Bert Meyers 1928–1979 Poet Bert Meyers was the son of Sephardic Jewish parents who emigrated from Spain to Brooklyn and then settled in Los Angeles. He grew up in East Hollywood and left high school to become a master picture framer and gilder. Though he did not attend college, Meyers was admitted to the Claremont Graduate School based on the strength of his poetry and earned a PhD. Meyers’s precisely framed poems are frequently image driven and often quite short. Noting that “the image is unequivocally at the center of his work” in her introduction to In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat, poet Denise Levertov praised Meyers’s work for the “extraordinary intensity and perfection of his poems and the consistency with which he illumined what he experienced, bodying it forth in images that enable readers to share his vision and thereby extend the boundaries of their own lives.” During his lifetime, Meyers published the collections Early Rain (1960), The Dark Birds (1968), Sunlight on the Wall (1976), Windowsills (1979), and The Wild Olive Trees (1979). Before he died, he selected and arranged the core poems of In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat: Collected Poems (2007). His widow, Odette Meyers, son Daniel Meyers, and friend Morton Marcus shepherded the book into publication, expanding Meyers’s original selection into his collected works by adding more poems, songs, articles, and testimonies to the work Meyers had originally chosen. Meyers taught at Pitzer College, which dedicated the Bert Meyers Poetry Room inside the historic Grove House in the poet’s honor.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 06:51:51 +0000
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