2 David Lerner Quotes

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"David Lerner" was an United States/American renegade poet born in New York City. Lerner came from a family of Russian-Jewish renegades, and grew up as a so-called "red-diaper baby". Lerner published numerous articles as a journalist, including material on the Russian singer and poet Vladimir Vysotsky. Lerner pursued a bohemian life and became involved in the notorious Cafe Babar in San Francisco about 1986, 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.' Lerner's common-law wife, Maura O'Connor also published poetry.

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"