FEATURE
December 2006

Gerald Stern


THE CORTLAND REVIEW

E
SSAY
Tony Barnstone
  "A Manifesto on the Contemporary Sonnet: A Personal Aesthetics"
Tony Barnstone considers the sonnet from its formal beginnings to its evolution into the twenty-first century, including some generative techniques for sonnets of your own


S
ONNETS
Tony Barnstone

Willis Barnstone
Lorna Knowles Blake
Kim Bridgford
Billy Collins
Leisha Douglas
Barry Ergang
Ross A. Gay
Soheila Ghaussy This marks an author's first online publication
Miranda Girard This marks an author's first online publication
Myrna Goodman This marks an author's first online publication
Susan Gubernat
Heidi Hart
Jay Leeming This marks an author's first online publication
Anne Marie Macari

Patricia O'Hara
John Poch
Michael Salcman
Patricia Smith
A.E. Stallings

Gerald Stern
Joyce Sutphen
Jeet Thayil
Meredith Trede This marks an author's first online publication

 

Gerald Stern lives in Lambertville, New Jersey, and is the Poet Laureate of New Jersey, its first. He is the author of twelve books of poems, the winner of many major awards, including, in 1998, the National Book Award for This Time: New and Selected Poems. (Norton, 1999). Last Blue (2001), American Sonnets and What I Can't Bear Losing: Notes from a Life (2003), and his newest, Everything is Burning, published just this month, are all from Norton.

Glut    


The whole point was getting rid of glut
for which I starved myself and lived with the heat down
and only shaved oh every five days and used
a blunt razor for months so that my cheek
was not only red but the hair was bent not cut
for which I then would be ready for the bicycle
and the broken wrist, for which-oh God-I would be
ready to climb the steps and fight the boxes
with only nothing, a pair of shoes, and once
inside to open the window and let the snow in
and when the fire was over climb down the icy
fire escape and drop the last twenty
feet with notebooks against my chest, bruises
down one side of my body, fresh blood down the other.

 

 

Gerald Stern: Poetry
Copyright ©2006 The Cortland Review December 2006 FeatureThe Cortland Review