David Lerner

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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.

Lerner and Bruce Isaacson co-founded Zeigeist 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 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."