By Jesse Lee Kercheval

Gerald Stern’s “The Dancing” included in This Time: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Company, 1984) begins like this:

      In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
      and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
      I have never seen a postwar Philco
      with the automatic eye
      nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
      in 1945 in that tiny living room
      on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
      then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
      my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
      his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
      of old Ukraine . . .

When I read this poem I see a child-sized version of the adult Gerry Stern I knew, dancing, spinning in circles. I see him as he was in 1984 when I took a class with him at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his bald dome framed by unruly dandelion puffs of gray hair. He was 59 then, but young in the time he had spent in poetry world. His second book, Lucky Life, the one that turned the world’s eye his way, had been published just seven years earlier in 1977 when he was already 52.

During one workshop, held in his house in Iowa City, I remember him tying a ribbon, leftover from some unwrapped present, around his head and dancing like this, clicking his fingers like castanets. He was madly, rhythmically alive. I wish I could say we all jumped up to join in, like the parents in the poem. But we sat stiffly on his couch and chairs, staring down at the sheets of poems in our laps, waiting for his attention to return to the words we had written.

Now I read his poem and ask myself, why didn’t we dance? Why don’t we dance more often? In the presence of a dancing poet, or in the face of “the evil Mellons,” who appear at the end of the poem, polluting our world? When threatened by dictatorships and racism? For God, or in protest against God?

*

At Iowa, I was a fiction MFA student. As an undergrad at Florida State University, I had taken every writing workshop I could—fiction, poetry, even playwriting. But at Iowa, we entered as if through separate doors. Fiction writers were forbidden to take poetry workshops and vice versa. Fiction writers attended the fiction readings by visiting fiction writers. Poets, the poetry readings. After the readings, there were receptions—parties—at some student’s apartment. At the fiction parties, people stood around and talked, a drink in one hand. I remember getting Raymond Carver a cup of cold leftover coffee from someone’s kitchen. He had stopped drinking. And he stood by the door, his coat on, cup in hand for an hour, waiting to leave. Those kinds of parties. At the poetry parties, I heard, people danced.

I got in Gerry Sterns’ class at Iowa by throwing myself on the floor outside his office, rolling back and forth, pretending to rend my clothes.

I had gone to his office to ask if I could take his poetry workshop. He said, as he was supposed to, that it wasn’t allowed. I had read Lucky Life. I knew he had a taste for the dramatic. I did my best, hitting the dingy linoleum hard as I fell. If I had read “The Dancing,” from Paradise Poems, before I went to his office, I might have hummed Boléro and danced instead.

But he laughed, helped me up off the floor. And let me in his class.

*

Making the forbidden but entirely logical assumption that the speaker in the poem is Gerry Stern, a Jew raised in Pittsburgh who wrote about his own life in his poetry all his life, in 1945, the stated date of the poem’s action, Gerry is not a small child, but a young man. He was 23.

He’d graduated from high school in 1942 but had been rejected for military service due to his poor eyesight. His family had immigrated to Pittsburgh in 1905, before even the first World War, but the weight of the Holocaust is there in the closing lines of the poem that reach well beyond Pittsburgh, and to Poland, where his mother had been born:

      . . . the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
      screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
      as if we could never stop—in 1945—
      in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
      of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
      from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany—
      oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

“This extraordinary moment of dancing is really the liberation from the camps in 1945,” the poet Ed Hirsch says in a video about the poem I used to show to my classes. “And suddenly you realize that this moment in Pittsburgh, this paradisial moment in Pittsburgh, is also an infernal moment, or coming out of an infernal moment, in Europe.”

I remember hearing Gerry Stern read “The Dancing” in Iowa—from his then brand-new collection. It seemed, in that moment, completely Gerry. That dancing! Over the years, I heard him read it at least two more times. It seems to me that it became more and more a statement about who he was as a poet in this world. On the same video as Ed Hirsch, Gerry says, “We remember the famous words that after the Holocaust, after Shoah, there can be no poetry. The alternative is, after Shoah there can be only poetry.”

*

I think my wildest dancing, my most poetic and uncontrolled dancing, was in the 1980s at the early incarnations of the AWP’s annual conventions. I first went in 1986, when it was in Chicago, two years after Gerald Stern’s workshop. In those days the high point of the convention was the dance. Sometimes with a band. Sometimes a DJ. There were no competing events. Everyone went. Everyone danced. Most badly. Nearly all madly. Someone always ending the night dancing on a table. I danced with my undergrad writing teacher from Florida State University, Jerry (Jerome) Stern. Jerry always called Gerry, “the Other Gerry Stern.” And Gerry, laughing, did the same.

I don’t remember if Gerry Stern was at the dance at AWP in 1986. But Jerry Stern danced like the family in Gerry’s poem. He had grown up in New York, his father leaving Germany for the U.S. just before the war. Both of them, I think, danced with 1945 in their hearts. The tragedy under the joy.

Jerry Stern died young, in 1996 at 58. Gerry Stern lived until 2022, just short of 97.

I know there is still an official dance at AWP, but to be honest, I haven’t danced in years. Reading this poem, I am ashamed to say that.

*

In his book of short autobiographical essays, Stealing History, Gerry Stern writes, “I have Tourette’s Syndrome. I never had a name for it when I was a kid, but I had a tic and when I’m nervous sometimes it activates itself. When you combine my wild talking with my self-pity and quick resentment you end up hopeless before my onslaught.”

In 1984, I would not have known what to call it and, I think, neither did Gerry. But before he tied a ribbon around his head in front of class of more than slightly depressed young poets in Iowa, I remember him saying, “Sometimes the body needs to move.”

And his did.

*

Bolero was—and is—a dance, one that has inspired other composers besides Maurice Ravel. Ravel’s Boléro (whose working title was “Fandango”) was composed as a ballet score, though it is usually played as a concert piece, as the kind of music that poured out of the Philco radio in “The Dancing.”

When I hear it, I always think of Allegro non troppo, Bruno Bozzetto’s 1976 animated film that is a parody of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. In it, sludge at the bottom of a coke bottle left behind by a visiting rocket ship bubbles to life and progresses through absurd versions of the stages of evolution to the tune of Boléro. More particularly, I see pink and purple dinosaurs morph into being, then march in a long line to the music across time and a changing earth, with mammals and birds joining the parade, past pyramids, a tank, across a highway to die at the feet of erupting skyscrapers.

A long walk, a long dance. One it would be good to face with knives whirling in each hand.

*

In 1985, I asked Gerry for a letter of recommendation. I was already thinking ahead to graduation and applying for teaching jobs, and I wanted proof I was a poet as well as a fiction writer, or more particularly, could teach poetry as well as fiction workshops. All my other letters appeared in my dossier, ready to go out. But nothing from him. I realized I had not seen around him for a while. I went looking for him, found him ambling down the hall. I stepped in front of him, hands on my hips, “What’s up with the letter, Gerry?” I said.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, “I got shot.” He pointed at his cheek, where his beard had grown in hiding the entrance wound. Somehow, I had missed the news every official Iowa poet must have already known. He’d been passenger in a car in Newark on his way to a reading. The woman driving him stopped at a red light and a bullet came through the car window. “You know what the cop said?” Gerry asked me. “He said, ‘You should know better than to stop at a red light in Newark.’” He laughed and touched his neck. “The bullet’s still in there.”

In an essay in his 2003 collection, What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes From a Life, he writes, “I am so used to having a bullet in my neck that I never think of it, only when the subject comes up and someone—full of doubt or amazement—gingerly reaches a hand out to feel it.”

He wrote me the letter.

I didn’t ask to feel the bullet, but, I admit, I have often wondered what it felt like—the bullet, being shot, walking around with a tangible reminder that every dance stops. Even a dance with a never-ending, repetitive rhythm like Bolero comes to an end.

So stand up. Put on some music. Dance.

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Jesse Lee Kercheval’s recent poetry collections are I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and Un pez dorado no te sirve para nada (Editorial Yaugurú, Uruguay, 2023). She is the author of French Girl, which the Washington Post named one of the Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2024.