvania. When, in the 1950s, Temple University, where he was teaching, built a six-foot wall around its campus to separate it from the surrounding Black neighborhood, he refused to walk through the entrance and climbed over the wall to get to class. The university fired him. He knew that any concession to power — and he saw universities as bastions of corporate power — eroded your integrity. He was unyielding. He told me, but perhaps more importantly showed me, that I must also be unyielding. We would not, he assured me, be rewarded by the wider society for our obstinacy, nor would we often be understood, but we would be free. And there would be those, especially the marginalized and oppressed, who would see in our defiance an ally, and that, in the end, was all that truly mattered. He called himself an agnostic, but he came as close to embodying the qualities of an Old Testament prophet — Biblical prophets were regarded at best as eccentrics if not insane — as anyone I ever met. He tied the most mundane moments of existence to the eternal mystery of the cosmos.
He grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, living in the shadow of the Carnegie and Mellon oligarchs who resided on the hills above the city on their estates, escaping the fetid air the working class breathed below. The social inequality of his childhood instilled in him a lifelong hatred of the rich, as well as the religious institutions that bowed before them. Drafted into the army at the end of World War II, he ended up being charged for a crime he did not commit and working ten- or eleven-hour days in a rock quarry with other convicts, most of whom were Black. He was later exonerated and given an honorable discharge, allowing him to collect seventy-five dollars a month from the GI. Bill and study for a doctorate, which he never completed, at The University of Paris. He lived in a cheap hotel in Paris where he had an affair with the owner’s wife, leading the husband to slip rat poison into his food, which nearly killed him. He walked across the northern half of Italy in remnants of his old uniform, visiting cities such as Venice and Bologna. He taught at many colleges and universities, some of which terminated his contracts because of his radicalism and outspokenness. He once fell asleep and started snoring during a poetry reading by Donald Hall, who never spoke to him again, an incident Jerry found uproariously funny.
December 3, 2021
that chapter about Mr. Stern being shot at when visiting Newark was quite rivoting...
October 4, 2016
Reading this book as part of my Pittsburgh reading marathon for my own book--Stern is a sublime writer and I really enjoyed these 'biographical essays' rather than a purely chronological structure. He had a very different Pittsburgh than I did, 30+ years earlier.
March 12, 2013
Gerald Stern keeps amazing me. In 20 memory-packed essays, we are transported back in time and place into the crazy, poetry-fueled life of the author's youth, the vivid and at times harsh contrasts of social class in Pittsburgh and other cities Stern has lived, and the realities of his life as a Poet, an outspoken critic, and a Jew. Several essays I adored (like his poetry) and had to read straight through twice: "Tree of Life" and "The Ring" have to be up there as two of the best essays I've read in recent years and feel like a continuation of his large body of poetic work.
September 29, 2014
In preparation for Gerald Sterns' visit to Albany in November, I decided to read not only his poems but a book of his essays. This book contains essays on various episodes from Stern's life that explain where he comes from, literally and figuratively. My favorite essay is a short one called "Some Secrets" that talks about how Stern became a writer.
April 27, 2012
What happens when a poet writes his memoir? it becomes a book of life and poetry and objects and accidents and bullets and rings and poetry again, and love and women and more women and books and death and everythingelse.
November 2, 2010
A great memoir of a great man & poet
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews