Culture
Gerd Stern, Beat Era Poet and Multimedia Artist, Dies at 96
Mr. Stern’s life was as colorful, confusing and sometimes chaotic as his art. He was born Gerd Jacob Stern in Oct. 12, 1928, to a Jewish family in the Saar, a German-speaking region administered by France and Britain under a mandate from the League of Nations. After the Saar was incorporated into Nazi Germany in 1935, Mr. Stern’s father, Otto, a cheese importer, moved his family to New York City, where he re-established his business.
Mr. Stern attended the Bronx High School of Science and the City College of New York with the intention of studying zoology, but he left after a few weeks. His subsequent stay at Black Mountain College, the experimental interdisciplinary school in North Carolina, where he planned to study poetry, was even briefer. Its rector, the painter Josef Albers, was, Mr. Stern recalled, “out of the same mold as my father: the Germanic disciplinarian.”
“I couldn’t take it,” he said, “so I split.”
He was, however, strongly influenced by other Black Mountain instructors, including Buckminster Fuller and John Cage.
It was through Cage that Mr. Stern was introduced to Marshall McLuhan’s theories, reading the manuscript of what would be published in 1964 as “Understanding Media,” McLuhan’s oracular treatise on the impact television and other modes of communication had on human consciousness.
At this point, Mr. Stern recalled, his poems turned nonlinear, “running off the paper into collage and lights and sounds.” He turned words into slide shows, pasted words around three-dimensional objects and, with the installation “Contact Is the Only Love,” constructed a device to blitz viewers with assorted word images.
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment highlights observations from future or alternate worlds depicted in popular science fiction. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
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