Description

Pitzer College, Claremont, California, is the site of the historic Grove House built in 1902 and moved to the college's campus in the 1970s. Within Grove House is the Bert Meyers Poetry Room, named in honor of the author of this collection and former teacher at Pitzer.

Bert Meyers wrote these poems between 1947 and 1979. Prior to his death at the age of fifty-one, Meyers determined what he considered his best work; following his death Meyers's widow and son added to the collection, all of which now appears in "In a Dybbuk's Raincoat," introducing a new generation to Bert Meyers's poetry and songs.

Morten Marcus, friend of Bert Meyers, was asked by Meyers's widow to work with her and Meyers's son, Daniel, to get "In a Dybbuk's Raincoat" into print.

"There are terrific things here: prose pieces entirely new to me, pungent paragraphs about Paris, lively comments on poetry, and several naughty words about Yeats. Once in a while, one encounters old classics, such as 'Picture Framing.' It's marvelous that Morton Marcus and Bert's son, Daniel, have brought out this book."--Robert Bly, author of "My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy"

L.A.
The world's largest ash-tray,
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,
exotic janitors,
sweep out the sky at dusk.
The grey air molds.
Geraniums heat 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 the cartons of trash and diamonds
and ideologies
areopened, used, dumped into the sea.

Pencil Sharpener
It has no arms or legs, this tiny nude; yet grip
it by the 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.

They Who Waste Me
When I ask for a hand,
they give me a shovel.
If I complain, they say,
Worms are needles at work
to clothe a corpse for spring.has inhaled a neighbor.