David Lerner (born in New York City on November 23, 1951; died in San Francisco, California on July 1(?),1997) is an American renegade poet. 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. New York, New York and NYC redirect here. ... San Francisco redirects here. ... Sappho and Alcaeus of Mytilene, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1881). ... For other uses, see Bohemian (disambiguation). ... This page is a candidate for speedy deletion. ...

Lerner and Bruce Isaacson co-founded Zeigeist Press and have been referred to as 'the Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot of the underground.' Ezra Pound in 1913. ... Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965), was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. ...

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 was one. He was an eloquent screamer, a soft-spoken rageoholic, a madman with a great manuscript. His poetry will always be a reminder of a time when poetry in the Mission was spontaneous, magical, and more than a little bit dangerous."

Bibliography

Poetry Collections

• I Want a New Gun (1988)
• Why Rimbaud Went to Africa (1989)
• Pray Like the Hunted (1992)
• The Last Five Miles to Grace (2005, new and selected poems)

External links

http://www.zeitgeist-press.com/about.htm