Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master

Glib though it sounds, I believe looking back is as crucial to human progress as forging ahead. I’m guessing the editorial staff at Poetry agree, because one of the more compelling features of recent issues involves reclaiming poets whose works have been unduly neglected by posterity. In each respective issue, an established writer introduces selections from such a poet’s oeuvre using hard-to-access sources, like personal papers or rare books long out-of-print. In some cases, as with Carolyn Rodgers (October 2022) and William Harris (February 2023), the resultant chapbook creates a compelling argument for the publication of a full-scale retrospective; in other instances, it functions as a trailer for the release of an upcoming edition. Assotto Saint’s Sacred Spells: Collected Works was just published by Nightboat Books in August, following his feature in May 2023. This past April, three months after Bert Meyers was remembered and celebrated in Poetry’s pages, the University of Houston, under the umbrella of its Unsung Masters Series, released Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master.

Edited by Dana Levin and Adele Elise Williams, the Meyers project was, among other things, a labor of love, not only for Levin and Williams, each of whom in their own way regard the poet, who died in 1979, as their teacher and mentor, but also for Daniel Meyers, the poet’s son. Daniel’s efforts to ensure his father’s legacy culminated in the publication of In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat: Collected Poems (University of New Mexico Press, 2007)—a handsome, impeccable volume that did not impact the poetry world as it should have and is now, tragically, out-of-print. It’s hard to understand why. After reading just fourteen poems, curated by Dana Levin in the January 2023 issue of Poetry, I was wholly convinced Bert Meyers must be counted among the finest English-language poets of the last hundred years. His lyric economy and persistent curiosity, combined with a well-defined sense of personal ethics and unique understanding of metaphor, animate his poetics, engender linguistic surprise, and transform ordinary, oft-overlooked details into miraculous moments of perception. For these reasons, I eagerly awaited Levin and Williams’s book, hoping its release would redeem a poet whose work redeems the phenomenal world.

Time will tell whether or not Bert Meyers’s poems are embraced by the broader public, but at the very least, Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of a Master presents an airtight case for the poet’s place in the canon. More than sixty poems are included in the book. These are augmented with several photos of Bert at various stages of his short life; a dozen or so hand-written notes, and various communications with other poets; an introduction and multiple “Postscripts”; several memoirs from former students, colleagues, and friends; and numerous valuable critical interpretations. Bibliographic and biographical information round out the collection. To address all of these additional features in-depth would detract from privileging Bert’s poems, which are unquestionably distinctive and worthy of the highest regard. As Adele Elise Williams states so memorably at the outset of her essay “Born in a Tear: On Bert Myers, Gender, and Admission”:

When I first encountered Bert Myers’s poetry, after years in graduate school studying poetry and poetics, I realized two things: one, the number of tremendous unknown poets; two, poetry gatekeeping is real. Meyers should be taught widely and with regularity. Why was I reading William Carlos Williams, those chickens, that wheelbarrow, pining for plums (I don’t even like plums!), when Meyers was saying things like, “Surely a dead moth’s / the skull of a tiny horse, / and the moon’s a saint / who pities the sea.”

Why indeed! A back-to-back reading of Meyers’s poems provides one swoon-worthy astonishment after another. Working through this collection, I felt as if I were observing rare birds in their natural habitats. From “Gulls Have Come Again”: “People were flowers that grew by the shore; / twilight takes them home, / they fade together at their tables.” In “Postcards”: “A woman leans from a window /to see how the sky feels. / Clouds rub their silver polish over the sun.” And in “Spleen”: “Sometimes, I just hang around / like a dead man’s coat, / or a vacant lot that trembles/ when construction crews pass.” It is tempting to claim these images are surreal, but close readings show they are not only intuitive but logical. In the following stanza from “Landscapes”:

There’s a hubcap, going blind
in a ditch; the dust,
spreading its cataract;
and a few yellow machines
that die like sunflowers,
dropping their parts in a field.

Here, Meyers’s language glows with the sort of eerie transparency one might find in an Edward Hopper painting. Objects have their own life and are more than merely metaphors for human experience. The passage, which features razor-sharp diction and precise details, is equal to anything written by Robert Bly or James Wright at the height of their respective powers.

Time and again, the poems selected for the book show Meyers extracting ineffable poetic moments from the most mundane sources. He achieves this through a highly personal understanding of metaphor and effective juxtapositions. Again, from “Postcards”: “Dwarfs and hunchbacks / are loading wagons. / Gardens drip in the heat. / Flowers burst in the walls. / An ox appears / like a hill in an alley.” The succession of carefully-placed images is held together by parallel sentence structures, where the verb in each of the three center lines (“drip,” “burst,” and “appears”) imbues the scene with movement. A lesser writer might have rendered it as a still-life. Meyers also could disarm his readers with incisive reflection. In “A Year in a Small Town”: “Today, I know / I haven’t done as much / for this world as a tree.” In contrast to some of the poet’s near-surreal passages, these lines recall the tender humility of John Clare.

There is much that should be said about Meyers’s thematic breadth and tonal range that cannot be addressed in the scope of this review. But I would be remiss if I did not illustrate, even in brief, the poet’s commitment to craft. His poems, well-metered and almost always lineated according to natural units of breath, have an unaffected grace. Similarly, Meyers’s sound work, while impressive, is subtle and free of strain. Considering another passage from “Postcards,” the following end-rhymes allow this stanza to chime without distracting a reader’s progress through the phrasing:

Somedays are harpsichords
under the chestnut trees.
Nothing lasts, their strings break,
the gold turns gray, a drizzle falls…
And then the gold’s restored.
People leave their tables,
birds their narrow benches in the walls.
And old woman sits and bathes
her tired feet that looks like marble
in a puddle near the market stalls.

Initially, these lines may seem closer to lyric prose than traditional verse. However, closer inspection shows certain end words are paired through an elaborate string of rhymes: “harpsichord” and “restored”; “break” and “bathes”; “falls” and “walls”; “tables” and “marbles.” By contrast, “trees” is sonically matched with a pair of interior words—“leaves” and “feet”—thereby linking three key images to the poem’s more conspicuous theme of falling, departing, and restoration. Due to the subtlety of Meyers’s effort, one’s understanding of the poem’s full effects arrives slowly, even subconsciously, through elaborate chains of sound.

In terms of organization, Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master resembles a dynamic documentary, where original source material—in this case, the poems—is periodically framed by testimonials and critical reflections. The format is especially useful to one who reads the book in sequence. Williams’s aforementioned essay considers the poet’s ideas about gender, specifically his view of masculinity as inherently flawed, whereby Meyers acknowledges “his own gendered faults” and yet recognizes such awareness does not make him a better person. This insight allowed me to reexamine “The Family”—which, initially, I found rigid in its presentation of women—from a fresh perspective, thereby suggesting the possibility that Meyers was capable of self-critique. (Do the “shriek and shudder” that close of the poem suggest that the “girl” and “mother” are breaking out of the beds and dreams initially assigned to them?) Other contributors foreground Meyers’s Romanian-Jewish heritage, citing key literary and historical markers that align with religious and cultural traditions evident in the poems. Such insights, too, are quite useful for understanding the writer’s inherent sense of otherness.

The personal memoirs and critical observations surrounding these poems also helped clarify certain hunches I had about influence. Once more, from “Postcards”:

Cars whirl around a monument.
People smile, horns blare,
headlights shine like brass.
The whole square’s a carousel.
Suddenly, you’re a child
who’s had his turn, a stranger;
the others stay, but you go home.

The epiphanic fourth line signals a psychological shift from communal participation to isolation, where belonging becomes a self-imposed estrangement. The shift is made possible when the “you” inhabits the metaphor of the carousel: he returns in time, though not space, to childhood—a journey that prompts him to “go home,” to return to a literal and metaphorical elsewhere. Although unique in its own right, the poem felt familiar. I sensed in it a thematic kinship with some of Yannis Ristos’s brief poems from Testimonies. I also perceived a certain stylistic affinity to the short lyrics of Constantine Cavafy, specifically the emotional turbulence that bubbles just beneath the restrained, measured surface. Both hunches were confirmed two pages later in Ari Sherman’s “Be Like Rain: A Memoir,” where Meyers, pleased with Sherman’s interest in poetry-in-translation, loans him books by Ritsos and Cavafy. Likewise, Amy Gerstler and Maurya Simon’s essays situate Meyer’s work within the traditions of world literature, each citing numerous writers Meyers modeled.

The dozen or so photographs scattered throughout the volume provide yet another portal for approaching the poet. Whether one regards Meyers as a seventeen-year-old gymnast or as a middle-aged man posing with his wife and children, there is no question that Bert’s presence was striking. His thick mane of dark hair, which eventually turned white, coupled with enormous eyes and chiseled facial features, lent him the charisma of a great character actor. These photographs are balanced with anecdotes about his intense, sometimes unpredictable actions—including his decision to drop out of high school and teach himself literature. Perhaps the best indicator of his singular personality can be glimpsed through his own writing. A few handwritten notes show him jotting provocative thoughts about poetry. In one such paper, from 1976, he reacts to a William Everson reading:

He read an hour long poem about his sex life, comparing its ups and downs, etc., with the course of a powerful river through the American landscape—a bicentennial event—the metaphorical fascism of ecological lust orchestrated by a Hollywood director who read Hopkins and Jeffers…(religion, alliteration and rhythm) What shit!

Although Meyers did not intend this note to be made public, various peers and former students claim he had no difficulty speaking his mind. In another artifact, he writes:

I have known waitresses and janitors from whom great images flowed like traffic on a freeway. I prefer fairy tales to most literature and I believe the last stanza of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” is more profound than The Cantos or The Wasteland.

With honesty comes great risk: there is a chance others might assume you are mad. And yet, only through honesty can genius find a voice. I hadn’t thought to compare Eliot or Pound’s modernist masterpieces to this (or any) nursery-rhyme, but I believe the poet’s judgement is sound.

Finally, there is a typed letter to W. H. Auden from 1968, following the publication of Meyers’s most well-known book, The Dark Birds. In just three paragraphs, the younger poet, compelled to introduce himself to an acknowledged master, reveals his unique, iconoclastic personality through a string of disclosures about his family who once lived where Auden was then residing. The result is a letter so unapologetically strange and authentic one wonders what Auden thought of it. Our great fortune is seeing that personality in poems that shine like rare gemstones. May Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master be taught and read for years to come.