Bert Meyers

Bert Meyers was born Bertram Ivan Meyers in Los Angeles on March 20, 1928. The son of Romanian and Polish Jewish immigrants, he maintained strong lifelong ties to his Jewish cultural heritage without being religious.  Always rebellious and a questioner of authority, he decided to drop out of high school and become a poet. For many years he worked at manual labor jobs, including janitor, farmer worker, house painter, and printer’s apprentice, until he became a master picture framer and gilder. Here he finally found some satisfaction in the process of craftsmanship and attention to detail, the same approach he used in composing his poetry. Throughout these years he continued to write, feeling that a poet should be immersed in the world, not ensconced in academia, and should have real world things to write about. During the late 40s and 50s he was involved with the communist youth in Los Angeles.  His idealism and belief in people drew him towards various causes for the rest of his life, from civil rights to the anti-Vietnam War movement.  Though never dogmatic, or overtly political, his poems are full humanistic belief and philosophy. In 1957 he married Odette Sarah Miller, a recent French immigrant to LA, who became the love of his life and his muse. A writer, poet and translator in her own right, she helped anchor his turbulent nature. They had two children, Anat Silvera and Daniel Meyers. But it was challenging to support this young family on the small salary of a picture framer. Within a couple of years exposure to the fumes and materials of gilding and picture framing made him ill, exacerbated by his smoking. Although he had never taken undergraduate classes, and had no high school diploma, in 1964 he was admitted to the Claremont Graduate School on the basis of his poetic achievements. By 1967 he had completed a Masters degree and all the work necessary for a Ph.D in English Literature and was hired to teach poetry and literature at Pitzer College in Claremont where he taught until 1978. Bert Meyers died of lung cancer in 1979, at the young age of 51. Source