By Lisa Bellamy

Over decades, the late Gerald Stern crafted an exuberant, talkative, and highly-performative narrator. His first-person narrator’s consciousness—his loves, memories, opinions, and passions (personal, literary, intellectual, and spiritual) —is itself the true subject of the poems. External activities, objects, and other characters, in constant interaction, offer an opportunity for the narrator to react, explore, and reveal himself and his world.

“The Dancing,” like so many Stern poems, is a poem of largesse: very much in the lyric mode, existing outside conventional, linear time. The core scene in “The Dancing” is a family of three simply dancing together, in a spontaneous, joyful moment. It is a scene of heightened, intimate intensity, against forces of evil and inequality.

The narrator’s consciousness broadens past the moment, though: space is elastic, in motion. The narrator is active, mobile, depicting a mother, father, and child dancing in 1945 Pittsburgh, even—as noted with irony, and underlying sadness and horror—there is “other dancing,” thousands of miles away in Poland and Germany.

Time, also, is in motion. With neither backstory nor prologue, the reader, initially, is dropped into the present-tense: a world of used and worn things: ” . . . broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots . . . ,” as if the world today is a fallen world. The narrator then pivots, with seamless transition, to an autobiographical past, via references to a Philco radio and Ravel’s “Bolero,” which provided the music to which he and his parents danced.

The narrator’s emotions, too, are in motion.  While the strongest emotion is love—exemplified in the dancing scene itself—the narrator feels free to offer ambivalence and anger  about social and cultural issues. The Mellons, prominent Pittsburgh industrialists, are “evil.” The hometown, Pittsburgh, is both “beautiful” and “filthy.” The living room is “tiny,” suggesting, of course, that the family is poor.

Finally, the poem’s lineation itself is in motion—the reader discerns a loose, iambic pulse that leans into pentameter, but is by no means strict or controlled.

Stern embeds his core scene of ecstatic dance in these elements of motion and mobility. The narrator’s gesture is clear and communicative—there is no guesswork on the reader’s part about what is happening. The scene is set in a “tiny living room” on “Beechwood Boulevard.” Immediately, the reader is a participant, as the narrator shifts from the past tense of “nor danced as I did then,” to a lyric present tense: “knives all flashing, my hair all streaming.” In addition, the reader participates in the narrator’s mind and memory: is the reference to knives imaginative and playful? It may be. And then, in a fluid turn, the narrator offers more and more participation, in a realistic portrait of “my mother red with laughter, my father cupping / his left hand under his armpit.” This is so energetic, loving, joyful—and specific. The red face and left hand cupped under the armpit convey joy and engagement far more than abstract description, so that the dance itself is an expression of this family’s intimacy, love, and camaraderie.

When the narrator steps outside the scene to comment, to speak over the heads of the mother, father, and child characters to the reader, as in “doing the dance of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum, half fart,” this characterization and context draws the reader even more into the scene, as an informed participant, now-knowledgeable about the narrator’s immigrant Ukrainian culture and history. The narrator never lingers over the action, but offers just enough specific phrasing to convey the scene’s essence, and the characters’ core emotions, with no unnecessary stage directions or extraneous physical details.

As Stern’s narrator relishes this raucous, celebratory scene, he moves to a deeper, even more meaningful level: metaphor. “The world at last a meadow,” he proclaims. The words “at last” are critical. They convey the sense that this family dances and celebrates in the midst of, or in spite of, opposing forces, as they whirl and sing.  In fact, they are “screaming and falling, as if we were dying, as if we could never stop.” This is such a charged moment: conveying both life and death; and of course, a meadow is a teeming world of living and dying creatures. Thus, Stern uses dancing as both a realistic action in a scene, and as metaphor for the art of living itself.

These lines prepare the reader for a heartfelt, devastating conclusion and prayer. It has become clear that this family, through the simple act of dancing to radio music, perseveres with energy and love against a Holocaust, and in the midst of their own travails surviving and thriving in America. They are heroes, invisible until brought to life by Stern’s narrator. As Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “The difference between the kind of poetry in which an ‘I’ tells about itself and a poetry which ‘sings gods and heroes’ is not great, since in both cases the object of description is mythologized.” They have earned their mercy, bestowed, in Stern’s view, by a God that dances as well: “oh God of mercy, oh wild God.”

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Lisa Bellamy studied with Philip Schultz at The Writers Studio, where she teaches. She is the author of The Northway and Nectar. and has received two Pushcart Prizes and a Fugue Poetry Prize.  Her poem “Yoho” appeared in the United Nations Network on Migration’s 2022 climate change exhibition. www.lisabellamypoet.com