By his third or fourth anecdote, 90-year-old poet and essayist Gerald Stern had me eating out of his hand — metaphorically speaking, of course.

He’s back in his hometown to give a lecture tonight in Oakland, and I met him for the first time at his hotel Monday to hear him one on one. When I asked whether he found it necessary long ago to leave Pittsburgh to “find his voice,” the National Book Award winner and author of two dozen books and thousands of poems denied the question’s premise.

“I never really left [Pittsburgh],” he said despite currently owning a home in Lambertville, N.J., and an apartment in New York City. His resume is sprinkled with the academic, literary and life milestones expected of a writer of his stature.

Ever the silver-tongued raconteur, Mr. Stern effortlessly rattles off some biographical highlights — high school at Taylor Allderdice, an undergraduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a friendship with the nationally known poet Jack Gilbert, followed by a stint in the military. He hung around long enough to qualify for the G.I. Bill, which helped him get a master’s degree from Columbia University.

Mr. Stern recalls driving his friend, an artist then known as Andy Warhola, to East Liberty to catch a train that would take him to New York. For his friendship, Warhol gave him a painting of Mrs. Warhola that would be worth millions if it hadn’t been lost in a storage locker years later, a twist of fate that still causes Mr. Stern to chuckle.

Like many writers in their 30s in the middle of the last century, Mr. Stern did a lot of knocking around between New York and Paris. He taught for seven years at Temple University, where he failed to get tenure, and eventually migrated to Indiana University of Pennsylvania in a period he vividly remembers because of the Kennedy assassination and the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi.

After four years at IUP, Mr. Stern took a leave of absence to work at a community college in New Jersey. He then taught at Pitt for a year in 1979. That was followed by an invitation from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, from which he retired in 1996 after 14 years on the faculty. Ever restless, a stint at Sarah Lawrence brought him out of retirement. He continues to lecture, publish award-winning books and do workshops at the start of his 10th decade.

But his anecdotes are what stand out most about Mr. Stern, who insists he hasn’t missed a day of writing since he resolved in 1966 to get serious about it. He invited me to feel the bullet still lodged in his neck from when he was shot in Newark, N.J., in 1985 on his way to a reading scheduled the day afterward in Bethlehem, Pa.

To this day, he doesn’t know if he was the victim of a gang initiation or an attempted carjacking. He was in the passenger seat, and he remembers collapsing to the floor of the car near the accelerator, pushing down hard on it with his bloody hands while the panicked driver steered them out of danger. He eventually made it to a hospital and was discharged the next day.

The other poets he was supposed to read with in Bethlehem memorialized him because they’d heard he’d died. When he showed up to read his poems, some of those poets were more angry about it than relieved.

On a separate note, the writer who was born and raised in “Jew Town,” the city neighborhood now called Uptown, recalls his complicated relationship with the photo-realist painter Philip Pearlstein, who was then dating the woman who would become Mr. Stern’s first wife.

Like Woody Allen’s Zelig, Mr. Stern’s own cultural center of gravity put him in touch with many of the 20th century’s most influential writers and artists. His steady output and intellectual restlessness earned him legions of admirers and a declaration by University of Pittsburgh Press editor Ed Ochester that he is America’s “greatest living poet.”

“If this guy didn’t love me, I wouldn’t be here,” says the poet Toi Derricotte about the man she met at the Iowa writers program decades ago. “He was a bridge to me for my own power and authority.”

Gerald Stern will deliver a free lecture at 7 p.m. at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall. Yes, this is worth missing the first half of the Democratic debate to catch.

Tony Norman: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631.

First Published: October 13, 2015, 4:00 a.m.