A Katabasis
By Steve Watkins
It was 1992. Our friend Jerome Stern was still so very much alive back then, still teaching fiction writing and American popular culture at Florida State University, still writing and recording his popular radio essays for Florida Public Radio and NPR. It would be another five years before his dear friend Carol Houck Smith would publish a collection of those essays at W.W. Norton under the title Radios: Short Takes on Life and Culture—a companion work to Making Shapely Fiction, Jerry’s wonderful 1991 book on short story writing and narrative technique that so many of us have assigned over the past 35 years, sharing it with thousands of students in hundreds of creative writing classrooms all across America.
“These pieces, mostly broadcast on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered by the late Jerome Stern, are indeed mini essays,” Publisher’s Weekly wrote about Radios in a 1997 review. “Stern picks subjects far and wide, taking possession of them all. He talks about the sanctuary of libraries where no one asks, ‘Have you cleaned out the cat box yet?’ and the joy of books: ‘I must sing the song of the book, for nothing more voluptuous do I know than sitting with bright pictures, fat upon my lap.’ He muses on doctors, the idiocies of airplane travel, and the brief lives of goldfish. He even turns his eye on his own illness from cancer: ‘I faint, passing out into a dream of dreaming. This makes me feel wonderful, but must alarm the doctor. … He prefers conversations to melodrama.’ Collected in this slim volume are the words of a voice now still (Stern died in March 1996) that those who tuned into his quirky, somehow rational flights of verbal fancy will not soon forget.”
Jerry had grown up with the Beat poets—almost literally as a native New Yorker coming of age in the 1950s—and he never lost his Brooklyn accent even after 30 years, more than half his too-short life, living in the Deep South. So it made sense that day in 1992 when an instructor at the FSU film school, also a friend, asked if Jerry would record a reading of Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 epic “Howl” for a student film project. Not only that, but would Jerry appear in the film as well—walking into a bar, sitting at a table, reading Ginsberg?
Jerry being Jerry, of course he said yes. Nothing he liked better than a creative collaboration, people coming together for art and literature, and anything he could do to help make it happen. So that’s Jerry you see and hear (once you make it past a few weird bars of “Feelings”) when you watch this 1992 student production of “Howl.” Long lost, or buried, or archived, or hidden, it was recently rediscovered and shared on social media and with friends of Jerry’s by Steve Swartz, one of the instructors whose students who shot the film—with all the exuberance and unevenness and oddness and alternately lame and inspired music and scenes you’d expect to find in a movie project comprised of four different sections made by four different groups of aspiring filmmakers and then spliced together by their teachers.
And our friend Jerry Stern: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night….”
To see and hear the rest, here’s “Howl.”
(You can also read the full text of “Howl” on the Poetry Foundation website, HERE.)
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Steve Watkins is co-founder and editor of PIE & CHAI, a professor emeritus of English, a longtime tree steward with Tree Fredericksburg, an inveterate dog walker, a recovering yoga teacher and co-founder of two yoga businesses, father of four daughters, grandfather of four grandsons, and author of 15 books, two of which are forthcoming in 2024. His author website is http://www.stevewatkinsbooks.com/.
