David Lerner (November 23, 1951] – July 1, 1997 ?) was an American renegade poet born in New York City. After some time as a journalist, Lerner pursued a bohemian lifestyle and became involved in the notorious Cafe Babar in San Francisco, a group dubbed as the Babarians. Lerner and Bruce Isaacson co-founded Zeitgeist Press and have been referred to as 'the Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot of the underground.'
One of Lerner's most celebrated poems, 'Mei...
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David Lerner (November 23, 1951] – July 1, 1997 ?) was an American renegade poet born in New York City. After some time as a journalist, Lerner pursued a bohemian lifestyle and became involved in the notorious Cafe Babar in San Francisco, a group dubbed as the Babarians. Lerner and Bruce Isaacson co-founded Zeitgeist Press and have been referred to as 'the Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot of the underground.'
One of Lerner's most celebrated poems, 'Mein Kampf', is a seminal statement of underground poetics in response to the weight of the mainstream. In it he says:
I'd rather
sell arms to the Martians
than wait sullenly for a
letter from a diseased clown with a
three-piece mind
telling me that I've won a
bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses
for my poem "Autumn in the Spring"
Lerner died of a heroin overdose in 1997 and Zeitgeist published 'The Last Five Miles to Grace' posthumously. Bucky Sinister of the San Francisco Bay Guardian wrote: "Lerner was a broken-down saint if there ever...
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