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Morton Marcus: Bert Meyers was a poet who was neglected. He was born in Los Angeles on March 20th, 1928. After graduating high school, he moved to New York for a time, taught himself to write poetry, and then returned to Los Angeles in the

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early 50s, where he worked as a painter, a picture framer, and a gilder. He chose to work with his hands. He could have done other kinds of jobs, but he wanted to be a laborer; he wanted to feel life through being a workman. In 1967, he was

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admitted to Claremont College, though he did not have a BA, to get a graduate degree when he scored 98% on his graduate record examination, and he taught at Pitzer for the rest of his years, until his death on April 22nd, 1979.

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His poetry earned him two Ingram Merrill awards, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts Award. And Denise Levertov, who I'll be quoting, said of him, "his work remains, but that this good man is gone and that there will be no more poems from that

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clear spring leaves one sore and impoverished." Well, I have selected a program of Bert Meyers today and what I want to do in this program is give you a sense of the full scope of his work. And to do that I have divided his work into various

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categories. He wrote poems about the city he came from, which is Los Angeles. He wrote poems about objects, children, he did portraits of people, he wrote poems about working. He wrote poems about what the modern life, the life of technology and

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the life of the city are doing to us. And he wrote poems of simple, quiet beauty, as out of the chaos of our existence he found beauty and he found meaning. So, what I'd like to do first is to read what I would consider to be some of the ugly

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poems and those are the cityscapes and I'll start off with some LA poems. And start off with a poem very simply called, "LA." He was born and then lived his entire adult life in LA, as I said. Bert Meyers is known for one thing above all

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the other techniques of poetry, and that is his amazing imagery. He gives us ways of looking at the everyday world that astonishes us. And I think you'll see that in this LA poem, and certainly the other cityscape poems I'm going to

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read right after it. Here is: LA The world's largest ashtray, the latest in concrete, capital of the absurd. One huge studio where people drive from set to

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set and everyone's from a different planet. For miles, the palm trees, exotic janitors, sweep out the screen at dusk, the gray air molds, geraniums heat the alleys, jasmine and gasoline undress the night. This is the desert that lost its

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mind, the place that boredom built -- freeways, condominiums, malls, where cartons of trash and diamonds and ideologies are opened, used, dumped near the sea. Well, I think you can see in that poem what I mean by his

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imagery, the palm trees, exotic janitors, he says, sweep out the sky at dusk and we look at palm trees maybe as we've never seen them before. They are giant brooms and they're exotic. But the whole poem is about the exotic, crazy confluence of

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different kinds of life and imagery that go to make up Los Angeles. Let me before I harp on any of those images, let me just give you an example of three poems about the city that Bert wrote sometime later. He calls these landscapes, I call them

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cityscapes. And what's interesting about these poems, they're three separate poems, but they move outward from the city, to the suburbs or the outskirts of the city, really, and then upwards along the coast. And here they are, and

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again, just listen for these amazing images that he could come up with. Here, he talks about the city being like a circuit board of a computer and goes on and uses a lot of other images but that is generally the one that he is concerned with.

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LANDSCAPES ONE: THE CITY The city grows from a highway stem, it's a glittering circuit board. A crystal that palpates, nights swept away like a broken

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glass. The day begins, it prints the parking lots, doors work like switches, people are impulses in a system. But often, a siren occurs, the awakened man's incredulous wail. And the sky, that rotten lung, bleeds and blackens. The windows on the

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walls multiply their cells; still curious, the infected moon regulates its lens. TWO: ON THE OUTSKIRTS On the outskirts, the factory, somebody chemistry set. A

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junkyard where a 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 it's cataract, and a few yellow machines that die like

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sunflowers, dropping their parts in a field. The hills are a pile of rags and a pail of dirty thinner, scrap metal trees crinkle on the wind's gray flame and the tumbleweeds roll their barbed wire over the roads. An airplane roars like a sperm

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through a crack in the smog's deep stone. THREE: ALONG THE COAST You stare, propped like a sick man from the car's enchanted bed. A hill nibbles at a field's green fork, an old arthritic

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fence hobbles up toward a cloud. A little factory smoke grows abstract in the sky, only the cows have reached perfection. Their quiet minds look empty. The landscape requires them. When the cows eat the ground, the shadows, even the boulders

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rise and bow to each other. Faraway, the suburbs, one cube cloning itself like the stone at the veteran cemetery, and all along the coast the sun drives over the sea. It's windshields glitter in the waves.

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Well, there are some very interesting images there. Certainly one is the air and airplane war- I'm sorry. An airplane roars like a sperm through a crack in the smog's deep stone. There seems to be something right about that

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image. Though at the same time, it may seem slightly far fetched.The rightness is that it strikes us almost below our consciousness, it is a way we have never really looked at the world around us. And one thing that Bert Meyers does is he

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either gives us simple images to show us the world around us renewed, that is the everyday world renewed, or he can actually take an image and just by placing it where he places it, it is like a whole poem in itself. It is a whole vision.

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Now, the perfection of these images, the conciseness of them, remind us and probably have reminded you already of Haiku poetry, and I want to go over one three line section. Yes, it's three lines, it even has the right amount of lines for a

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haiku from that last section, the last poem that I read called along the coast and it went like this: "Far away the suburbs, one cube cloning itself, like the stone at the veterans cemetery." Now there, image has gone beyond image and has become vision and

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to me that is a whole poem in itself. What are the suburbs? The suburbs, he says, metaphorically, are one cube cloning itself. We've heard that, or things like it before, each cube being the ticky-tacky houses that are all alike. And

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since they are all alike, they are one cube cloning itself, obviously endlessly over hillsides. The leap he makes after that is the leap into vision. What are the cloning cubes like? They are like the stone at the veteran cemetery,

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or like the tombstones that keep growing and growing and growing not at any cemetery but in a veteran cemetery. It is like the tombstones that are part of our foreign policy, that are part of our wars, which grow with this un-ending dead to the American

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way of life, which not only is foreign policy but we are thrown back onto this idea of suburbs of the nation and the kind of material culture we have built. That's how the different ways that his images work. And there

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are a lot of these parts of poems that could stand alone. In fact, understanding Bert Meyers is understanding that you're having one image joined to another image, joined to another image, joined to another image and this gives you a sense of

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seeing the world anew through sense impressions. Now, what is also interesting is that Bert very rarely uses ideas. His ideas are in his images, they evoke pictures in your mind, sounds in your mind, which makes you see what he's talking about.

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Well, okay, let me go on to other poems now and see how this works. Certainly, Bert, and his desire to work, and the way he works are very, very clearly seen in a lot of these poems, and these poems are given definition. Let's just get into

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a poem called, "Picture Framing." And this, of course, is one of the jobs that he did, very short poem, as most of his poems are, in fact, I've just read some of the longer ones. And these are poems about what he does every day and that is

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the kind of work he pursued. PICTURE FRAMING My fingers feed in the fields of wood. I sand pine, walnut, bass, and sweat to raise their grain. Paints, powder and brush are the

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seasons of my trade. At the end of the day, I drive home, the proud cattle of my hands. And the proud cattle reflect the pride that he did have in his work. Here's another poem, which I find very interesting and

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which is called, "Apprentice." And this is when he is learning a trade but it really is, one of the many poems which I will be reading shortly, on objects and of the objects he wrote about maybe a third of the poems that he wrote on objects, because he

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really was in love with the everyday life, are poems about the objects he worked with: saws, hammers, paints, etc. Here is the one I consider to be on a hammer, and it's called: APPRENTICE

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Because I love you, I've learned to be this hammer that runs all day, like a horse with a hoof in its head. In the afternoon, my hands lie down together for a minute. But it seems to be an amazing concept of looking at a hammer

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and seeing it being a horse with a hoof in its head that runs all day long. And this is the kind of imagery I'm talking about, the amazing kind of imagery which permeates his work. Now, the vision behind this imagery, it seems to me is to find in the

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everyday world, some moment of wonder, some moment of magic. And he never denies the ugliness of the world he's writing about. But in those first two quotes I read at the beginning of the program, he refuses to say, all right, let's all pack it in and

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throw it away, life's meaningless. To him, life is a wondrous series of moments, one of which follow another, just like his images. And so what he sees is something that he wants to show you and he knows that you can see it. It's there, but

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you've got to take the time to see it. And what he, as poet, does is just show you these things in a new way. Well, let's take a look at some more of these definitions then of the tools that he uses in his work. And he calls these:

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SOME DEFINITIONS AT WORK The hammer lowered its horns and the rusty nails shrieked, pulled from the place where it lived. A table saw whined, like a virtuous bee that knows it will die in a meadow of dust.

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Sandpaper sighed as it killed itself, caressing the sugar pine, the ash. The house painter's brush, a morphodite with a long stem of agile voice and a spring in its bristle, swayed satisfied with itself on the wall. Glue, the woodworkers

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sperm, began to boil in the pot. The rags, that breath full of turpentine, demanded their rights and threatened to burst like the sun. And the woman who turned into a mop, disheveled gray, worn out by the floor. And the man who'd become a broom,

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his broad shoulder lost in the dirt. Notice how even a motor bleeds when it breaks, drops of oil stare from its skin, like the eyes of a frightened fish. Well what did this do to people living in this world? If they

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did not rescue through their imaginations, through having the visions of children seeing the world clear and renewed in these images in this wonderful way, he could transpose the world and thought we all could. What happened to these people? Well,

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what happened to them and I'll read just one of these poems is that they became the Americans who were waging war against Vietnam, and we're now waging war in Central America. And I will read his portrait that he calls, "A Citizen," and I would

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like to make it the citizen of the cityscape, the citizen whose life -- and this is one thing that Bert disliked more than anything else, or was saddened by, let's put it that way more than anything else -- and that was the way our lives and our

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energies are wasted. And the way we do not have this enormous visionary sense of our life and the wonder around us, well, what happens to you, you become: A CITIZEN

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The spider I hit, loose thread on the floor, clenches its fist. The cat lies down. It looks at me, as if through a window. I'm a coat hanger twisted by rage, everything shrinks from my hands. That landscape threatened by planes, a woman's astonished

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face. I serve the giants who ate the villages, whose arms swept aside the stars like raindrops on a windshield, who broke the sky, man's sacred mirror and promised peace. I did these things for freedom, endless as a boulevard, where all the lights

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are green. My car won't start, dead leaves follow me, they're scribbling my name. I'm a swastika, the headless man whose iron limbs grind the world. I want to change, even a wall gets painted again.

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Well, that was his vision, that was his vision of what the world could make us but what he refused to accept. And what I would like to read now for a few moments are his- some portraits of children because it was in the simple way a child looked at

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the world that we have the possibility of renewal, the possibility of actually saving the species because he looked at things in his last days in a very dark way. And I want to start off with a picture taken from a child's point of view.

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And it's called: A CHILD'S AN APPLE or, "A Child is an Apple," and it is the way a child views his life among these adults, maybe among the citizens we just read about who are the destroyers, and yet who

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are unhappy with their lives. Here's the way a child sees it from his point of view: Those who are tall look down, they show their keys, the dead bird in their hands. They open and close volumes of doors

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[cut-off]. Of the poetry of Bert Meyers. Well, if Bert found life to be so difficult, what was his answer? I've already given it, it is seeing the wonder of the

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life around you. And what I would like to read on this part of the show are poems that I call Bert's visions. And I will start off with a poem, and all of these poems sort of develop in the same way, the ones that I'm going to read, talking about

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the unhappiness of the situation we're in. Again, I think you can see the landscape or the cityscape that informs these poems. And yet the magic that is all around us, even in the city, even as the world around us is destroyed, there's still wonder.

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And the wonder is that you look at the world head on. The wonder is that your imagination still has the lucidity, clarity and originality of a child. And he calls this: BECAUSE THERE'S SO MUCH SPEED

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Because there's so much speed, without any place to go, and driven blind as light, we rush from stone to stone and bump against the world. I like the subtle snail, wrapped in its wooden fog, it crawls across my yard, and where it goes, it

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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 round and round.

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That seems to me as a rather amazing poem, it moves in three stanzas from the world around us are useless roads and how we're just rushing around, to then go to a much slower, quieter life, the life of the snail with its useless roads, which of course

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is the slimy tracks it makes. But then in the third stanza, takes the leap that makes it an exceptional poem and that is, it takes the leap of looking at the world from the viewpoint of the snail. And I'll read that last stanza again to you, because

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the- its world is the snail's world. "Day and night in its world, leaves fall without a sound and flowers become suns, that bugs like tiny planets in a green astronomy go round and round and round."

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While he has other things to say, if he thinks that man, and what man does, wastes time, this is not the situation in other poems. And here's one very telltale poem, which I have dug out of a book called, "Sunlight on the Wall," and I'll be

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telling you about these in a few moments. And it paints a different portrait of man and his rushing around because in the end, what saves the world, what makes the world livable, is going to be and is men, that is men and women. It's called,

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"Stars Climb Girders of Light," and here as I think you'll see nature, just being nature is not enough. It has to take a force that changes nature, it has to be a force that makes nature into something dynamic.

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STARS CLIMB GIRDERS OF LIGHT Stars climb girders of light, they arrange themselves in the usual place, they quit before dawn and nothing's been done. Then men come out, their helmets fill the sky, their cities rise

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and fall and the men descend, proud 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. Well, I think that's a very positive poem, although it's a

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very realistic poem in that it accepts briefness here on earth and our inevitable end. Well, here's another poem, if you will, about bad times, and how to treat them. And it's called: THESE DAYS

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These days, everything's bad. The future waits in a button. No one plans, nobody says three years from now. Evening falls upon a porch, bloody black and white, it opens like the paper, someone bursts into flames. Winter, a grim warehouse

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delivers the wind. An angry truck rattles by, the inconsolable self strumming its gas pedal tuning up for the storm. Lies, so many lies, windows malignant with things. When at last the nail strangles the hammer, and even the

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[unidentified] then rifles, rockets. Oh, what a time, what a time. And, like an old ideal, the moon's been reached, a few astonished flies wrinkle the dust on its face. Be like the rain that wears a ragged coat and finds a lamp in the smallest

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stone and sings for nothing from street to street. Well, I think that gives you a sense of what I was talking about and I'll come back to those poems certainly to end the show. Another thing that makes life living of course is love.

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And he and his wife had been married for more than 20 years, had two children and a lot of understanding Bert Meyers I think his understanding the stability and wonder that life had for him through his love for his wife Odette, who is a French

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scholar. And I'd like to go into this part of the show reading a wonderful love poem, because it is a love poem not only to Odette, but it is a love poem about the responsibility we bear towards each other and it is called, "Gently, Gently."

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And also in introducing Odette, it will allow me to take off on a series of poems that Bert wrote called, "Postcards," which show him a different cityscape or show us a different cityscape, which is cityscapes and villagescapes of France. The

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love poem called: GENTLY, GENTLY We too, began with joy, then sickness came, then poverty. We were poor, so poor, our children were our only friends. Gently,

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gently through anger and pain, love justified itself like the nails in the house during a storm. Somehow we created hope, reliable drum in the shadow's wrist, a tuning fork on the sidewalk of dreams. At night, I was the one who became a cello,

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strum with all our roads where memory hums to itself like a tire. And you, mad as a clarinet, where the street divides, a city of raindrops in a bush. The slow honey that drips from a sky's old ladle, the reason I'm frightened of

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death. I swear by the wing's love spreads at my waist that I'll carry your tune until my tired strings break. Well, what Denise Levertov has said about Bert is, "I feel Bert Meyers can be called a great poet because of the

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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."

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And I think in image after image, in poem after poem, there are lines and images which really share with us, or allow us to see, to experience the wonder of the world as Bert saw it. I'd like to sort of go through some of these images

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with you. And in some cases, I won't even be reading full poems. Here's just the way he feels standing at his window. And here's an image it says, "Blackbirds are headlines

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overhead." Now as I read these poems, you can't stop and listen to the images and really spend time with them but just think about that, blackbirds sort of thrown against the sky in silhouette are like headlines but they are headlines about a

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newspaper which is not every day, but about the world of nature. Here's another one: "Here on this jewel of Earth, time tears at the green edge." I mean seems to be that as a classical line, "here on this

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jewel of Earth, time tears at the green edge." It is that sense of fatality which goes through all his works; we are going to die. This is a wonderful place, why do we have to leave it? And then:

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"This window pane, 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." Let me read to you some of these, "Postcards," that I was

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talking about to get us into some of these images and where they are so simple. And I'll just read it, here's one and just think of the exactness of this image: "On the horizon, late at night, a ship glows like the last cafe

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still open at the end of a boulevard after the rain." And it seems to me not only is that an accurate description of a ship, but something magical has happened. And it's not only that the ship is like a cafe that's at the end of the

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boulevard, but that beautiful little extra image of the shininess of it all, because of the sense of rain lacquering everything. Here's another sense of the ship in which, again, these are all

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sort of short poems, each one is a postcard in itself and here is a ship that's leaving, and leaving people on shore who have lit matches and what happens because of that in the poet's mind:

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"Passengers board the ship at twilight, the people who wave from the peer light matches, they become a crowd of candles on the shore. The boat, a huge altar, dissolves in the fog." Well, what about this sense of a farmer and his scythe, you know

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those huge scythes that farmers cut down fields of wheat with which he observes in France and French- outside a French village: "A farmer swings a scythe, tilting the blade's sharp edge.

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The weeds are waves that fall on a glistening coastline. When he stands up, the scythe a tall one-legged bird whose long bill the farmer cleans." How about this wonderful sense of the market in a French

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village. It's whimsical and yet there is this wonderful sense of life and energy: "A market in the street, herbs, those quiet housewives, wearing their modest prints were found in the fields at dawn. Clods of

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garlic, the kitchen's diamond, hang from every stall. Cheese, like the walls of France, red peppers with a plastic glow." And this wonderful little moment of the cook, speaking softly: "The cook speak softly, gesturing as if she were washing

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her hands in French. She loves to look at the sea, when the water ripples and a gaggle of rowboats wobbles near the shore. She talks to the chickens in the garden. They're very intelligent, she says, they'd tell us beautiful stories if

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they weren't so busy eating." And just this image as he passes a field outside the village: "White butterflies in a field are the frayed handkerchiefs of those who didn't finish saying goodbye."

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Here's Paris, a wonderful portrait. And I just want to read you two lines. Actually, I'm gonna read you four lines from these things just to show you how he could totally pin the butterfly of image of our vision to the wall with his words. And

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here's his image of Paris at night and it's these simple two lines, I think they're really rather amazing: "Night lifts the moon like a coffee cup from the skyline's cluttered shelf." Let me repeat that. "Night lifts the moon like

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a coffee cup from the skyline's cluttered shelf." I don't think any of us have seen a city like that before. It certainly seems to me it has to be an old city. It's not a new city we're talking about because new cities are not like

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cluttered shelves. He then completes that description of Paris like this: "Neighborhoods are history books, leatherbound and stacked in their centuries."

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And like the cook which is more a portrait. Here is a wonderful little moment that he found in Paris and it has sort of a magic to it, certainly the last line leaps right out of the observed fact into an imagined fact and a whole vision of the world. In

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fact, the poem moves from the street, up the building, and then beyond that, so there's a constant movement almost of the gaze from street level up to the heavens. So there is a subtlety even in the simplicity of what Bert is writing which really

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deserves to be examined. Again, this is Paris: "In a little square, a man fills a bottle at a fountain. The sound of water stops, continues. A woman leans from a window to see how the sky feels. Clouds rub their silver polish over the sun." And this

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is one of my favorite poems from the section; it is so magical. Notice the description of this animal, which is a dog, and Bert has a lot of poems about animals and what they mean to him, but notice the description about this dog, obviously near death

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not taken care of but notice the wonder, even of this dog's most elemental action and what wonder it brings if you are looking, and these are the moments that to me, make life worth living, and that I am looking for all the time. I hope you are too,

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maybe part of the time. Anyway, here's this wonderful little poem about an old dog in Paris, and it goes like this: "An old dog, a four legged bundle of straw, leaves the cafe and goes to the gutter for a drink. When he returns, his

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footprints are a crooked row of tiny vases, each one with four flowers on the sidewalk." And somewhere else he says about Paris: "It is like a sea without its water, the world's most delicate

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accumulation of debris." And then these moments when the world does transform in its poignancy, and I have not read a lot of Bert Meyers poems of poignancy. And the poignancy of our existence really strikes

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home in this little four line poem, again about Paris: "It rained and rained in the courtyard, and an old man in a gray coat sang to empty windows, the laundry wept for hours." This is the poetry of Bert Meyers that I've been reading, a

00:41:09.990 - 00:41:29.100

man who lived from 1928 to 1979, 51 short lived years on this earth. I'd hoped actually that I would bring you some of Bert Meyers reading his own poem, but the tape that I got, unfortunately, was not of the quality that could be read over

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the air. Bert Meyer's books we can thank two local publishers for, believe it or not. An earlier book, actually the third from the last book that he wrote called, "Sunlight on the Wall," was printed by Kayak Books, which is directed by George

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Hitchcock here in town and that book is still available. It's called, "Sunlight on the Wall." And his next book, which is a combination of two books, "The Wild Olive Tree," and, "The Blue Cafe," and I've been reading from all three, though, "The

00:42:01.110 - 00:42:14.040

Wild Olive Tree," and, "The Blue Cafe," are in one volume together, was put out by Jazz Press here in Santa Cruz, a beautiful edition. The paperback, which is the one that you'll buy, has a picture of Bert on the cover, a very good

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looking man. And these books are available right now at the Bookshop Santa Cruz and at the Capitola Book Cafe. And if they're not, and or if you go want them from any other bookstore, just go in and say, "would you please order these

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books from Jazz Press or Kayak Books which are here in town, and if you don't know where to get ahold of them, just get a hold of Mort Marcus, and he'll be able to give you their address."

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Well, it seems to me that we have been looking at a poet who is rather exceptional and I really hate to even end this hour because there are so many wonderful moments in a Bert Meyers book.

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Here's just another one I'm thinking of, here is DAYBREAK. And it's just the wonder of daybreak and it really is a beautiful, beautiful piece of work: Birds drift from the trees. The moon's a little goat over there

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on the hill. Dawn, as blue as her milk fills the sky's tin pail. The air so cold, a gas station glitters in an ice cube. The freeway hums like a pipe when the water's on. Streetlights turn off their dew, the sun climbs down from a roof,

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stops by a house and strikes its long match on a wall, takes out a string of brass keys and opens every door. Here's what he says about some animals and if you do see his face on, "The Wild Olive Tree," in the bookstore, just think of

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this description he says of himself: "I act like the camel with its melancholy, sensuous eyes and fastidious lips." And then in looking at a bison he really talks about our entire

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history. When he says: "I see the dung-colored bison. I see the dung-colored crumbling bison, an entire town evicted, even its sofas falling apart. The young look over the fence. Their eyes are maple leaves

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after the rain. American lakes 100 years ago, their mothers stare at the ground, their fathers shrink, like the countryside. The moon, the oldest streetlight, touches them with its intangible glow."

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Well, I'm going to end the show with a vision poem by Bert Meyers. But before I do, I want to make sure that you're going to listen in to the "Jazz Kitchen" with Leon Allen, which will be coming up within two minutes. To remind you also that

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this is the new Poetry Show and next week, Joe Stroud will be on. He and I just attended a wonderful reading last night by Gerald Stern over in San Jose and he may be bringing that to you, I'm not sure but it was a really a wonderful, wonderful

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night. And I hope you will stay tuned and listen for us. Bert Meyers, whose death will be celebrated within the next 10 days said this in a poem called: AND STILL

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Nobody's honest, nothing matters, that's why I'm always adjusting myself: my chemicals, my complaints. And every day, I fly around in my insect-colored car, the city's a carcass, streets quiver like meat. In my own voice, I hear a broom that

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sighs while it waves farewell to the past. And still, it happens. A few leaves come around a corner, demonstrate, then disappear. Mozart arrives in an ice cream truck, a long war ends. I feel like a streetlight, tall and radiant. My face was

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made to shine among others.