It seems apt to start a tribute to the poet Gerald Stern—who died last month, on the age of ninety-seven—with a memory. A memory of a spot, and specifically a spot in Pittsburgh, where Stern was born and raised. As an undergraduate on the University of Pittsburgh, also Stern’s alma mater, I lived on the ninth story of an apartment constructing called Webster Hall. Though the apartments themselves were entirely without character, evidence of the constructing’s former life as a hotel endured in its elegant, imposing Beaux-Arts façade and its lobby’s ornately patterned carpet and gold-trimmed furniture. Only after I graduated and moved out did I learn that Webster Hall had been a favourite haunt of Stern and his fellow...
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