Gerald Stern’s Lucky Life
A poem can live on a page, but sometimes it escapes into a room. Gerald Stern’s Lucky Life is one of those poems that seems to ask for more than quiet reading. Its words carry gratitude, strangeness, memory and the sudden shock of being alive. Here, the poem is presented alongside Diane Keaton’s extraordinary reading room in her Sullivan Canyon home in California, where lines from Lucky Life curve around the walls like a private incantation. It is a beautiful homage: literature turned into architecture, and a room transformed into a poem. Some people are saying that it looks like a torture chamber … the comments section is open at the bottom of the page if you agree.
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Lucky Life by Gerald Stern
Lucky Life isn’t one long string of horrors
and there are moments of peace and of pleasure as I lie in between the blows.
Lucky I don’t have to wake up in Philipsburg, New Jersey,
on the hill overlooking Union Square or the hill overlooking
Kuebler Brewery or the hill overlooking S.S. Philip and James
but have my own hills and my own vistas to come back to.
Each year I go down to the island I add
one more year to the darkness;
and though I sit up with dear friends
trying to separate one year from the other,
this one from the last, that one from the former,
another from another,
after a while they all get lumped together,
the year we walked to Holgate,
the year our shoes got washed away,
the year it rained,
the year my tooth brought misery to us all.
This year was a crisis. I knew it when we pulled
the car onto the sand and looked for the key.
I knew it when we walked up the outside steps
and opened the hot icebox and began the struggle
with swollen drawers and I knew it when we laid out
the sheets and separated the clothes into piles
and I knew it when we made our first rush onto
the beach and I knew it when we finally sat
on the porch with coffee cups shaking in our hands.
My dream is I’m walking through Phillipsburg, New Jersey,
and I’m lost on South Main Street. I am trying to tell,
by memory, which statue of Christopher Columbus
I have to look for, the one with him slumped over
and lost in weariness or the one with him
vaguely guiding the way with a cross and a globe in
one hand and a compass in the other.
My dream is I’m in the Eagle Hotel on Chamber Street
sitting at the oak bar, listening to two
obese veterans discussing Hawaii in 1942,
and reading the funny signs over the bottles.
My dream is I sleep upstairs over the honey locust
and sit on the side porch overlooking the stone culvert
with a whole new set of friends, mostly old and humorless.
Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand?
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study
the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year?
Will you still let me draw my sacred figures
and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?
Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky the waves are cold enough to wash out the meanness.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.
– Gerald Stern
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Gerald Stern’s Lucky Life
Gerald Stern was an American Beat Generation poet known for his passionate, restless, Whitman-like voice, full of memory, politics, humour, grief and gratitude. Born in Pittsburgh in 1925, he published widely over many decades, won the National Book Award for This Time: New and Selected Poems, and became admired for poems that could make ordinary moments feel suddenly immense — exactly the kind of spirit Diane Keaton captured by turning Lucky Life into a room.
Diane Keaton’s reading room turns Lucky Life into something more than a poem to be read; it becomes an atmosphere. The words wrap around the curved walls, surrounding the chair at the centre of the room, so that reading becomes almost architectural. It is not simply decoration. It is a declaration of what Keaton valued: books, images, memory, eccentricity, and the emotional charge of living among words.
Her homage to Stern’s poem also reveals something essential about her taste. Keaton was never content with interiors that merely looked good. She wanted rooms that had voice, rhythm and biography. A chair could become a stage. A wall could become a page. A poem could become part of the house itself.
That is what makes the image so powerful. Lucky Life is no longer confined to paper. In Keaton’s hands, it becomes a private sanctuary, a literary mural and a daily reminder that art does not have to sit at a polite distance. It can surround us, haunt us, comfort us and, with the right room, move in permanently.
Further reading, from our affiliates, Amazon
This Time: New and Selected Poems by Gerald Stern
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