Bert Meyers

Bert Meyers was born in Los Angeles on March 20, 1928. The son of Romanian Jewish immigrants, he maintained strong lifelong ties to his Jewish cultural heritage without being religious. Always rebellious and a questioner of authority, Meyers decided to drop out of high school and become a poet.

For many years, he worked manual labor jobs including janitor, farm worker, house painter, and printer’s apprentice, until he became a master picture framer and gilder. With this work, he finally found some satisfaction in the process of craftsmanship and attention to detail, which was the same approach he used in composing his poetry. Throughout these years, Myer continued to write, feeling that a poet should be immersed in the world, not ensconced in academia, and should have real-world subjects to write about. As he 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.”

Meyers wanted to be self-taught. He read everything he could get his hands on and had a prodigious literary memory. He frequented the vibrant circles of Los Angeles poets at the time, including Thomas McGrath and others. Fiercely independent and nonconforming, Meyers strove to find his own path. In the words of his fellow poet and friend Robert Mezey, “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.”

During the late 40s and 50s, he was involved with the communist youth in Los Angeles. His idealism and belief in people drew him towards various causes for the rest of his life, from civil rights to the anti-Vietnam War movement. Though never dogmatic or overtly political, his poems are full of humanistic belief and philosophy. 

In 1957, Meyers married Odette Sarah Miller, a recent French immigrant to Los Angeles who was the love of his life and his muse. A writer, poet, and translator in her own right, Miller helped anchor Meyers's turbulent nature. Together, they had two children, Anat Silvera and Daniel Meyers. It was challenging for Meyers to support this young family on the small salary of a picture framer. Within a couple of years, exposure to the fumes and materials of gilding and picture framing, exacerbated by his smoking, made Meyers ill. He was hospitalized and could not work for two difficult years.

Although he had never taken undergraduate classes and had no high school diploma, in 1964, Meyers was admitted to the Claremont Graduate School on the basis of his poetic achievements. By 1967, he had earned a masters degree and all the work necessary for a PhD in English Literature. Meyers was hired to teach poetry and literature at Pitzer College in Claremont, where he taught until 1978. During the last period of his life as a professor, Meyers not only finally had the time offered by academia to focus on his writing, he also had an important and lasting influence on some of his most talented students, a new generation of poets and writers including Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Garrett Hongo, and Mauyra Simon. Bert Meyers died of lung cancer in 1979 at the age of 51.

During his lifetime, Meyers published the collections Early Rain (1960), The Dark Birds (1968), Sunlight on the Wall (1976), Windowsills (1979), and The Wild Olive Trees (1979). Before he died, he also selected and arranged the core poems of the posthumous In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat: Collected Poems (2007). His widow, Odette Meyers, son Daniel Meyers, and friend Morton Marcus shepherded the book into publication, expanding Meyers’s original selections into his collected works by adding more poems, songs, articles, and testimonies to the work Meyers had originally chosen.

Meyers’s precisely-framed poems are frequently image-driven and often quite short. Noting that “the image is unequivocally at the center of his work” in her introduction to In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat, the late poet Denise Levertov lamented that, “Bert Meyers's death has deprived us of one of the best poets of our time,” and praised Meyers’s work for the “extraordinary intensity and perfection of his poems and the consistency with which he illumined what he experienced, bodying it forth in images that enable readers to share his vision and thereby extend the boundaries of their own lives.