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Morton Marcus: Stars climb girders of light, they arrange themselves in the usual place. They quit before dawn, and nothing has been done. Then men come out, their helmets fill the sky. Their cities rise and fall and men descend. Proud

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carpenters of dew. Man brief as the storm, more than five feet of lightning, twisted and beautiful. Man made like his roads with somewhere to go. That was a poem by tonight's subject on the Poetry Show, Bert

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Meyers and it is with great pleasure and sadness that I bring you Bert Meyer's poetry. And I'm going to tell you a bit about him, who he was and let you hear some of his poetry tonight. I will start though by reading you the beginning of an

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article by Denise Levertov, written in her book of collected essays by New Directions called, "Light Up the Cave." And this is an article simply called, "Bert Meyers," and the first line goes like this: "Bert Meyers' death has deprived us of one of the

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best poets of our time." There are many people who agree with that: Philip Levine, John Haines, Robert Bly, the list goes on and on. And yet, the tragedy of this man is that he has died almost 20 years ago and his Selected Poems have never

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come out, although they have been waiting for publication. The first year I did this program, which was back around 13 years ago or more, I presented a Bert Meyers program and that is what I plan on doing tonight.

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So, tonight's show is on the poet, Bert Meyers. And let me just go through his biography and let you understand where some of his imagery comes from, and where his concerns come from. Bert Meyers was born in Los Angeles in 1928 and he spent

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many years of his childhood in a mountain camp run by the Red Cross for orphans and children from broken homes. After sporadic attendance at Hollywood High and other schools, he was off to New York and lived there a few years in extreme poverty,

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teaching himself to write poetry. By the mid 1950s, when he was merely, you know, just 20 to 23 years old, he was back in LA, working as a sander in the Landau Gallery and doing the most menial sort of labor. Marriage and the birth of

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children convinced him he better improve his worldly prospects and he became a picture framer and gilder. He liked his craft very much and worked at it for more than 10 years, until, with weak lungs, he was forced to give it up. He had suffered

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periodic attacks of asthma all through his life, and the chemical fumes aggravated his illness. Although he never finished high school or attended college, he was admitted to Claremont Graduate School through the kind intervention of

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Sachvan Berkovich(?). With his keen intelligence in literary culture, he had no difficulty in completing the course of study, but hard-pressed to support his family, he accepted a job at Pitzer College without finishing his dissertation or taking a

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degree. It was 1967 then, and he and Odette, his wife, and the two children were to live in Claremont for the next 12 years except for brief sabbaticals and fellowships. His first book, "The Dark Birds," was published by Doubleday in 1968, but

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attracted relatively little attention, although he was praised early by Marianne Moore and John Hall Wheelock, and as I've said, later by Denise Levertov and other distinguished fellow poets, his audience during his lifetime was woefully

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small. His original lyric style was not fashionable, and he had no interest or talent for self-promotion. Kayak Press, which by the way, friends, is how I met Bert when he was coming through Santa Cruz, this is when Kayak and George

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Hitchcock moved down from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, back in the late 60s. Kayak Press brought out, "Sunlight on the Wall," in 1976 and that was it. He could not find a publisher for his other work. He died in 1979 of lung cancer at the age

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of 51. Papa Box Jazz Press published a double book, or two books, "The Wild Olive Tree," and, "The Blue Cafe," in 1982. Now, that is the same Jazz Press you older members of the literary community here know was based afterwards in Santa Cruz

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and was run by a student of George Hitchcock's, who graduated and decided he wanted to become a printer. A volume of Selected Poems was supposed to appear by 1985; it has never come out. But perhaps in the future, he will find the readers

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he deserves who will delight in what John Haines described quote in talking about Bert's poetry, "As the freshness and originality of Bert's images and the compassion that lay behind those images." I certainly hope that is the case and I have been

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recently in touch with his widow Odette and was very, very sorry to hear about the difficulties of getting a book of Bert's published. So if I would, I'm going to read you from what Odette sent me

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which is actually Bert's selection of his own poems for his Selected Poems. But before I do that, I want to read and describe what a Bert Meyers poem is like. I want to read from his last book, really, which is called, "The Blue Cafe," and it

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is just a series of images and I think what everyone loved about Bert's work, certainly Denise Levertov talks about it in her work, and I'm sure that Haines who loved short, tight, compact poems loved about it, and Bly certainly did, was the nature of

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the imagery that Bert Meyers used, that he could actually put into words. It was very original, but it's also very haiku-like. He can say things in a line or two, even though the poem may go on, which you think is an entire poem in itself. And

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I just want to read some of these images to you, these are all separate little poems, to give you this sense of where his poetry is. He believed that what an artist should do, in his case, of course, a poet, is to evoke responses in the reader to

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make them see the world in a new way and therefore enrich themselves to become seers who can therefore find the richness in their lives, no matter how ugly or menial their daily lives are. By the way, he was a great poet of Los Angeles among other

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things. And one of my favorite images by him was his image of Los Angeles. He called- it went like this: "Los Angeles, the planet's largest ashtray." And that is some of the nature of the images he gave you. Though they are so precise and

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startling, they yet evoke more, your imagination works and fills in the suggestion of that image. Anyway, here are some of these images, which he wrote for Odette between 1975 and his death in 1979. And I'll pause after each one of these because

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they're poems in themselves as I said. Bales of hay, Cartons of sunlight fading in a field, leaves everywhere, shreds of a giant eraser, an oak leaf becoming an antique.

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The highway's an old surrealist's granite hair, and the seas become a sky full of clouds. A wind records the waves and plays them in the trees. After the rain, a streetlight hangs the shadows of trees like

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laundry on a wall. Hands, twin sisters to whom everyone's a wrinkle that needs to be smoothed, a stranger who should be fed. I wish we were two birds living in a courtyard near

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Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Leaves spread their tablecloths, trees open their cafes, all day the sun's a barrel of beer. At night, the Earth's a woman, the full moon's her mirror. And this is the poetry of Bert Meyers that we will be reading

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tonight and I'm now going to go to his own selection of his poems sent to me by Odette Meyers, which is entitled "In a Dybbuk's Raincoat," and a Dybbuk is sort of a Jewish devil. So from the Selected Poems, 1950 to 1975. It is four years before

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his death and I think that, "The Blue Cafe," and, "The Wild Olive Tree," the double book that was put out by Jazz Press really are his later work and we'll get to that by the end of the show. BECAUSE THERE'S SO MUCH SPEED, this is the very first poem he

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selected for the beginning of the book. Because there's so much speed without any place to go and driven blind as light, we rush from stone to stone and bumping against the world. I like the subtle snail wrapped in its

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wooden fog, it crawls across my yard, and where it goes, it paints the ground with useless roads. Day and night in its world, leaves fall without a sound and flowers become suns that bugs like little planets in a green astronomy go round and

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round and round. RAINY DAY Outside, nothing moves, only the rain, nailing the house up like a coffin. Remember in childhood when it rained and the whole

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world sailed down the alley, leaves, paper, old shoes, the buildings, everything like a circus going to sea? Now the rain, the iron rain, with its little keys, is closing all the doors and I think we're all dead. See how the sky sits like

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a tombstone on the roofs? AT MY WINDOW And you've seen boys play and he remembers his own childhood. Across the street, nine boys in the weeds scream hurling rocks,

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blackbirds are headlines overhead. One boy looks at the sun, and I look back at how I stood under a tree, my hands hot with stones. A squirrel tail up and balanced on a bow faced me like a question I couldn't answer. Here on this jewel of

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Earth, time tears at the green edge. This pain, thin water makes two small islands of my eyes and the sky always seems to be the sail of a great ship that never reaches land. Below on the sidewalk, a neighbor's little girl tall as a yardstick, her

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eyes in glasses on her bike rides by singing, "Old Lady of Spain, I adore you." And it's obvious that so much of his poem, poems, are observing the world, seeing and recording, and you don't really get the

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sense of the poet, as an eye, a confessor. He is not an "I" that is a capital letter, "I," he is an eye, an E-Y-E, and he is concerned with giving these precise little pictures, which will sort of bloom like flowers in your mind. This does not mean

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that he only writes nature poems or only writes these observances. He also, though he tries to contain this, has poems of social significance, and certainly sees the ugliness of the world around him, both in the United States and in Europe

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as well when he traveled there. Here's a poem called, "In the Alley." And just listen to this opening image of seeing a plane high in the sky. This is where Bert is the penultimate, concise and precise poet and where he seems to owe so much to Asian

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poetry and becomes so much like a Haiku poet, but of great originality. His language's extremely casual, informal, grasping the vernacular of spoken American, really. IN THE ALLEY

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At noon, an airplane, a hard drop of sweat rolls down the sky's big forehead. The dry alley dreams of water, trampled root, fenced off, the housewife trees multiply their fruit. Later a man gray as gravel comes up the alley and a garbage can,

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an alarm of flies goes off in his face. Scared by a wind that walks through gates, among the leaves, the fallen man curls around the wall like smoke and disappears. In the yards, the trees drop loquats and yellow, ripe, round pears.

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In that marvelous picture, that marvelous sense of place and endings, but again, that incredible image, "At noon, an airplane, a hard drop of sweat rolls down the sky's, big forehead." I just, it's stuff that astonishes readers and

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certainly astonishes other poetry. Here's, "Picture Framing," which of course is what he did for so many years and it really weakened his already asthmatic lungs. When you're picture framing, when you're gilding, all of that gold

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dust, if you would, goes into your throat and the other chemicals that are used, and this finally was Bert's undoing, although he also was a very heavy smoker, so none of this helped.

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PICTURE FRAMING My fingers graze in the fields of wood. I sand pine, walnut, base, and sweat to raise their grain. Paints, powder and brush are the seasons of my trade. At the end of the day, I drive home

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the proud cattle of my hands. And I, you know, I wonder, I've done some work with my hands in the past and you get to feel having worked with them that your hands, they become big, they become knobby, calloused,

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I'm sure many of you have felt this out there. And you feel that they they're like cattle, you know, and he drives home the proud cattle of his hands, but they are proud cattle because they have done an honest day's work and because he is, of

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course, a craftsman and he is very proud of being a craftsman. And that I think also goes with his poetry, he is proud of the craft of poetry and what he can accomplish in it as a craftsman with words. Okay, going on.

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THIS MORNING We were the rain last night. A smell still lingers in the flower beds. The white hills rise like crumpled moons, a swarm of insects lights a lawn's dull face. We go to see

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ourselves in puddles, you and I, clear fragrant fragments of the flood. And I am just reading right through his Selected Poems. Here's, "Pigeons," a little bit longer poem. All the poems by

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the way, though he has written some prose poems, which I will read later, are very short line poems. They usually have two beats to the line, sometimes they go off at three but they're usually no more than two or three beats to the line.

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PIGEONS Wherever I go to find peace or an island under palms in the afternoon, at midnight to pity my neighborhood, at dawn in the shrubs to look for a child, I hear them. They fly by

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applauding themselves. I see them, they pray as they walk, their eyes are halos around a pit. They look amazed. Who are these that come as a cloud to our windows, who rush up like smoke before the town burns. You will find one on a mountain, a

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carpenter shop, at home on the lawn of an old estate, at the library in the forehead of paradise. Whoever is mad can accuse them, thousands are killed in a day, what happens to them happens to me. When I can't sleep, they moan, and I'm there,

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and it's still like that. I'm going through a long sequence now called, "Madman Poems." And here's, GULLS HAVE COME AGAIN, and it's really a poem

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about dusk. Gulls have come again to consider another beautiful death of the sun. People were flowers that grew by the shore, twilight takes them home. They fade together at their tables. In the

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tall green shops, the police of birds lower the last light, the eyelid of a shadow shuts the hills. The sound of the ocean walks over the land. Nobody wants to die. And it's fitting that the next poem called, "Funeral." And I

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must say that, especially this first stanza, this was a poem published in Kayak. And I remember when I was collating the magazines, I did almost every one of them for a number of years, I came across this poem in Kayak, and it just took

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my breath away. And this was the first Bert Meyers poem I ever read. It's FUNERAL and just listen to this opening stanza: Surely a dead moth's the skull of a tiny horse, and the moon's

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a saint who pities the sea. Peace, peace to this child of rain and light and the people who stay holding candles and lilies, tasting their tears, naked in a dream over the long drawer they've closed in the earth.

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And I think that the beginning of that poem, "Surely a dead moth's the skull of a tiny horse," I mean, it just- it just totally upsets your perspective. It totally upsets the way you look at the world. And the last image, the image of the grave,

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itself, being a long drawer that they've closed in the earth since now the child is buried, it's just really wonderful, a really wonderful sense. Not just because it's an original image, to look at a grave as a drawer that is now closed when you fill

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it, but because it gives you a sense there of the earth being an enormous bureau, something that we would have in a bedroom, it makes the whole world into our bedroom, our intimate room, our living in our house or the Earth is our house. And so

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therefore, we inhabit something that is not vast, but it's something that is part of our everyday life and that we should take care of as we take care of the most intimate room and furniture in our lives. And that's how his image opens up.

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Here's A YEAR IN A SMALL TOWN, in four very tiny sections: 1. Surrounded by flowers, bees are drowning in the house painter's pot. 2. Today I know I haven't done as much for this world as a

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tree. 3. Children bring home stones instead of friends. The black bird has a golden eye. 4. Spring, that young man is wearing the shirt. I was

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[unidentified] him. But I want you to notice, certainly one of those, it is so much like a zen koan and or a haiku and it is so mystical, so visionary and Bert's trademark's so simple, "Today I know I

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haven't done as much for this world as a tree." This is called ONE MORNING. I told myself a single man's like water where nobody swims; and I went out. In gardens, doves(?) were broken jars a wind

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blew through, beds of ivy were spread with webs. Old underwear, forgotten wives, mores of the wrong figures of men lay at the roots. While sparrows strain their tiny springs to live, I heard how people damned another day. Later, I found some

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blackberries under a porch and leaves as rough as a cat's tongue. And here he's talking about lovers in a poem called THE DRIVE:

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Because their bed was calm, and they'd never done what they read about, they drove to the hills, left the car and climbed high over the shale and spread her dress in the dirt. Soft ceramic quail, the natives there, still from the chaparral, while they

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groomed and hurt themselves. He made [inaudible] bubble out of the ground. The hill was a flower that evening closed. They went naked. [Cut]

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To enter this workshop, he's heard about this poetry workshop being taught by Bert Meyers, and he says this and I will read you this this page, what it was like to be in there knowing nothing and he says this and as I said, Garrett is Japanese-American:

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"There were around nine people in the class. A man with long blonde hair and a puckered face that gathered down to a ginger beard introduced the topic of Walt Whitman and his homosexuality. Another student, a woman with long braided brown

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hair, smelling of patchouli oil cited some critics and a discussion she'd been involved in at a writer's conference in Vermont the past summer. I felt in a war and how complicated their acquaintanceships with a subject, was how socialized. I'd

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barely begun to read poetry, let alone discuss it with adults in a public place, especially a classroom. Then Meyer said, that's crap, and proceeded to provide us with an extended critique of this particular journalistically and decidedly

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unliterary approach the discussion of Whitman. Meyer said that Whitman was a poet who may have been gay, who may not have been gay, who might have been multi-sexual or bisexual or non-sexual. But what was important about Whitman was that

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he had this feeling for human kind, for the wounded dying in the Union hospitals, for the workers and builders and teamsters, and for women that compelled him to write a strange prosaic, but chant-like non-metric verse, slightly

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imitative of what he thought Indian Vedic scripture was like, slightly imitative of what he thought Native American storytelling and ceremonial chant were like, and taking off on what he vaguely heard about as vers libre, free-verse from

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the French, borrowing certain common American religious ideas, joining all of them to what he felt was the elite fashion of literary transcendentalism. And from that he, Walt Whitman, a newspaperman and profound sentimentalist, had accomplished

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the building, along with Emily Dickinson, a spinster, of what had come to us as American poetry. Homosexuality was not the issue, nor was heterosexuality, said Meyers, it was poetry that was the issue. And he, Meyers, would not allow

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our discussions to be turned over to whatever fashionable or scholarly controversy has written, had arisen to divert attention away from what was important. Poetry was poetry, he said, and although gay rights and women's rights and minority

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rights were important, it was poetic content and poetic style and poetic tradition, which we would emphasize, and not the social controversies, not debunking and not the dismissing. Unlike my usual literary professors, who

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cultivated a studied mildness, Bert Myers had passion. He had opinions and he was not afraid to state them. He had an attitude and he felt confident in exposing us to it. And that attitude had the music of eloquence."

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That says what he does and at the end of the class, this is what happens: "When he was finished, he tucked the pamphlet he was reading from into his outer coat pocket, reassembled his thermos and

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started for the door. He hesitated and asked if I'd walk with him, and since I'd said nothing during the class and puzzled him, we left the building through a glass door. His wife and teenage son and daughter were there to meet him.

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They were walking a family dog, a black labrador, and invited me to trail along. We trudged back through a foggy night, across asphalt tennis courts, a zillion lined walks and under olive trees, through one college's campus and then another. I found

00:31:58.490 - 00:32:14.000

myself walking beside the poet who produced the pipe and was having trouble keeping it lit. He'd stopped from time to time relighting the pipe and I'd stop with him to keep him company. "I know what you're unhappy about," Meyer said, sucking on the stem

00:32:14.000 - 00:32:30.260

of his pipe. Sprinklers hissed on a lawn somewhere nearby. His wife and children and dog were up ahead of us. I was stunned, fixed to the sidewalk in my sturdy tennis shoes. He stared at me. "Your parents were in those camps," he said, and a

00:32:30.260 - 00:32:45.290

puff of smoke swirled around the dark blade of his face. He said even a kid in high school in Los Angeles, it was World War II, a few months after Pearl Harbor. He was a gymnast at Marshall High. There were lots of Japanese-American kids in

00:32:45.290 - 00:32:58.130

school, he'd grown up with them. He'd gone to the picnics at MacArthur Park with a niece, he would bring their kids every weekend and share food, rice bowls and fish cakes and sweet pieces of marinated meat. He'd run around, he was a kid and

00:32:58.130 - 00:33:12.560

could ask anyone, a Jewish kid, with his Jewish parents, Sephardic Jews, in fact, from Spain via Brooklyn and he'd grown up with him, passing baseball, playing baseball, stealing hubcaps trying to get dates, when all of a sudden one

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morning all these Japanese people he had been playing with, all the Japanese-American kids were gone, just gone. He couldn't believe it. Our government had taken all of them, rounded them up like cattle and marched them off into

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trains and ship them away to God knows where, to kingdom come, to concentration camps, the desert. His schoolmates were stunned but everyone seemed to accept that after a while. Meyer's father, Manuel, raged about it at home. It was a crummy deal. Bert Myers

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knew about it. He could tell me, he could look into my eyes and see into the history I was not myself ready to address, to live by. He knew part of me, my story, the part no one else knew or seemed to want to know. And he said he would help me with

00:34:05.840 - 00:34:33.380

it, he was telling me that. I followed him." So that is the effect that Bert had on his students. I've read other memoirs of Bert by his students, and they are all very similar, the passion, the eloquence, and the total

00:34:33.380 - 00:34:51.170

dedication to the art of poetry. So, let me continue reading some of these poems by Bert Reynolds, and- Bert Reynolds, very funny. Bert Meyers, and not Burt Reynolds by any means. Bert Meyers and this is:

00:34:51.000 - 00:35:12.120

The grasshopper goes for a ride, its little sprocket spins over IN THE YARD the earth. A lizard five inches of stream flows under a board. The leaf runs from the cat, a moth's a Pharaoh in search of a

00:35:12.120 - 00:35:30.450

tomb full of light. And a bumblebee explains to the morning glories the joy of being a telephone. Only the woman knows what the man's for. I'm gonna read that again because this really shows that

00:35:30.480 - 00:35:45.870

imagery coming again and again, every two lines and then it graduates from the insects in the yard to the human condition. So I'll read it again. And again, this marvelous imagery I've been talking about if you're just tuned in, that

00:35:45.870 - 00:36:01.260

really is the hallmark of Bert Meyers' work. His work's so Haiku-like, so precise and concise. IN THE YARD The grasshopper goes for a ride, it's a little sprocket spins

00:36:01.260 - 00:36:24.510

over the earth. The lizard, five inches of stream flows under a board. The leaf runs from the cat, a moth's a Pharaoh in search of a tomb full of light. And a bumblebee explains to the morning glories the joy of being a telephone. Only the woman

00:36:24.510 - 00:36:47.180

knows what the man's for. Kayak Press, George Hitchcock's Kayak Press put out, "Sunlight on the Wall," which really was all the poems that Bert wanted to collect from the earlier books that he'd written, the two

00:36:47.180 - 00:37:03.200

earlier books, and that became part of, "Sunlight on the Wall," which also had other poems in it, but it's very much up to 1975 the Collected Poems, so here's some things now from actually, "Twilight in the Walls," called:

00:37:03.200 - 00:37:19.090

TWILIGHT AT THE SHOP A whole day at the saw, when they come for the rubbish, I throw myself out with the dust. We smile and smoke and praise what's left of the sun. Dark trees have bottled its light,

00:37:20.110 - 00:37:41.810

they glow like many beers. "I can't sleep," and how many times we felt this and wanted to write something just, in some way talk about the sense of loss and anxiety that we have. And yet, just the wonder of being at

00:37:41.810 - 00:37:59.660

that moment alone and up in the house, "I can't sleep." I CAN'T SLEEP I wish we were young in another house in a different town. I can hear the dog run away in her dream. Outside, raindrops. Their

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tender hoofbeats trapped in the courtyard of a leaf. This is: SOME DEFINITIONS AT WORK. The hammer lowered its horns and the rusty nail shrieked, pulled from the place where it lived. The table saw whined like a

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virtuous bee that knows it will die in a metal of dust. The sandpaper sighed as it killed itself caressing the sugar pine and the ash. The house painter's brush, amorphodite with a long stem, a vaginal voice and a spring in its bristle swayed,

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satisfied with itself on the wall. Glue, the woodworker's sperm began to boil in the pot. The rigs, their breath full of turpentine, demanded their rights and threatened to burst like the sun. Then the woman who turned into a mop, disheveled

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gray, worn out by the floor, and the man who'd become a broom, his broad shoulder lost in the dirt, noticed how even a motor bleeds when it breaks, drops of oil stare from its skin like the eyes of frightened fish.

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I mean, it's just one image after another that just takes your breath away. Here's some landscapes. This is first of The city grows from a highway's stem. It's a glittering circuit all,

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THE CITY board, a crystal that palpates. Night swept away like a broken glass. The day begins, it prints the parking lots, doors work like switches, people are impulses in a system. But often,

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a siren occurs, the awaken man's incredulous wail, and the sky, that rotten lung bleeds, then blackens. The windows on the walls multiply their cells. Still curious, the infected moon regulates its lens.

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That whole sense of being in the city, obviously Los Angeles with the blackened lung, the rotten lung that bleeds, the sunlight coming up. And then blackening which is its wonderful smog, to then suddenly have the moon you know, infected regulating its

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lens, sort of looking curiously down at the city, making the city seem so small but also just wondering, what is man doing to himself down there. Here is another landscape called: ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE CITY

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On the outskirts the factory, somebody's chemistry set, a junkyard where the town keeps throwing itself away. Rust clots on the mangled iron pane in the sun's aluminum glare. There's a hubcap, going blind in a ditch, the dust spreading its cataract,

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and a few yellow machines that die like sunflowers dropping their parts in a field. The hills are a pile of rags in a pail of dirty thinner. Scrap metal trees crinkle in the wind's gray flame and the tumbleweeds roll their barbed

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wire over the road. An airplane roars like a sperm through a crack in the smog's deep stone. And that is- we've been reading a lot of beautiful images by Bert but that is the other side of what Bert sees. It is not a

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world that is all sunlight and melodies, it is a world which we are making ugly, and we are destroying and he does not talk as a social poet as such taking up a cause, he just again observes what we're doing in the world and lets the power of the

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images do their work. Here's the third of these landscapes and this is called ALONG THE COAST as we move from city to outskirts and finally You stare, propped like a sick man from the car's enchanted

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along the coast. bed. A hill nibbles at a field's green fork. An old arthritic fence huddled up toward a cloud. A little factory smoke grows abstract in the sky. Only the cows have reached perfection.

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Their quiet minds look empty, the landscape requires them. When the cows eat, the ground, the shadows, even boulders ise and bow to each other. Far way the suburbs, one cube cloni g itself, like tumbstone at a eteran's cemetery. And all along

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the coast, the sun drives over he city, its windshields glitte in the waves. Here's a long thin poem called, "Pebble." PEBBLE

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Fragment of the first chunk, a regular moon, perpetual cloud that dusts blind eye, mud's crude planet. Durable friend between the fingers, destroyer of giants, something that grows immense in a shoe, the boulders crumb, the rock's quiet child,

00:44:26.630 - 00:44:52.520

the flower's pure disciple. Wasteland's embryo despairs gray seed, staunch member in the brotherhood of water polishers, wisdom's jewel, weed's eternal fruit, the raindrop's tomb. Let me read that again. These are just a series of images on a

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pebble. And if you wonder about the one for example, that talks about the destroyer of giants is of course, a reference to David, who picks up a stone and a little larger than a pebble and kills Goliath. But anyway, here again is pebble and just the

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series of images, which end with the most startling image. If you've ever read a poem like this, what you've got to do is each image has to be better than the preceding one. And you have to make sure that you end with the strongest one yet that

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certainly seems to imply a great meaning as this does. Anyway: PEBBLE Fragment of the first chunk, a regular moon, perpetual cloud, the dust's blind eye, mud's crude a planet. Durable friend

00:45:41.870 - 00:46:03.470

between the fingers, destroyer of giants, something that grows immense in a shoe, the boulder's crumb, the rock's quiet child, the flower's pure disciple, wasteland's embryo, despair's gray seed, staunch member in the brotherhood of water polishers,

00:46:04.550 - 00:46:26.210

wisdom's jewel, the weed's eternal fruit, the raindrop's tomb. And his great compassion and sensitivity for people here is a very, very short poem on old age and the old.

00:46:29.420 - 00:46:50.060

OLD is what it's called. Their children are gone. Almost everyone they loved and half of what they understood has disappeared. But the door's still open, the porch light's on, a little wind at night and

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they hear footsteps when a few leaves fall. Okay, I'm going to rush through this and we are just about to finish. There's many, many, many more pages here, which I would love to read. But what I'm going to do now is I'm going to jump

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to several poems in his last book, which is not in the Selected Poems, and I've got to ask you for that, um, the poem images I read to you is not in the Selected Poems. And so, I will read one more poem, and if you just tuned in, this is KUSP

00:47:49.170 - 00:48:08.550

88.9 FM on your dial, and I've been reading the poems of Bert Meyers, born in 1928 and died at the age of 51 in 1979 of lung cancer, and is really one of those poets who was beloved of some of the finest poets writing today, some of the most famous

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poets, but whose work has been enormously neglected. And it's really time for him to have a Selected Poems come out. There is a long story why it has not come out. I do not want to go into it on the air, but it is rather shameful and already

00:48:24.630 - 00:48:40.290

just- and his wife Odette, who has been loyal and wonderful, really wants before her time is up for this book to come out and I'll be seeing what I can do about that. Anyway, here's the last poem in this double book put out by Jazz Press here in

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Santa Cruz, "The Wild Olive Tree," and, "The Blue Cafe." And it's, here's the order I would like to imagine. This is the latest poem that Bert would have written. It's called HERE IS THE AUTUMN.

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Well, we've reached the autumn. When it's all run down, leaves peel like paint, the edges of things get brown. Days are made of paper thrown out with trash, the sky's a window that needs to be washed. Youth's like sunlight fading in a pair of jeans and

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only becomes the century's exhausted dreams. We're growing old, my dear. Our minds are turning gritty, the friends we had aren't there, this world's a painting on a wall that fades away.

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Let me read that again. We're growing old, my dear. Our minds are turning gray, the friends we had aren't here, this world's a painting on a wall that floats away.

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The poetry of Bert Meyers. I hope you've enjoyed listening to it. I'll be back in several weeks. Stay tuned for Billy Harris and her wonderful show, "Before Bedtime." It is no longer that and I keep forgetting it. Billy, what is

00:50:16.320 - 00:50:30.450

the title? Of course it is, "From the Bookshelf." I just wanted to see if she remembered and keep listening to the spoken arts on KUSP and [unintelligible] in general. Billy, you're on and thank you once again, Paul, for your

00:50:30.450 - 00:50:31.500

wonderful job at the board.