Read Genesis by Gerald Stern

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend December 30, 2016   Read Genesis   Gerald Stern

I was betrayed by Bohemia early in my life and left a run-down hotel with my eye swollen shut by an insect bite but got my revenge in France and Italy and wasn't bitten once in those two countries.   I swore off free meals and book-stealing both there and elsewhere and if I got something for nothing it wasn't by schnorring so have a heart, pedagogus.   Think of Baudelaire and his clouds or Michelangelo on his step ladder putting a little spit in for tone and a gob or two for substance just to please the flunkies down there   even as they kicked the wooden legs their tongues out in excitement though I have to interrupt to say God did it with a voice not a finger, n'est-ce pas?            Copyright © 2016 Gerald Stern. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "The poem, which has an internal and musical logic, considers two things, Bohemia—good and bad—and the artist in his act. There is a turn, almost as if in a sonnet, in the eleventh line, which begins the second half of the poem; it is Michelangelo at his ceiling, and the Papal flunkies below, kicking the step ladder. But God communicated with her voice, not with her finger, as in Michelangelo (and Yeats)." —Gerald Stern   Gerald Stern is the author of Galaxy Love, forthcoming from W. W. Norton in 2017. He lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.   Photo credit: Gerald Zörner Poetry by Stern   Galaxy Love (W. W. Norton, 2017) "Variation on a Theme" by W. S. Merwin "No, Love Is Not Dead" by Robert Desnos "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038