Edward Hirsch Reads Gerald Stern
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Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

On this program, we invite a poet to choose a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss. Then they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine. Today, these poems are also from A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925 to 2025, the anthology that's just now out. Today, my guest is Edward Hirsch, whose honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and the National Jewish Book Award.

Eddie, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me. It's nice to be here, Kevin. Thanks for having me. It's great to see you. The first poem you've selected to read is 96 Van Damme by Gerald Stern. What was it about this poem that caught your attention in the archive and the anthology? First of all, Jerry Stern was like an older brother to me. He hired me for my first job at Poets in the Schools in Pennsylvania in 1975.

He had a fifth floor walk up in New York and I visited him on Van Damme Street. So when I saw the poem in 1977, I was 27 years old. I just never seen a poem like this. Also had known a poet who had written such a poem. So that just leapt out at me in 77 and it leapt out at me again in the anthology. Wonderful. Let's hear it. This is 96 Van Damme by Gerald Stern. 96 Van Damme.

I'm going to carry my bed into New York City tonight, complete with dangling sheets and ripped blankets. I'm going to push it across three dark highways or coast along under 600,000 faint stars. I want to have it with me so I don't have to beg for too much shelter from my weak and exhausted friends. I want to be as close as possible to my pillow in case a dream or a fantasy should pass by.

I want to fall asleep on my own fire escape and wake up dazed and hungry to the sound of garbage grinding in the street below and the smell of coffee cooking in the window above. That was 96 Van Damme by Gerald Stern, which was published in the July 4, 1977 issue of The New Yorker.

I love that it was in the July 4th issue. I mean, it's such an American idiom that he's working in and creating and that incantatory quality. And it's not just that sort of echoey repetition. There's something about Stern's point of view in this poem, like, I want to be out there. I want to be, you know, wake to the sign of garbage grinding, which is such a specific but accurate description. I mean, how did you take that sort of walk-up quality of the

poem? It's a poem that gets stranger the more you look at it, at least to me. Yeah. I love the feel of it. I love the urban landscape. I like to say that city people have natures too. I love that. This is a really New York poem of a certain kind, but it's so literal. But then the closer you look at it, it just has this weird, surreal quality. But driving it, I think, is this kind of

emotional desperation or longing to find a home, to go home. And that's why I think it's sort of located at 96 Van Damme. It's like, that's the destination. I'm going to find a home there. But it seems so natural when you read it that it takes you a moment to go, why is he pushing a bed? Why is he pushing a bed? Why doesn't he have a bed already? Exactly. Well, and I love this idea, across three dark highways or...

coast along under 600,000 faint stars. And that idea of the stars, they're there, but you can't see them. And I feel like that's almost what Shelter is in the poem. It's a destination. It's a distant thing for him. But he's sort of seeking it and can almost see it. Totally.

Totally. Also, it's so weirdly specific, like 600,000. But also, like, the three dark highways is like, this is literally where I'm going. So it's like, it can map it as I'm walking there. But then under this great, vast world outside, 600,000 stars. Right. A world that he's kind of created for us, I think. And you know that it's an accurate map.

address, you know, but I think it becomes more than that in the end. You know, it becomes a place not just of shelter, but of dreams, fantasy, but also his friends. I love this kind of line. I'm still working it out. I want to have it with me so I don't have to beg for too much shelter from my weak and exhausted friends. I mean, is that a compliment to call your friends weak and exhausted? Or is it like just this is the reality of

you know, 1977, July 4th, like this is his sort of reality. I don't think it's meant to be a compliment, but I don't think it's an insult either. I think it's literally meant to be a description of like, all my friends are just worn out. Everyone is just beat.

And so I don't want to ask for shelter from them. Right. Although some of it is just so surreal. Like, it's very funny to say I want to keep my pillow with me just in case I see a dream coming by or get a fantasy here. Right, right. The combination of the literal and the surreal in this poem was, I think, quite wonderful. Yeah.

When I also, of course, this is a kind of fantasy. It starts, I am going to, I'm going to, and then it's, I want to, I want to. There's a slight gap there between the wishes and the fulfillment of them. Totally agree. There's a kind of drama, like I'm pushing my bed, which is very physical and literal. And then there's the bigger dream. Right. And the poem, I think, moves between these very specific things. The address, the

The 600,000 stars, the three highways, the pillow. And then there's this other vast yearning in it that you can't quite put your finger on, but you get a sense of like, I just need some kind of rest for my longing. Yeah.

There is this kind of tension in it between the mystical and what we might think of as the mundane, which I think Stern saw as almost interchangeable. It's through the mundane, maybe, that you get to the mystical. Is that how you see it? Totally. We don't leave the earthly plane very quickly. You sort of stay in it. And that's why the sort of setting of New York City is so crucial. And it's also like, it's maybe not even just mundane, maybe a little hostile. Mm-hmm.

I mean, it's like garbage trucks and highways. And it's not what you tritiously think of the pastoral. It's really an urban scene, and it's challenging. And then behind this is this dream for a dream or a fantasy or a longing or some rest or some shelter. Well, and I think of the pastoral as—

the country as glimpsed from the city. You know, it's a acidified dream of what country life would be. But this is almost like the city glimpsed from the stars or something. It has a cosmic...

of view, even in its intimacies. And I love that tension between the cosmic and the, you know, weak and exhausted, between sleep and dream, you know. And that tension, he rides really wonderfully in the poem. This is part of a group of poems he wrote for his second book called Lucky Life. What a great book. And it's just a great book. And it all has this kind of quality that begins with a kind of sense of exhaustion and I would say even failure. Mm-hmm.

And a kind of need to kind of rest. Like you're already worn out when you start this poem. It's like carrying your bed. And some people, I think, think he's homeless in the poem. But I don't think so. Because he's got an address to go to. Right, right. But he's so tired that when he falls asleep at the end, he's on the fire escape. He's not in his bed that he's bringing up the fifth floor. Yeah, yeah.

It's an odd tone because there's a playful element in it. Yeah, we're kind of losing the humor and talking about it as if it's super serious when it's not. It's like, I'm going to carry my bed into New York City tonight. Okay. You have me carrying. And we've seen stranger things on the subway than someone carrying a bed. Yeah, we've seen people pushing beds. But it's got that weird quality of like a long journey of pushing your bed across highways through town. And I think it's a physical bed, but it's also—

I mean, what else is more personal? And literally, you spend probably most of your time in it, and it's a place of dream for him, but also a place...

of rest, but being restive and not restful at all. Totally agree. I think that if Gaston Bachelard, who wrote The Poetics of Space, was talking about this poem, you'd see that he'd talk about how the bed is intimate and interior place, and now it's outside. And we're moving through this external world of New York City, which is slightly hostile, to seek a place of shelter in the bed, which is so personal.

Yeah. Well, and the poetry is like that. It's such an apt metaphor. Is it a Ars Poetica? Is it a poem about what poetry should be? It may be his Ars Poetica. I'm not sure it's everyone's, but yes, I agree. It sort of embodies what I think the work is about here. This physical plan, like rooted in the earth, but this also...

longing for something beyond. For me, I think what's interesting about Stern is the way that it does feel like he's coming to it with a maturity and an earned quality, like an earned yearning. He wrote an essay called Some Secrets, which is about why he never wrote a good poem before he was 50 years old.

He was writing all through his 20s, 30s, and 40s, but he never succeeded. And it was only in his late 40s and early 50s when he really began to start with the fact that he was a failure, that he had one little small press book, that he was teaching at community college, that he began in this sense of failure to

in middle age, but with the exuberance of a young poet. And I think what we feel in poems like 96 Van Damme is the exuberance of a young poet, but the experience and maturity of someone who's in middle age. And I think it's the same thing with joy. It's an earned joy. It's not an easy one. There's a kind of earned comfort here or earned rest as he gets to his own fire escape. But again,

You're sleeping in this perilous place where you hear the garbage trucks. You're hungry. You're stunned.

You're at home, but the sort of smell of coffee is comforting. Yeah, yeah. And those C sounds at the last line, the smell of coffee cooking in the wind, you know, there's something about that. Again, he's, as you said, between the street below, the window above. You're always in this sort of in-between state, I feel. Hate to use the language, but the whole poem is liminal. Like the whole poem is moving between spaces. Like where is he coming from with the bed? Yeah.

And he's pushing it through New York. And you see it. And then it's what he wants to happen. Yes. Where he wants to arrive. And then the feeling is, with a restfulness at the end, that he finally does fall asleep, waking up dazed, hungry. He's made it. Garbage is like a reminder of what the world is like out in New York City in the morning. But also the coffee is like something promising. Yes, right. It's a real reminder that

Even something that's simple as this kind of repetition, that's what the poem can be. It can be your wishes, your dreams, and just naming the thing that you want. And there's always that yearning, I think.

It's very simple, anaphoric repetition, but it's got this incredible thing driving it. And that's what I think is, in my opinion, one of the great things behind it and about my favorite poems in the New Yorker anthology, which is the poems of lived experience. And that even though this is a kind of fantasy, it has a life behind it.

And it's got an emotional life behind it. And so I think that this is one of the reasons we turn to poetry, to get this effective experience that you can't get elsewhere. How would you like write an essay that describes these feelings? You couldn't do it. The poem has to kind of enact this burden, this journey, and this longing. More from my conversation with Edward Hirsch after the break.

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Welcome back. My pleasure. Now, in our November 25th, 1991 issue, the New Yorker published your poem, Man on a Firescape, which you'll read for us in a moment. Do you want to say anything about that first? Can you take us back to sort of when it appeared and any thoughts you have? I mean, first of all, any poem in the New Yorker feels like an event for the poet because you actually see people reading the magazine.

Of course, you don't really realize that they're really reading the cartoons. Yeah, they're looking for the cartoons. They're looking at the cartoons, but you can pretend they're reading your poem. They do both. They do both. But it felt especially exciting for me because the poem is such a New York poem. It's very much a cityscape. And so it felt so right to me. Dreamt to have it in The New Yorker, and then it was so exciting when it appeared there. Well, let's hear it. Here's Edward Hirsch reading his poem, Man on a Fire Escape. Man on a Fire Escape.

He couldn't remember what propelled him out of the bedroom window onto the fire escape of his fifth-floor walk-up on the river so that he could see, as if for the first time, sunsets settling down on the day's cityscape and tugboats pulling barges up the river. There were barred windows glaring at him from the other side of the street while the sun deepened into a smoky flare that scalded the cloud's gold vermilion.

It was just an ordinary autumn twilight, the kind he had witnessed often before, but then the day brightened almost unnaturally into a rusting, burnished, purplish-red haze, and everything burst into flame. The factories pouring smoke into the sky, the trees and shrubs, the shadows of pedestrians scorched and rushing home.

There were storefronts going blind and cars burning on the parkway and steel girders collapsing into the polluted waves. Even the latticed fretwork of stairs where he was standing, even the first stars climbing out of their sunlit graves, were branded and lifted up, consumed by fire. It was like watching the start of Armageddon, like seeing his mother dipped in flame.

And then he closed his eyes and it was over. Just like that. When he opened them again, the world had reassembled beyond harm. So where had he crossed to? Nowhere. And what had he seen? Nothing. No foghorns called out to each other as if in a dream. And no moon rose over the dark river like a warning. Icy. Long forgotten. While he turned back to an empty room.

That was Man on a Fire Escape by Edward Hirsch. So I'm struck, of course, right away that this is also a fire escape in your poem, but it has a very different feel. It doesn't have that same escape feel. It feels like it is a kind of entry into almost like an apocalyptic vision. I mean, how did you think about these fire escapes or that particular fire escape in your poem?

First of all, I'm very fond of fire escapes in poems, but I'm very fond of this kind of urban scenery because it felt like hadn't been in poetry that much before. I mean, there are a couple of things like think of how much time people who live in cities spend in cities. And then you think of the percentage of poems that are about cities, very small. And then if you think about, say,

how much poems have to deal with, say, the subject of work and how much people actually work. You go, all they do is, you know, have love, death, and the changing of the seasons. People have jobs. Yeah, exactly. So I like the scene and I like both the literalness of the unpoetic nature of the fire escape, but then the sort of

that's built into it. Sure. Which is trying to escape from fire. Right, right. And again, it's in this space between being outside and being inside. You're right between. You're not totally outside. You're not on the street, but you're not in the house either. And so you're in this space of witness, I guess. And that's what the speaker does. He just looks out and sees something in the city. Well, and it's Twilight, another, you know,

you know, liminal, as we said earlier, space and time. It was just an ordinary autumn twilight, the kind he had witnessed often before.

But then the day brightened almost unnaturally. And this kind of burning, branded thing and all these kind of images of kind of resurrection, but also of death. So I'm just mostly admiring it, but I also wonder if there's anything else you can tell us about it. I like the idea of something that seems ordinary as the springboard towards something that's extraordinary. Yeah.

poems that begin in the quotidian and then try to move to another realm. The idea for my poem, aside from the landscape of it and the description of it, was I'd read apocalyptic poems by, say, Yeats. I'd never read an apocalyptic poem where you sort of see it and take it back. Yeah.

I love that part about it. I think that's the thing about the poem. On one hand, it's an ordinary twilight, and I love the description of trying to describe an ordinary twilight, which is a magical time of day between day and night. But then the vision of something that is very extreme, it is an apocalyptic vision of the world being destroyed. But it's a vision. It's like looking into it and seeing this. And then...

it disappears and the experience goes. So it's sort of bracketed by, but then, as you know, from the logic of that, and then it returns to end then when the vision is over.

Well, it returns after the mother. Right. Like seeing his mother dipped in flame. Okay. I just want to say that I shocked myself when I wrote that. I like shocked myself. I scared myself. Every once in a while you write something that scares you. That seems so brutal to me that it scared me. And I just stopped. That was like the end.

And the poem was going to either end there, and it does sort of trail off then. Yeah, it has ellipses there. It has ellipses there. Because I didn't feel like I could go beyond that. I, like, shocked myself with that. And then I just stopped and decided it's going to end right there or it's going to go forward. But instead, and then he closed his eyes and it was over. So it's like the vision has ended. Yeah.

He closes his eyes to sort of move into some other space. And then when he opens them again, he's back in the normal or ordinary world. But he can't quite forget what he'd just seen. Well, yes, by then when those questions are there, one wonders who's asking them and who's answering them so definitively. So where had he crossed to? Nowhere. Hmm.

Really? You've kind of crossed and you're changed, you know, and I think there's something wonderful about a poem. And while this doesn't feel exactly like an Ars Poetica poem about poetry, there is a kind of declaration about the imagination and its imprinting power, I feel, there. So where had he crossed through nowhere and what had he seen? Nothing.

But then there's that wonderful thing where in the negative, it's almost like using negative space to draw. No foghorns called out to each other as if in dream. And no moon rose over the dark river like a warning. Well, you know, we have a warning and some foghorns right there, even though they're not supposed to be.

You're so on to me. You're so on to me. You totally get what it's about. Like you say there's no moon, but you've just evoked the moon. You said there's no foghorns, but you've just evoked the foghorns. They say there's no warning, but you feel the warning. And then there's a kind of, I guess, a pun on nowhere, pun on nothing. Like he didn't really see anything because it was a vision, but then he also, what was the vision of?

Nothingness. Nothingness. Where did it go on? Nowhere. What was the vision of? Nowhereness. So I think it sort of is meant to work two ways. But you're right. The question's like...

Who's asking? I don't know the answer to that. It was like, I guess he's asking himself. Sure. Or the speaker, the poet is asking him. It's really not clear exactly. Well, there's an element of trying to convince oneself. Yeah. But also, I'm struck by what you just kind of indicated, which is there's a narrator. It's third person. Yeah. And I don't think it could have worked the same if it was first person. It would have felt a little too...

in a way. There's something distant about even the depth of where the he goes. I'm curious about it. Is it a he as a kind of I, you think? Or he as kind of every person? How does it work looking back at the poem now? I might have tried it in the first person because it's a first person point of view in a certain way. And it just didn't work at all. Like it seemed to like make a claim. Right.

for yourself that it didn't seem right at all. Like I had a vision. No, it just doesn't. It just seemed really wrong. But as soon as I put it in this sort of indifferent third person position,

I think it's what fiction writers call close third person. But I like the sort of anonymity of just any person on a fire escape really looking out. But then what it describes from the third person is something that you could only know about yourself. Like you couldn't look at someone on the fire escape and say, he's seeing this. It's a very close third person as if it's first person. Whenever you make this move in a poem,

There is something distancing about it as in a portrait. And I thought for this poem, it was the only way that it worked.

Well, I love that idea of a portrait because it's kind of a self-portrait and a portrait, maybe in a mirror almost of kind of this world that you almost imagine beyond the mirror, but also is the mirror. There's something in that that I think is really compelling. I think in those days, I was very under the sway of Edward Hopper's urban paintings and the loneliness in them. Sure. And the office windows and the feeling of kind of isolation in the city at night. It wouldn't feel right to be in the

You were the first person. Right. That's well said. And I think if there was any artist I could have had like 20 poems of in the anthology, it was Hopper poems because he really speaks to poets in a way that I think is really powerful. The loneliness in it.

I think, and the American quality of it. That's right. We didn't talk about it much, but I do think there's an American quality to this Armageddon. You know, there's something about it that feels both universal, but also really specific to the he, but also this moment and, you know, to...

Looking out on a world that feels both changed and unchangeable, you know, there's almost a fate that feels like it's in the poem. Guilty as charged on this one in terms of, I think the language moves between something vernacular and something more romantic. It's sort of like, you might say it, if you were looking historically at American poetry, it like,

starts with Williams and tries to move into Wallace Stevens and then goes back to William Carlos Williams. It's something, you know, bigger and more grand and more romantic, but there is a kind of rootedness in place, I guess, and the place is very urban, very much of a cityscape. Well, I love the epic quality you create in a lyric poem, so thank you for it. I want to ask you a little bit about your forthcoming book.

My Childhood in Pieces. It's not a book of poems, but a memoir. And I love the subtitle. You describe it as a stand-up comedy, a skokie elegy. These seem like almost contradictions, but they're not, right? Tell us about it.

I'm so excited about my book. It all consists of very short pieces, not poetry, but approximate to poetry, I guess. Got it. Poetry adjacent. Each one has a title, and it's two or three lines, and they're structured as stand-up jokes. Oh, really? I got the idea by writing down things my parents said.

So I'll give you the very first one to give you a sense of what the book is like. Conversation with my mother. My mother's standing at the stove, stirring a pot of chicken soup. I go, you know, you really shouldn't make fun of me. You're my mother. She said, don't be so sure, kid.

So I started writing down things that they said. And then this enabled me to just start telling my story of my childhood with the same kind of tightness, the same kind of turn. They're not all jokes, but they're all really tight this way. Each one has a turn as in a poem.

So the very first piece is called All Sales Are Final. God is like my old boss on Maxwell Street. My grandfather said, you may get home and discover that your new shirt doesn't have a back, but you're still not going to get a refund. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. So-

It's like that. And this enabled me to tell the story of my childhood. And then as I backed into it, my parents moved when I was in fifth grade, I guess. They moved to Skokie, which is a suburb of Chicago. And the world that I grew up in, I began to realize, is gone. Skokie is still there. But the world that I grew up in, lower middle class, Jewish Chicago, or the 50s and 60s, it just doesn't exist anymore. Right.

And that's where the poem starts, the book starts to turn into an elegy. Well, and you said poem. Yeah, sorry. You're sneaking in poetry on us too all the time. I love that. Can't help myself. Can't help myself. So it's an elegy not just for a childhood, but for a place. That's what I feel. That's what happened.

I started out as stand-up comedy and then also had this elegiac quality. And we decided that we should tag it both ways because the stand-up comedy is not entirely accurate, but the elegy part is not exactly accurate either. And so it really tries to be both things.

Well, I think you put your finger on something about humor that is true, I think, in poetry too. And we talked about this with Stern a little bit. Sometimes it's very dark, the humor. And also culturally, I think there's a kind of dark humor of survival. I assume that

You're also working. You and I share this. I mean, our cultures share this. Yes, exactly. The jokes are like hard. The jokes are tough, but they're funny. A shirt without a back. A shirt without a back. Here's one from my grandmother. If I had a brain cell, I'd charge the most for yours. Why? Because I'm the smartest one in the family? No, because yours have never been used.

Ouch. Yeah. That's a tough one. It's all ouch. And then what this does is that I then move into anecdotes to telling stories that have the same kind of quality of commentary by my parents and then my grandmother. And then I just began to use the mode. I really like the mode. Sure. I began to use the mode to tell my own story.

Well, and I love this idea. You said, you know, the turn in a poem and the turn in a joke. And I think of, you know, culturally the turn in the blues say, you know, I think all of these things are so...

fascinating and important. And, you know, looking back at the poems we looked at, you know, what I love about Stern is he almost doesn't have a turn. You know, like the joke, if you will, is that there is no turn. You know, I'm just going to want this. And maybe at the end, there's that turn of sort of waking. And in yours, it's that moment that you pushed past in the writing, you know, where it trails off, but then there's this turn. But it's not a full turn. You know, it's not something somewhere else, even though it says it is, you know. Yeah.

I agree. The Stern poem doesn't have one, in my opinion. It's a relentless sort of push, but it's a short poem. But first of all, I love your comparison to the blues because I think the blues have something in common with the sonnet. They have this, what the Italians call the volta. They have a turn. Line, line, turn. Line, line, turn. That's the blues stanza. And I think that's the structure of the joke too. Like something unexpected and inevitable. Right.

It doesn't seem likely. You don't see it coming. But then when it turns, it feels like it hits you right, like it's accurate. And the fact that I was telling stories from my childhood and they were landing this way felt like this was enabling me to tell a story that I just hadn't been able to tell before. Eddie, thanks so much for talking with me today. It's a thrill. Thanks for having me, Kevin.

Man on a Fire Escape by Edward Hirsch, as well as Gerald Stern's 96 Van Damme, can be found on newyorker.com, as well as the anthology A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925-2025. Gerald Stern's last collection was Blessed as We Were. Edward Hirsch's forthcoming book is My Childhood in Pieces.

You may subscribe to this podcast, the Fiction Podcast, the Writer's Voice Podcast, and the Politics & More podcast by searching for The New Yorker in your podcast app. You can hear more poetry read by the authors on newyorker.com and the New Yorker app, available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is The Corner by Chief Zion Atunde Ajua, courtesy of Stretch Music and Ropa Dope.

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