Congratulations to Boston Shambhala community member Bert Stern for the release of his book of poetry called “Steerage.”
Bert will be publishing his poetry collection “Steerage” with the Ibbetson Street Press. Bert is a Somerville poet, a Bagel Bard, a Shambhala practitioner, 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.
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.”
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.
“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 peasant like and ethnic, or contemplative and spare, are crafted like indestructible carpentry. ” Frannie Lindsay
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.
RSS Subscribe 
sadness, and as a way to become popular. To that end, I wrote mostly humorous songs, or breakup songs. And to a large extent, this has not changed.
