On Bert Meyers

As an undergraduate at Pitzer College in 1984, I set up camp in the Bert Meyers Poetry Room. It was upstairs in the front bedroom of the Grove House, a Craftsman-style bungalow that had been moved to campus with great fanfare some years before, to serve as a student union of sorts. For three years, I read and wrote under the gaze of a portrait of Bert, which had a knack for falling off the wall whenever I was especially brooding about life. At those moments I always thought Bert was trying to get my attention: “Snap out of it! Get back to work!” And so I would. I hung out in the Poetry Room so much I moved in by accretion, eventually spending each night on the outside sleeping porch just off a side window for most of a semester, until the custodial staff found me out. Although Bert was five years dead when I started college, his presence was very alive in that room and in the classrooms where I began to study poetry.

I was introduced to his work by his former students, taught his work by his former colleagues, immersed myself in it in a room that housed his library of beat-up paperbacks. As someone who showed up to college in love with the poems of T.S. Eliot, I found books and periodicals among Bert’s collection that blew my mind open to contemporary poetry in English. Ntozake Shange’s Nappy Edges and Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares left indelible marks, as did many poems in translation—Julio Cortázar, Antonio Machado, Paul Celan—which I found in well-worn issues of Robert Bly’s influential magazine, The Sixties. Even in death, Bert was teaching me.

Reading Bert’s poems was revelatory. His capacity to visualize, to embody metaphor, stunned me. “I see it exactly!” I would think, encountering his images: two sailboats like tennis shoes walking on water; garlic whose “breath is a verb”—how entirely apt! As anyone who has tried to write a concrete and resonant image (or tried to teach someone else to write one) knows: it’s hard. What’s required? Devotion to both the five-sense fact of a thing and the dream it inspires; the facility to render it with the rhythmic and sonic pleasure that powers poetry; to compose it with the economic compression that is the signature of the poetic image; and to combine these craft elements into something that feels indelibly true to lived experience. Something like this:

Smoke waters the flowers
that grow in the lungs.
The cigarette, like your life,
is a piece of chalk
that shrinks as it tries to explain.

A searing set of images from one of Bert’s greatest poems, “After the Meal,” evoking the cancer that would kill him at fifty-one.

____

Bert Meyers was a quintessential Los Angeles poet. Born there in 1928, his poems are full of evocations of “the desert/that lost its mind”: its freeways, vacant lots, gas stations, palm trees, dry hills, a place where “jasmine and gasoline/undress the night.” The son of Romanian Jewish immigrants, he maintained lifelong ties to his Jewish heritage without being religious. In adulthood he worked as a janitor, a ditch digger, a sheet metal worker, a warehouse man, a printer’s apprentice, and a house painter, until settling into work as an artisan picture framer and gilder, finding contract work with Los Angeles galleries. He once wrote in his journals, “I worked for more than fifteen years at various kinds of manual labor and during that time I met many men and women who could see and speak as poetically as those who are glorified by the printing press and the universities.”

Self-taught, Bert dropped out of high school at sixteen only to find himself a college professor in the last years of his life. In between, he read everything. He had decided opinions about literature, especially canonical poets: “I think Yeats needs to be criticized,” he wrote in his journals. “He, more than any other modern English poet, could make abstractions seem more real than our daily lives. Yet, his poems on women or old age are banal, for the way they portray sex as a kind of celestial gasoline and never deal with love.” About Pound’s Cantos he wrote: “I think the last stanza of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ is of far more value to mankind.”

If you’ve never read the whole of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” that last stanza has to do with kindness to the vulnerable. Bert was involved with various causes for his entire adult life, from working with communist youth in the forties and fifties to civil rights to the anti–Vietnam War movement. His poems often respond to the sociopolitical. It’s uncanny to read a poem published in 1979 and feel its contemporary resonance: in “These Days,” Bert writes, “These days, everything’s bad./The future waits in a button./No one plans, nobody says:/Three years from now ... ” The music and cultural critic Stanley Crouch said of Bert, “He was elegantly refined but also tough enough to understand the tragedy that slashes the throat of innocence.”

Bert put a premium on honesty, writing to the poet John Haines: “The freedom to speak honestly to someone else is precious.” He sent his second book, The Dark Birds, to W.H. Auden with a letter that closed: “I hope you enjoy the book. But if you dislike the poems, and have the time, I’d appreciate your telling me why.” His fellow poet and friend Robert Mezey said of him, “Bert Meyers belonged to no school or coterie and had no use for fashion. He was that rarest of creatures, a pure lyric poet. His poems are very much what he was—gentle, cantankerous, reflective, passionate and wise.”

____

Bert published five collections in his lifetime, all but one with small presses you’ve probably never heard of. His first book, for instance, a chapbook called Early Rain, came out with the now-defunct Alan Swallow Press in 1960, when Bert was thirty-two. His most high-profile publication was The Dark Birds, his second book and his first full-length collection, which came out from Doubleday eight years later. It’s in this book that Bert’s mature style holds sway, in poems like “Madman Songs” and “Stars Climb Girders of Light,” which are included in this folio. For me and for many who are still alive and read Bert’s work, many of his best known poems—“Signature,” “After the Meal,” “These Days,” and “Postcards,” to name but a few—can be found in The Dark Birds and in 1981’s The Wild Olive Tree & The Blue Café (Jazz Press/PapaBach Editions), which came out a few years after his death. But to say “best known” in relation to Bert’s work begs the question: best known by whom? He was read and respected by many of his contemporaries, including Robert Bly, Stanley Crouch, Denise Levertov, and Charles Simic. But he never published with a mainstream press like Doubleday again.

In 2007, nearly thirty years after he died, University of New Mexico Press brought out a collected, In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat, which is how new and younger readers found his work. Small presses, university presses—Bert’s work would not have survived without them. Considering the financial precarity such presses continually face, it’s no surprise that all of Bert’s books are out of print.

Which brings us to now. Nearly forty years after I first walked into the Bert Meyers Poetry Room, I’ve had the luck to edit a volume of his work for the Unsung Masters Series at Pleiades Press, a volume which will publish in March. My coeditor, Adele Elise Williams, and Bert’s son, Daniel Meyers, have been integral to this endeavor. I extend special gratitude to Daniel, who has kept his father’s archive of poems, journals, letters, notes, and photos alive: this book—and this folio—would not exist without Daniel’s stewardship of Bert’s memory.

Readers will notice I keep referring to Bert as “Bert,” and not “Meyers,” which would be the convention for an introductory essay on a literary figure—I can’t help it. As a student at Pitzer College, no one I met who had known Bert referred to him as anything else. There was often a sense of familial love, reverence, and bemusement in the way his former students and colleagues talked about him. Even though I never met Bert, I began to feel part of this family, part of the protective and loving circle that seemed to surround his memory and his work. A deep bow to Kevin Prufer and everyone on the board of the Unsung Masters Series, as well as to the editorial team at Poetry: you make space for the recovery and reclamation of significant literary voices nearly lost to time.