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Morton Marcus: He said, the sun climbs down from a roof, stops by a house and strikes its long match on a wall, takes out a ring of brass keys and opens every door. That's DAYBREAK.

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Part of it anyway, by the poet Bert Meyers. And tonight on the poetry show, we're going to bring you the saga of how his collected poems have just come into print. This Morton, Marcus and welcome to another Poetry Show.

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I want to read you a very short biography of Bert Meyers and then discuss just what this program is about. Bert Meyers was born in Los Angeles on March 20, 1928. Months before graduating from high school, he decided to drop out and become a

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poet. Over the next 18 years, he worked first at a number of manual labor jobs, including janitor, carpenter's apprentice, and worker at an airplane factory, and then became a master picture framer and gilder. Although he had never

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taken undergraduate classes, in 1964, he was admitted to the Claremont Graduate School on the basis of his poetic achievements. By 1967, he had completed all work for a PhD in English literature, and was hired to teach poetry workshops

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and literature at Pitzer College. Over the years, he published his poems in many journals and in five books. In 1979, shortly before his death at the age of 51, Meyers assembled a slim volume of those poem he considered his best

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work. For 20 years, his widow Odette Meyers attempted to get the manuscript published, but finally turned to Bert‘s friend, Morton Marcus for help. After Odette passed away, Morton and Bert‘s son Daniel searched through Bert‘s private papers

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and enlarged and reconstructed the collection in order to provide a sense of Bert Meyers as a man as well as a poet. The result is ‘’In a Dybbuk's Raincoat‘’, a collected poems of Bert Meyers that has been released this month from the

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University of New Mexico Press, it being as many of you know out there National Poetry Month. This book took 28 years to find print,although at his death Bert Meyers was one of the most praised poets in America. In fact, Denise Levertov, who read

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one of his books, the ‘’Dark Birds‘’ shortly before Bert‘s death, a few months before Bert‘s deaths, just immediately wrote an ecstatic review, which is the introduction to this volume, by the way, and called him one of the best poets of her

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time. Tomorrow night, Monday night at the Capitola Book Cafe in Capitola, Joe Stroud, Gary Young, Ellen Bass, Daniel Meyers, Bert's son, and yours truly, will present a reading

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from this book. Try to make it; this is a very, very important event in poetry. As I've said in my intro, we have in Bert Meyers one of the most original poets of the last part of the 20th century, and certainly a poet, and the way we've collected this

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book, who will intrigue you. And a poet, who will really show directions to you in poetry if you are a young poet, and if you are not, certainly if you're a reader of poetry or wanted to know poetry you can. Let me say something about Bert‘s poems.

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They're very simple, they're very direct in their speech, they have almost no rhetoric whatsoever. The image is the center of his poetry, he makes us see and feel the world anew, and those images are almost uncanny. To go farther with

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this, the images express not just feelings, or abstractions, but they actually express ideas. And we will hear many times how suddenly an image tells us an attitude and an idea that the poetry has, though the poet has not directly given us that idea.

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So, let's go into some of these poems. Bert always thought of himself as a working man, and of course, he was. He was in fact and picture framer. And on- we have letters in here by him and we have different prose pieces that

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he wrote. And we also- I'm looking for it now. I have some journals. And in March of 1969, he put a list down in his journals about his work experience since he was 18 and it goes like this: "Picture-framing, ten years;

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house painting, two years; ditch digging, half year; janitor, one and a half years; warehouseman, three-years; college teacher, two-years,; printing, one year; sheetmetal worker, one and a half years."

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So Bert actually did many different jobs. We're going to hear a lot of his poetry tonight. And it is, as I've been saying, we just had readings in San Francisco and Berkeley with Bob Haas, as many, many of you know, the former poet Laureate

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of the United States, Brenda Hillmann, Susan Griffin, Jane Hirshfield, all of whom are absolutely enthralled by Bert's poems. Let me read you a simple poem to start off as I did in all of these readings. And this is a poem to show you one aspect

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of Bert‘s poetry, which is his very, very sensitive vision of the human condition. And this is a poem about old people, and it's very short as most of Burt's poems are, and it's just called ‘’Old‘’ and listened to how the image works at the end

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of this poem, to really make you feel what these old people feel, but it doesn't tell you, it shows you, which all of your creative writing teachers have showed, no I know, told you that's the way to do it.

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OLD Their children are gone. Almost everyone they loved, and half of what they understood, have 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. So the- the loneliness of these old people alone with themselves makes even the most minute or the min- the minutiae of nature. The falling of leaves become actual footsteps. Here's some

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definitions at work. Why should I actually start this where he's an apprentice? So here is Bert as an apprentice, we'll read some work poems first and: THE APPRENTICE

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Because I love you, I've learned to be this hammer that runs all day like a horse with its hoof in its head. In the afternoon, my hands lie down together for a minute. And that's what I mean by his extraordinary images. I've

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learned to be this hammer that runs all day like a horse with its hoof in its head. And of course, if you look at a hammer, it looks like a face. But since it is that part of the face, that strikes the nail, it becomes a hoof so therefore it

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is a hoof in the horse's head. And then his hands lie down together for a minute in rest, and it's because he loves the person, his wife, I'm sure that he has taken this job. In fact, well- here is the job that he held the most, and it's

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called: PICTURE FRAMING My hands feed in the fields of wood. I sand pine, walnut, oak, and sweat to raise their grain. Paints, powder, and brush are

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the seasons of my trade. At the end of the day, I drive home the proud cattle of my hands. And that is a poem that Robert Bly, in particular is one of his favorite poems. And he thinks that last image is just

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extraordinary. And he explains it by saying that you know, when- Yes, you're driving home, but as he sees his hands on the wheel, the two hands look like cattle, and it's like he is the farmer driving home the cattle who will produce his livelihood.

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In this case, the hands, who have actually allowed him to picture frame with the fingers that have fed in the fields of wood have sanded and painted, powdered and brushed. And here's another work poem called:

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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.

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They glow like many beers. Here's some poems about where he lived, and if anything, he is a Los Angeles poet. He was raised in Los Angeles, and many of his very nature lyrical poems really are set in the city. And here's

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one of them. And it's called ALL AROUND ME and it's one of the long poems; he usually does not write long poems.

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All around me, butterflies, ecstatic hinges, hunt for the ideal door. A cicadas ratchet tightens a place in the yard. Everything's warmed by a wave from the tree. A bird trickles like a faucet and the dog just stands there looking down. Run,

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sleep, she can't remember. It's hard to be conscious. From here, I can watch the freeway– Ants on a window sill. The skyline doodles, an airplane seems to float like a fish. Nearby a factory smokes, I'm one of its little ash-trays. Suddenly a

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dinosaur, or Rome will rise, then crumble, in the cracks on a ragged wall. We do marvelous things without knowing how, like the chicken whose bronze shit builds a shrine under its coop. But, even so, one gets depressed. This morning, a

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field, a flock of stones asleep in its mist... This world's painted on a glass that has to break. And here's another one of these, finding nature in the city, and it's called ‘’In the Yard‘’ and again just- just wonder if these

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images that just really show you the world in a new way IN THE YARD The grasshopper goes for a ride, tt's little sprocket spins over the earth. The lizard, five inches of stream, flows under a

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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 knows what the man's for.

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And I love that sense of the bumblebee explaining to the morning glories the joy of being a telephone, because you know you- the observation is so acute here that he sees obviously the bumblebee in the morning glory looking for pollen, but at the

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same time, it just keeps buzzing all the time. And so it's as though the bumblebee in his mind is explaining to the morning glories what it's like to be a telephone delivering its buzzing message. Here's:

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‘’Watercolor Days‘’ and where did I put the rainstorm? Ah yes, we get to that later. Here's: WATERCOLOR DAYS Pull up the shade. Look outside. November sent a card to you, an

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antique world upon a shelf. These are the watercolor days. There's never been anything else. Trees that have lost most of their leaves are sketched and delicate and look like music written in the air. A faint blue wash and that's the sky. One

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hill, neither green nor brown. Sunlight warms a tired walls face. A few clouds, a few old ladies with twilight tinted hair. And here's an early poem, called, ‘’Rainy Day‘’. And

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again, these images reflect a mood and attitude. And obviously Bert didn't like rain too much as you can tell from this: RAINY DAY Outside, nothing moves. Only the rain, nailing the house up like

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a coffin. Remember in childhood when it rained, then the whole 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

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doors, and I think we're all dead. See how the sky sits like a tombstone on the roofs. And the focus of all this is of course, Los Angeles. And though Bert can be ecstatic as well as melancholy, he can also be very

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angry, very political and socially conscious, though he's never a political poem, a- political poet. He just is reporting the end of his world and the next some poems I'd like to read to you are going to reflect this and what is so

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uncanny about these poems, though they were written in the 1960s and the early 70s, they sound exactly like the world we live in today. Anyway, here's his picture of Los Angeles. THE WORLD'S LARGEST ASHTRAY

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The latest in concrete, capital of the absurd. One huge studio where people drive from set to set, and everyone's from a different planet. For miles, the palm trees, the exotic janitors, sweep out the sky at dusk. The gray air molds, geraniums heat

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the alleys, jasmine and gasoline undress the night. This is the desert that lost its mind, the place that boredom built, freeways, condominiums, malls, where cartons of trash and diamonds and ideologies are opened, used, dumped near the

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sea. And to go along with that is another poem called, ‘’Landscapes‘’. And this one is in three sections, and again it is Los Angeles.

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ONE- LANDSCAPES ONE: THE CITY The city grows from a highway stem. It's a glittering circuit

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board, a crystal, it palpitates. Nights 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 a siren occurs. The awakened man's incredulous wail, and the

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sky, that rotten lung, bleeds then blackens, the windows on the walls multiply their cells. Still curious, the infected moon regulates its lens TWO: ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE CITY.

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On the outskirts, the factory, somebody chemistry set, a junkyard with a town that 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 and a pile of dirty thinner, scrap metal trees crinkle and the winds gray flame, and the tumbleweeds roll their barbed

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wire over the roads. An airplane roars like a sperm through a crack in the smog‘s deep stone. And the third part of landscapes is called: ALONG THE COAST.

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You stare propped like a sick man from the car's chanted bed. A hill nibbles at a fields green fork, an old arthritic fence hobbles up toward a cloud. A` little factory smoke grows abstract in the sky. Only the clouds have reached, only the

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cows have reached perfection. Their quiet minds look empty, The landscape requires them, when the cows eat the ground, the shadows even bolders rise and bow to each other. Faraway, the suburbs, one cube cloning itself like the stone at the

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veterans cemetery and all along the coast, the sun drives over the sea. It's windshields glitter in the waves. Well, this- this gives rise to the feelings in the poet himself, but let me read to you always, oh-

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ALWAYS a very short poem and I'm going to read it several times. Bad weather, like common sense, tries and tries to extinguish that butterfly. Let me read that again because what this poem is really about

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is about common sense. And what he's saying is, no matter how hard it tries just like bad weather trying to destroy a butterfly, common sense cannot destroy the butterfly or i.e. the imagination or the soul. So:

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ALWAYS. One more time, here it comes. Bad weather, like common sense, tries and tries to extinguish that butterfly. And this gives rise to a sense in him of loneliness being

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removed and being depressed and it really reflects, I think, a lot of the feelings that are going on in this country right now. Here is one of the lesser disturbed ones and it's called: I CAN'T SLEEP, BUT IT'S HERE

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I can't sleep. I wish we were young in a different house in a different town. I can hear the dog runaway in her dream. Outside raindrops, their tender hoofbeats trapped in the courtyard of a leaf.

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And, let's see. I want something to go with that. Here he starts to get very, very bitter and this is called, ‘’After the Meal‘’. And here now, though he could not sleep, and it's a great description of insomnia, there's also dissatisfaction in

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it and dissatisfaction with the world and here's the poem that is called: AFTER THE MEAL, and the dissatisfaction now has a much stronger sense to it.

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A suburb of coffee cups; napkins, those crumpled hills; silverware, freeways spotted with grease, with flesh... And the ash-tray, a ghetto full of charred men, with grizzled heads who wasted their flame; where every breath scatters its bones

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and small gray mounds accumulate then crumble like nations or the knees of elephants. Like a cleaning pam- plant, steam comes through a hole in your face. Your exhaust is the last wild horse that gallops away. Smoke waters the flowers that grow in

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the lungs. The cigarette, like your life, is a piece of chalk that shrinks as it tries to explain. I want to read another cigarette poem that obviously ends with a smoking cigarette. Here's his description of a cigarette in

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what I call a series of object poems. And he says: Often you light a fuse to prove you won't explode. All the smoke shows the power that dies in you. You sigh as you tap your way to the end. The hand is the blind child called to the black

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board. And of course, what the blind child will write with, unable to see, is the chalk which looks just like a cigarette. And I read those two poems together because Bert died at 51 because

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he was a chain smoker. First developed emphysema with all of the gold leaf as a gilder and picture framer, and then that emphysema turned to cancer of the lungs. And he died at 51 years of age in 1979. So those poems about cigarettes are- he

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understands they are very much part of the difficulty. We will now go back and take a musical break and what I've been saying is, we are reading the poems of Bert Meyers that has just been published. in this book called ‘’In a Dybbuk's Raincoat‘’, the

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collected poems of Bert Meyers, which I have edited with Bert‘s son, Daniel Myers, and finally has been brought into print after 28 years in this National Poetry Month. And tomorrow night Joe Stroud, Gary Young, Ellen Bass and myself, along with

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Daniel Meyers, will be reading from the book. And if you would, sign in it at the Capitola Book Cafe at 7:30pm. And now we're going to go back to a musical break. Unknown: Before we get into the music break, I have a couple of

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short announcements, you could become the next great radio host. Enter the Public Radio Talent Quest for a chance to win cash, or the opportunity to start your own radio show. Go to kusp.org and click on the green Public Radio Talent Quest

00:29:53.370 - 00:30:11.820

button. Time is short, the period for entries is April 16 through May 14. Also, Sunday at nine KUSP presents "From the Bookshelf," hosted by Gary Shapiro. Each week Gary presents the spoken word program with stories, authors and special

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guests. Join us this evening at 9pm following the Poetry Show on Central Coast Public Radio KUSP. Morton Marcus: And we are back with a Poetry Show, this is Morton Marcus and tonight we are reading the poetry of Bert

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Meyers, who's collected poems have just come out from the University of New Mexico Press. And as I've said before on the show, in case you've just joined us, tomorrow night at Capitola Book Cafe at 7:30. Joe Stroud, Gary Young and Ellen Bass,

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Daniel Meyers, Bert Meyer‘s son, and yours truly will be reading from this book, which was edited by Daniel Meyers and yours truly. This book literally took 28 years to get published. When Bert died in 1979, his wife, Odette gave the book to one of

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the best known poets in United States who will go unnamed. And he insisted that he gets the selected- that he got to select the poems Bert put together, certainly, shortly before his death, and he insisted he was going to get it published. And

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year after year, Odette got in touch with this poet and he just kept reassuring her. And finally, 17 years later, when she found out she had cancer and was probably going to die, Odette took the book back from him. And she had been in touch

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with me all this time, and together, she and I worked on getting the manuscripts published, but she died actually before one of our plans to get it published actually came to fruition. And then I continued the quest. And when my publisher

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at that time, Creative Arts Press, when I showed them a copy of the manuscript, the publisher there insisted on doing the complete, collected poems of Bert Meyers and so I called up Daniel in Paris and we put together this book. But that is

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not the end of the story. And if you want to hear the end of this endless saga of trying to get this book published, come to the Capitola Book Cafe tomorrow night. Anyway, here's some poems by Bert about a poet and being a poet. And though he had a lot of

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ideas on this, he really didn't write this many poems about poetry. But here's one thing he said about it: What we want is simple, a country like a poem that's beautiful and true and makes us feel at home.

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And what I've been saying is that to Bert Meyers, the- the image was the central part of a poem. His language very, very simple, unadorned, almost Haiku like at times, there are parts of poems that seem to be whole poems in themselves. The images

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are so great, and this is one, you know, a short poem of only four lines. And what he's talking about is not really the poem, but is the country that we want. And the country that we want has that purity of the poem in it. So the poem and the

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country can sort of be reversed at any time. And you can say what we want is simple, like a poem. Like- like a country that's a poem, or like a poem that's a country, whatever, country or poem it's got to be beautiful and true and makes us

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feel at home. And it was not what he was seeing happen in the United States. Here's sort of a biography of himself as the poet. And as I read through his biography, he dropped out of high school and did a whole load of working man's jobs throughout

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his life until finally, in his 40s he- because of the accomplishments of his poetry, he was admitted to the graduate program at Claremont and graduated with a PhD and taught for several years of his life. So here is the poet in several

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parts and this is what is really a biography, or an autobiography: They said, go rise each day with her, become the reliable dough of family needs. I wouldn't. I walked away from the kitchen,

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the store she was building in her breast and everything grows dim like the little stone brought home from the shore. What will I bring if I come to your house? A little cold wind at the door, bad dreams to your spouse. There isn't a tree in

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your backyard, the lawns are plastic, the chairs are too hard. Now, I wouldn't talk. I'd be full of spite and I‘d strike my head like a match that won‘t light. Woman, mirror of all my sides, I pass through you to the window. When I lay my hand on

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the grass, forgive me if I call the earth my child. Always poor. He knows the crickets will leave him small jars of money. He waits; he admires a weed; his dreams are addressed. At night by his desk, he becomes a flower. Children are bees in his

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arms, a little pain, making honey. And so in the last sections of that poem, the poet almost transcends this world and becomes something in- without material gain, without riches, but ‘’the crickets can leave him

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small jars of money," their wealth is a different kind of wealth, "his dreams are addressed, and at night as he works, he becomes a flower, and children are bees in his arms, a little pain making honey‘’ as he has the great satisfaction that

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other people do not have. Well, let's go into some of these images of Berts and here's how he talks about a pebble. And actually, stones and pebbles were very, very popular to write about in the end of the 1960s and into the 70s. So here's his

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almost catalogue of associations with a pebble. PEBBLE Fragment of the first chunk, a regular moon, perpetual cloud, the dusts, blind eye, the mites crude planet. Durable friend

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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, wastelands embryo, despairs, grey seed, staunch member in the brotherhood of water polishers.

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Wisdom's jewel, the weeds' eternal fruit, the raindrops tomb. And here is another object poem called ‘’The Pencil Sharpener‘’. And this, as several poems in the book, is a prose poem, but

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mostly he wrote in very short lines, two beats each, sometimes three. THE PENCIL SHARPENER. It has no arms or legs, this tiny nude. Yet grip it by the

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waist, then stir its hips, a dry leaf multiplies, a cold motor starts in the wood. Revived, still shivering, the pencil sheds itself, and there's a butterfly, teeth, the fragments of a crown.

00:43:13.000 - 00:43:33.220

Let me read that again. You've all seen pencil sharpeners. Notice what he does with this- notice what he does with the images. In your mind, before I start, take a pencil, insert it in the pencil sharpener and turn the pencil sharpener and see

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what happens. Now here is the way he sees it and how he transforms all of the elements that go into sharpening a pencil. With his own and his images, pencil sharpener. It has no arms or legs, this tiny nude, yet grip it by the

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waist, then stir its hips, dry leaf multiplies, a cold motors starts in the wood. Revived, still shivering, the pencil sheds itself, and there's a butterfly, teeth, the fragments of a crown.

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And here's: PLIERS So imagine a pair of pliers. Contours of fish, or a donkey's intractable head. Open, the

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pliers are an eagle over its prey. Closed, any woman you reach for to tighten loose nuts. The color of all common tools and like mankind, made of steel, yet easy to use. So basically, it's only a jaw, or a thumb and forefinger joined by a pin.

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And though this isn't an object, per se, here's another one. It's a flower and it's: SUNFLOWERS No one spoke to the sunflowers, those antique microphones in the

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vacant lot. So they hung their heads and slowly fell apart. Picture a sunflower in your mind. I'll read it again. What's so good about being able to read Bert's poems twice is that they're so short; they lend themselves to it.

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SUNFLOWERS. No one spoke to the sunflowers, those antique microphones in the vacant lot. So they hung their heads and slowly fell apart. And trying to read my own writing here. Here is some-

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well, I don't think I'll read that actually. But I will read from a poem that I- I'm not gonna read the whole poem, I'm just going read part of it. This is from a poem, a very, very long poem called ‘’Images for Odette‘’. And it's just the

00:46:53.020 - 00:47:09.610

images that he sees everywhere around him and it- they're really rather amazing, but I'm just going to read 10 in which he talks about hands. Hands, twin sisters to whom everyone's a wrinkle that needs

00:47:09.640 - 00:47:40.510

to be smoothed. A stranger who should be fed. Hands, those humble wings that make each day flying toward its goal, at rest, still holding the shape of a tool. And I want to read some poems now, from a trip he took on a

00:47:40.510 - 00:48:05.900

sabbatical. It's almost buried in this book. It's- it's actually part of a long poem which is called: POSTCARDS FOR ODETTE And it is a description that actually went along with the

00:48:05.900 - 00:48:27.530

journal. We got the journal in the back here, of his trip to Europe on a sabbatical year, first to North Africa, and then up through Italy, and finally to France, and his absolute ecstatic response to the French. I don't think it is any mistake

00:48:27.530 - 00:48:43.610

that Daniel, when he grew up, settled in Paris, that is Daniel, Bert‘s son, settled in Paris, and lives there this day. Here's some of the things he says about Paris, and I think these, these are really sort of magical poems. So here it is.

00:48:43.730 - 00:48:59.540

And of course, his imagery goes, even in this poem, to the idea of painting, and since one, he was a framer and gilder, and he just associate great art, and especially great painting with, of course, France. So:

00:49:00.200 - 00:49:20.160

PARIS City where every wall's a canvas, a torn poster's an allegorical town, and time goes around painting the past. Night lifts the moon like a coffee cup from the skyline's cluttered

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shelf. Each day spring comes in the middle of fall. Neighborhoods are history books, leather bound, and stacked in their centuries. In a little square, a man fills a bottle at a fountain. The sound of water stops, continues. A woman leans

00:49:46.620 - 00:50:09.650

from a window to see how the sky feels. Clouds rub their silver polish over the sun. And here's one I particularly like, in fact the next two I particularly like. And just follow this description.

00:50:11.500 - 00:50:32.320

An old dog, a four legged bundle of straw, leaves the cafe and goes to the gutter for a drink. When he returns, his footprints are a crooked row of tiny vases, each one with four flowers on the sidewalk.

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Let me read that one again. Notice, again, how the precision of this image, the originality of the image, but also that the poet is observing something that we don't even pay attention to most of the time, and he just makes it and the world magical

00:50:52.820 - 00:51:15.110

for us. So here it is, again: An old dog, a four legged bundle of straw, leaves the cafe and goes to the gutter for a drink. When he returns, his footprints are a crooked row of tiny vases, each one with four flowers on

00:51:15.110 - 00:51:33.680

the sidewalk. And as you know, in Paris, or all over France, one of the daily traditions is to go to the baker's, or the boulangerie, and buy your baguette or your loaf of bread. And here he spies a

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child coming back from the bakery, and here's this wonderful little poem: A child carries a long thin loaf of bread, its sides are chipped, like the molding of a gilded frame. The crust looks warm,

00:51:51.140 - 00:52:12.280

dented, as if the baker were a blacksmith who hammered and sold the sun's rays. And as I'm sure all you know, the Arc de Triomphe is one of the Paris landmarks along with the Eiffel Tower. And here on a

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foggy day, Bert sees it, and suddenly makes one of these startling insights that make you shiver in what is no more than a three line poem. THE ARC DE TRIOMPHE

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Nothing but gray seen through the arch, as if triumph or an abyss, into which in nature- I'll do that again. ARC DE TRIOMPHE

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Nothing but gray seen through the arch, as if triumph were an abyss into which a nation marches. Among the antique dealers a pigeon on the sidewalks, a little baron who struts through a village of bric-à-brac.

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Here's another one. Just these momentary poems that he wrote when he was in Paris. It rained and rained in the courtyard. An old man in a gray coat sang to empty windows, the laundry wept for hours. Some

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days are harpsichords under the chestnut trees. Nothing lasts, their strings break, the gold turns gray, a drizzle falls, And then the gold restored, people leave their tables, birds their narrow benches in the walls. An old woman sits and bathes her

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tired feet that look like marble in a puddle near the market stalls. Okay. But as I said, the world began to show him a different kind of world and here, he imagines himself as a citizen,

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and these feelings of frustration and anger at what was going on in the world, really, I think reflect the feelings that I'm hearing from so many people, And here, a very short eight section poem, but very short section, some of them

00:54:48.090 - 00:55:06.090

no more than two lines. It's called: A CITIZEN And though it is in the first person, I think it really is all of us. And I'll just read it without the numbers.

00:55:08.310 - 00:55:33.090

The spider I hit, loose thread on the floor, clenches his 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. The landscape threatened by plains, a woman's astonished

00:55:33.090 - 00:55:57.300

face. I served the giant 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 is a boulevard where all the lights

00:55:57.300 - 00:56:17.760

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 sky. I want to change. Even a wall gets painted again.

00:56:25.710 - 00:56:41.650

And here's a poem called: TO MY ENEMIES And again, his mood continues. I'm still here, in a skin thinner than a Dybbuk's

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raincoat. Strange is the birds who scrounge those stubborn pumps that bring up nothing. Maddened by you, for whom the cash register with its clerical bells is a national church, you whose instance smile cracks the earth at my feet. May your wife

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go to paradise with a garbage man, your prick hang like a shoelace, your balls become raisins, hair grow on the whites of your eyes, and your eyelashes turn into lawn mowers that cut from nine to five. Man is a skin disease that covers the Earth,

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the stars are antibodies approaching, your president is a tsetse fly. And as I said, written way back in the 60s, but it sounds like 2007. So what, let's say, was written in 1967, really sounds

00:57:47.320 - 00:58:35.620

like 2007. Let's see what we will read to end this evening. And I guess we can go with again some startling images here to a poem called, ‘’College Town Blues‘’ and for some reason he gets into Switzerland, but here is:

00:58:35.620 - 00:58:53.250

COLLEGE TOWN BLUES Switzerland's okay. You know, pretty lakes and lots of snow, but the people all have clocks for hearts and cheese for faces. The mountains look like tooth decay, I'd rather be in Paris,

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the sunlight's made of wine, clouds go by like baby carriages. Who cares about the time. The boulevards shine like stars at night here in the sky. But I'm still here at a college town, so vermin armpit USA. The smog just oozes over from LA in

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a place called Maria's, where the coffee's boiled diarrhea, and the people all look the same. Campbell soups in different sizes, everybody smiles, even the dirt apologizes. It's neat and clean. But late at night, the gentle

00:59:34.380 - 01:00:23.610

wind leaps like a rapist from a bush. The walls of ivy creek and all the Ph. D. stare at their TVs, gossip, drink, play cards, but never, never scream. We will end this- actually, as I look for more poems here and

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don't find them. I wish to get on to the other show, I will leave you with the information that I've been reading from the collected poems of Bert Meyers which has just been released, called ‘’In a Dybbuk's Raincoat‘’ or ‘’In a Demon's

01:00:39.000 - 01:00:59.010

Raincoat‘’. And tomorrow night, Joe Stroud, Ellen Bass and Gary Young through- three of our finest poets will join Daniel Meyers, one of the editors of this book, and yours truly, the other editor of this book, at the Capitola Book Cafe at 7:30.

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Please come buy one of the books, I think you'll enjoy the evening and enjoy the comments of the other poets on this extraordinary man, Bert Meyers, who died in 1979, and it has taken 28 years to get this book printed. Come out tomorrow

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night. I look forward to seeing you. This is Morton Marcus saying, believe it or not, I'll see you next week with another show on the Poetry Show. Unknown: Thank you, Mort. And like to invite you to learn how

01:01:31.140 - 01:01:47.970

farmworkers build California from the ground up on "Pastures of Plenty." A documentary of the history of farmworkers produced by KUSPS Rachel Ann Goodman. Just tune in for pastures of plenty this week 10am, Monday, April 23. through Thursday,

01:01:47.970 - 01:01:53.370

April 26, right here on Central Coast Public Radio, KUSP.