David Lerner

Here's an introduction I wrote about David Lerner for a new anthology called The Spoken Word Revolution Redux (edited by Mark Eleveld). Lerner is a poet few people have heard of; his top dozen poems or so are outstanding. After the introduction, I've pasted one of his poems.
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“It is said that a saint
only becomes an icon
after many years of polishing.”
It’s a true pleasure to introduce the work of David Lerner in this context, hopefully exposing him to a larger readership. A few basic biographical details: Lerner was born in 1951 and died (of a drug overdose) in 1997. In his forty-six years, he published four books, all in a flurry of activity between 1988 and ’92, all with Zeitgeist Press.
Lerner was a fixture at the poetry nights at Café Babar in San Francisco; the regulars called themselves The Babarians. The San Francisco (and Berkeley) that Lerner emerged from no longer exists. That San Francisco, with the Mission’s fertile edginess, and a plethora of thorny, irreverent reading venues (the Chameleon, the Paradise Lounge) was destroyed (or at least badly damaged) with all the dot.com money that poured in, in the late 90’s, altering the city’s dynamic energy and making it much harder for scruffy, hand-to-mouth artist-types to survive.
When a poet leaves the earth physically, the phrase “out of sight, out of mind” comes into play. Even the heavily-accoladed academic poets (who Lerner despised) with their briefcases filled with olive wreathes and laurels—when they go over the cliff of life, usually their work follows suit, landing with a rarified plop on the slush pile of eternity.
What has kept Lerner’s work afloat for the nine years since he left the land of the breathing? How is it that a poet who only published on a very small press (even by poetry standards) and who didn’t have much of a readership outside of California gets to have a selected poems come out posthumously, when even a wonderful, younger, dead poet from the literary establishment, like Lynda Hull, can’t get a selected?
A couple reasons. One: a dedicated editor/publisher in Bruce Isaacson. Doesn’t every poet dream of a publisher like that, who even when you die will rescue what you did best in this world and try to bring it to the surface, just because he believes in you?
But the main reason Lerner’s work is alive, still floating, bobbing on the surface of oblivion, is that his poems bring a visceral joy to readers. Lerner doesn’t have admirers who stroke their chin and think (in a British accent), “hmm, quite a simile you came up there with Davy, old chap”. Lerner has believers. He appeals to our id, that dark place in the mind where rage and desire blurs.
His best work stomps a fine line between righteous indignation and spontaneous blasts of humor. His anger at society’s injustices, at poetic hypocrisy, is lightened, cut if you will, by his exquisite imagination, his ability to inflict tender, haunting imagery on the reader’s brain.
Lerner poems are often powered by wild, associative leaps. Many poems rely on anaphora (the repetition of a few words at the beginning of a line). The repeating phrase for Lerner functions almost like a canon, that he re-loads and aims in a new direction, firing out blasts of metaphor with great velocity. (Think of the way a star radiates out in multiple directions.) This type of poem also lends itself to (almost demands) a wild imagination, otherwise it will get boring quickly and feel repetitive. (One of writing’s paradoxes—how to repeat and not be repetitive.)
Photos of Lerner depict him as a large, furry, almost jolly man—imagine a younger version of Santa Claus who hasn’t surrendered the color in his hair yet—but Lerner’s poems are anything but big and burly, and definitely not cuddly. His poems are agile and full of kicks. More Kung-Fu than Sumo. As much Travis Bickle as Walt Whitman. Imagine the poetic love child of Etheridge Knight and Robert Desnos.
Lerner’s a chipped, cross-eyed sapphire in the rough. He’s a bearded Mona Lisa sleeping under a bridge. I’m not saying that every Lerner poet is a gem: many poems are sloppy and reach easy conclusions, striking the same note, but his best work, his top twenty poems, what every writer should ultimately be judged by, borders on the brilliant.
Maybe the best compliment I can give Lerner is that for the past four years at Sarah Lawrence College where I teach, we’ve put on a show called the Dead Poets Slam, where students memorize, embody, perform poems by dead poets in a theatrical context. Every year Lerner’s poems tear down the house.
I wish Lerner were still alive and writing, but I am thankful that we are left with this yearning, sparkling, unshaven, bruised, illuminating, relentless body of work that refuses to stay down.
MEIN KAMPF by David Lerner
“Gary Snyder lives in the country. He wakes up in the morning and listens to birds. We live in the city.”
– Kathleen Wood
all I want to do
is make poetry famous
all I want to do is
burn my initials into the sun
all I want to do is
read poetry from the middle of a
burning building
standing in the fast lane of the
freeway
falling from the top of the
Empire State Building
the literary world
sucks dead dog dick
I’d rather be Richard Speck
than Gary Snyder
I’d rather ride a rocketship to hell
than a Volvo to Bolinas
I’d rather
sell arms to the Martians
than wait sullenly for a
letter from some diseased clown with a
three-piece mind
telling me that I’ve won a
bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses
for my poem “Autumn in the Spring”
I want to be
hated
by everyone who teaches for a living
I want people to hear my poetry and
get headaches
I want people to hear my poetry and
vomit
I want people to hear my poetry and
weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,
eat their television sets, beat each other to death with
swords and
go out and get riotously drunk on
someone else’s money
this ain’t no party
this ain’t no disco
this ain’t foolin’ a
grab-bag of clever wordplay and sensitive thoughts and
gracious theories about
how many ambiguities can dance on the head of a
machine gun
this ain’t no
genteel evening over
cappuccino and bullshit
this ain’t no life-affirming
our days have meaning
as we watch the flowers breath [sic] through our souls and
fall desperately in love
this ain’t no letter-press, hand-me-down,
wimpy beatnik festival of bitching about
the broken rainbow
it is a carnival of dread
it is a savage sideshow
about to move to the main arena
it is terror and wild beauty
walking hand in hand down a bombed-out road
as missiles scream, while a
sky the color of arterial blood
blinks on and off
like the lights on Broadway
after the last junkie’s dead of AIDS
I come not to bury poetry
but to blow it up
not to dandle it on my knee
like a retarded child with
beautiful eyes
but
throw it off a cliff into
icy seas and
see if the motherfucker can
swim for its life
because love is an excellent thing
surely we need it
but, my friends...
there is so much hate These Days
that hatred is just love with a chip on its shoulder
a chip as big as the Ritz
and heavier than
all the bills I’ll never pay
because they’re after us
they’re selling radioactive charm bracelets
and breakfast cereals that
lower your IQ by 50 points per mouthful
we got politicians who think
starting World War III
would be a good career move
we got beautiful women
with eyes like wet stones
peering out at us from the pages of
glossy magazines
promising that they’ll
fuck us till we shoot blood
if we’ll just buy one of these beautiful switchblade knives
I’ve got mine.