Imagethesia: The Poetry of Bert Meyers

by Eric Gudas

Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master, poetry and criticism, edited by Dana Levin and Adele Elise Williams, The Unsung Masters Series, in collaboration with Gulf Coast, A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, Copper Nickel, and Pleiades: Literature in Context, produced at the University of Houston Department of English, 2023, 213 pages, $16.00.

BERT MEYERS'S POEMS arise from the wild, shifting terrain between verse and song, lamentation and joy, exile and homecoming, curse and benediction. Not long before his death in 1979, at the age of fifty-one, Meyers obliquely portrayed himself as a poet who could "raise / a few birds from a blank page" ("The Poets"). That few belies the audacity of Meyers's ambition: how many poets can summon one wing—even one feather!—from airy nothing? In his poem "Homecoming":

The mockingbirds, those joyful books

that opened in the sky,

then closed their pages on a branch,

awake and go mad,

chewing the bones of their old songs

Meyers's birds body forth life's ongoingness—beyond time and death-bound human consciousness:

What else awakes and knows

it was born, it will die.

The same clouds come and go;

the same bird sings or flies.

(From "Lament," page 127)

Meyers's poems both sing and fly. The freedom he longs for and mourns takes flight from the printed word—but surpasses the page-bound world.

A recent volume in the Unsung Masters series, Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master, edited by Dana Levin and Adele Elise Williams, restores Meyers's poems to print for the second time this century. Not long after its publication in 2007, In a Dybbuk's Raincoat: Collected Poems (University of New Mexico Press), edited by Morton Marcus and the poet's son, Daniel Meyers, wound up on the remainder shelves. Meyers, preoccupied with waste in late twentieth-century America, grimly presaged his own poems' fate:

A whole day at the saw—

when they come for the rubbish,

I throw myself

out with the dust.

(From "Twilight at the Shop," page 92)

Levin and Williams once more reclaim Meyers's work from the dust heap of American poetry. Their book augments a generous selection of his poems with family photographs, manuscripts and other primary documents, and essays about his life and work by a range of contemporary writers. Many of the essayists were Meyers's students and colleagues at Pitzer College, where he taught from 1967 to 1978. However, even to those contributors who know him only through his work, Meyers emerges as a Teacher: he "schools you," José Angel Araguz attests, "without needing footnotes." A master of the poetic image (about which more later), the epigrammatic short poem, the lyric sequence, the prose poem, and such genres as elegy, love poem, invective, bestiary, and lullaby, Meyers—who attained "a style / so clear it could wash a face" ("The Poets")—makes the act of writing seem deceptively easy.

The opening of "Gently, Gently," a poem written in the late 1970s to Odette Meyers, his wife of two decades, exemplifies that clarity:

We, too, began with joy.

Then, sickness came;

then, poverty.

We were poor, so poor,

our children were our only friends.

Gently, gently,

through anger and pain,

love justified itself,

like the nails in the house

during a storm.

Meyers found "the most profound lines of poetry" in the last stanza of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," which he quoted in two lines that contain only monosyllabic words: "Why does the lamb love Mary so? / Mary loves the lamb, you know." His own poem distills a lifetime's shared experience into such monosyllables as "joy," "poor," "friends," and "love." "Gently, Gently" celebrates love that endures and grows stronger over decades—not despite, but because of life's "storm" and its tests. Meyers's early formalism of the 1950s justifies itself in these stanzas, which never totally forsake rhyme and which pulse with iambs and trochees.

I first encountered "Gently, Gently" almost thirty years ago, when the late poet Naomi Replansky—another unsung master—introduced me to Meyers's work in her Upper West Side apartment. Naomi met Meyers, ten years her junior, during her sojourn in 1950s Los Angeles, through her lifelong friend Thomas McGrath. "Tom—well, his poems could get a bit didactic," Naomi confided to me, "but Bert Meyers—you've probably never heard of him— never. Bert was always crystal clear." Naomi and Meyers remained friends for a quarter-century, until the latter's death. Each poet worked a whole variety of jobs far outside the academic sphere. Naomi's employment history included stints as a lathe operator during World War II and, a few decades later, as a computer programmer. Meyers ended up a Professor of English at Pitzer without high school or college degrees via a circuitous, improbable path. As Levin notes, he worked "as a janitor, ditch digger, a sheet metal worker, a warehouse man, a printer's apprentice, and a house painter, until settling into work as an artisan picture framer and gilder." Although Meyers, like Naomi, rejected the autobiographical strain in American poetry, his own life experiences emerge everywhere in his poems, through single words and images: shovel, housepainter, table-saw, hammer, nail, mop, broom, sweep, janitors, turpentine, thinner, warehouse, gold (as in gold leaf).

Amy Gerstler, Meyers's student at Pitzer, alludes to such everyday objects in her essay, "A Gardner in Paradise: A Memoir": "Bert's poems teach us to gaze intently, with our whole, hungry souls, and to recognize immensities in the seemingly simple, the apparently humble, the easily overlooked." One answer to why Meyers has been repeatedly "overlooked" by American poetry's gatekeepers surfaces from his poems themselves, such as "Sunflowers," which train their eyes on a disregarded world, a world of waste-objects:

No one spoke to the sunflowers,

those antique microphones

in the vacant lot.

So, they hung their heads

and, slowly, fell apart.

His poems illuminate overlooked people, too. "Meyers champions the underdog," Williams stresses. "His poetry often concerns the silenced, the striving." In "L.A.," Meyers's homage to Los Angeles, the city he spent his life in and around, he pays tribute, via metaphor, to the overlooked manual laborers who create and re-create the city's iconography every day: "…the palm trees, / exotic janitors, / sweep out the sky at dusk."

Meyers's topography of Los Angeles extends to the city's margins which, in his lifetime, moved further and further outward, even as L.A.'s multiple centers expanded. Sean Singer sees Meyers as a particularly Jewish poet of exile and marginality: "The voice in his poems exists on the periphery, and that voice is able to be the polestar and give meaning to the fable and decay of existence." Meyers's topographical imagination sees that "periphery" in spatial terms:

On the outskirts, the factory—

somebody's chemistry set;

a junkyard, where the town

keeps throwing itself away;

rust clots on the mangled iron;

pain in the sun's aluminum glare…

(From "Landscapes," page 99)

Except for the vague "somebody," human beings are almost entirely absent from this vision of L.A.'s outer realms. Yet, what Singer might call Meyers's outsider-eye allows the poet to discern human "pain" embedded in the post-industrial landscape. Images of ashes and ashtrays haunt Meyers's poems, not just in his reckonings with his native city. A life-long heavy smoker, who eventually died of lung cancer, Meyers lived surrounded by ashtrays; but his dim view of human history, informed by the Holocaust and the ever-present possibility of nuclear destruction ("The future waits in a button"), transform this everyday object into an avatar of devastation: "a ghetto full of charred men / with grizzled heads / who wasted their flame" ("After the Meal").

Everyone notices Meyers's images: the word-clusters that take flight from the page and seize us with their immediacy. Meyers's poems combine so many types of figuration that we might need a new term—imagethesia? Everywhere in his poems, we encounter simile, metaphor, anthropomorphism and especially reverse-anthropomorphism—the attribution of qualities from nature, animals, and the non-sentient world to humans: "Often as we extend our hands, / nothing happens: loose wires hang / from the plaster of our sleeves" ("Now I Sleep in the Afternoon"). Meyers's two-punch of image and metaphor so exceeds so-called extended metaphor and even mixed metaphor that Denise Levertov coined the term "montage-images," that is, "montages that synthesize into a new image," to describe his practice. In the third stanza of "Gently, Gently," Meyers's image-synthesis hits warp speed:

Somehow, we created hope,

reliable drum

in the shadow's wrist;

a tuning fork

on the sidewalk of dreams.

For Meyers, hope can't be taken for granted. Rather, it needs to be "created" —and not in some diffuse sense, but moment by moment, year by year, by the poem's "you" and "I." In five lines, Meyers links hope, music (including the music of poetry), and dreams in a "montage image" whose straightforward language belies its intricacy. "When poets hammer out their own metaphors," Singer states, "they are also being reborn, attaching new meanings to dead symbols"—including the symbol of hope.

Meyers’s image-making alchemy surges most powerfully through his verbs, agents of phenomenal compression. In the last line of “The Dark Birds,” he ignites a mystic conflagration with the most ordinary verb: “fire undressed my bones.” He’s a master of anthimeria—the use of one part of speech for another—in his nouns-turned-verbs: “One morning, Georgia O’Keeffe / cobblestoned the infinite with clouds” (“Georgia O’Keefe). In his essay, Araguz needs anthimeria to articulate how Meyers’s poems “strange things up and return them to us so that all involved are changed” (my emphasis). Meyers stranges up Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings (or at least the refrigerator magnet cliché of her work) with “cobblestone,” a noun turned transitive verb whose object—“the infinite”—raises the stakes over and above painting into the realm of vision, where vaporous clouds have the solidity of stones.

Like many poets, Meyers is drawn to the verb "hum," which summons up the sounds of insects as well as human song. "Hum" also functions as a kind of universal background sound suited to fit a speaker's reverie, ennui, and any mood in between. In Keats's "Endymion," the sound of bees links images of rising sun and the leaves through which that sun's glimpsed: "Just when the light of morn, with hum of bees, / Stole through its verdurous matting of fresh trees." The time-honored bees of poetry also enter Meyers's poems:

And summer, brown and hairy

hums to itself

around the yard,

like a bee

in a window box.

(From "August")

The poems of John Clare, whom Meyers revered, are full of humming, too: "From the hedge, in drowsy hum, / Heedless buzzing beetles bum, / Haunting every bushy place" ("Summer Evening"). Clare's vibrating hedge haunts Meyers's prose poem "Maybe" as an impossibility, a disconnect between the human and natural worlds:

We filled the moon and the stars and everything on earth with our desire; and still, life doesn't hum like a hedge in summer.

L.A.'s ever-present freeway network "hums like a pipe / when the water's on" ("Sunrise"). This connection between highways and humming carries over into the fourth stanza of "Gently, Gently":

At night, I was the one

who became a cello

strung with all our roads,

where memory hums

to itself like a tire.

As the stanza's only active verb, "hum" powers a "montage-image" that starts with the cello, which creates music (remember the previous stanza's "drum" and "tuning fork"). The cello's parallel strings, in turn, become a visual analogue for "all our roads"—the pathways that, like the earlier "sidewalk of dreams," create a spatial metaphor for time: the long marriage that "began with joy" and which stretches backward in the poet's "memory."

The next to last poem in Meyers's posthumously published book The Wild Olive Tree (1979), "Gently, Gently" looks backward over his and Odette Meyers's long union (the Unsung Masters book reproduces his hand-written marriage certificate, dated October 20, 1957) and forward into their shared future. Here are the poem's concluding stanzas:

And you, mad as a clarinet

where the street divides;

a city of raindrops in a bush;

the slow honey that drips

from the sky's old ladle…

the reason I'm frightened of death.

I swear by the wings

love spreads at my waist,

that I'll carry your tune

until my tired strings break.

This poem—among the best love poems written in any language, ever—has an elegiac shadow: Meyers, who died in April, 1979, did not live to see The Wild Olive Tree published—and then quickly go out of print. Perhaps Bert Meyers has become a Muse of Forgetting in American poetry, his poems fated to be lost and rediscovered by successive generations, each new band of readers determined to "carry [his] tune" to the next.

Most of Meyers's four "favorite poets"—"Issa, Blake, Baudelaire, and Emily Dickinson" —died in some form of literary obscurity. Like Blake, Meyers urges us

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

Blake wrote those words in 1803. Almost two centuries later, in a letter to his friend Hugh Miller, Meyers declared:

Now, I'm convinced the whole planet's a dynamic system and that man's a shabby, yet glittering mirror, an engineer who duplicates nature endlessly. Love, first learned from our parents and community, has made our lives both noble & tragic. That's why I worship the eternal in the present. Why should I want to burn furiously, then disintegrate back into the mulch of events?

Out there in Eternity, William Blake and Bert Meyers trade quatrains back and forth, looking back occasionally at what the latter called "the earth's plain face." Here in the time-bound realm, I've stopped brooding over Meyers's intermittent absence from bookshelves and anthologies. I hope the Unsung Masters volume stays in print until the end of time. No matter what, though, Meyers's poems can take care of themselves. Meyers himself worried passionately, not about the endurance of his or anyone's else words, but about the survival of "the whole planet":

Here, on this jewel of earth,

time tears at the green edge.

This 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.

(From "At My Window," page 52)

Eric Gudas is the author of Best Western and Other Poems, winner of the Gerald Cable Book Award, and Beautiful Monster, a chapbook. His writings have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry Flash, Los Angeles Review of Books, Raritan, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles.

— posted September 2025