Linda Lerner was born and educated in New York City. Twelve collections of her poetry have been published; The most recent, Living In Dangerous Times,( Presa Press, 2007); City Woman (March Street Press, 2006--Small Press Reviews' Nov.-Dec. 2006 pick of the month); Because you can't I will (Pudding House, 2005); The Bowery And Other Poems (March Street Press-- Small Press Reviews’ Nov.-Dec. 2004 pick of the month) 2004, A Koan For Samsara (Ibbetson Street Press, 2003); Greatest Hits (1989-2002) Pudding House publications; she's been nominated twice for a pushcart prize.
Recent publications her poems have/will appear in include The New York Quarterly, Van Gogh's Ear, Tribes, Home Planet News, The Paterson Literary Review, Onthebus, The Louisiana Review, Black Bear Review, South Boston Literary Review ("Bullies" won its Spring 2002 poetry prize), Ragged Lion Anthology, & Big Hammer.
Linda Lerner & Andrew Gettler founded POETS on the line in 1995, the first poetry anthology available on the Net. For Nos. 6&7 (1997/98) the Vietnam Veterans / Poets issue she received a 1997 Puffin Foundations Grant & Ludwig Vogelstein Grant. POETS on the line will be kept permanently on the Net, though it ceased publication with the Millennium issue, (9&10)
Her essay on The Present State Of American Poetry, "Poems From The Crypt Don't Speak to Living People" appears the New York Quarterly, no. 60, 2004; Her interview with Hayden Carruth appeared in the 50th issue of The New York Quarterly; one with Robert Peters is in the 51st issue of Chiron Review, Summer, 1997.
Linda Lerner has reviewed books for Home Planet News, Small Press Review, Tribes, Chiron Review, Black Bear Review, et al; She is a contributing editor for Home Planet News.
In the last few years she has given readings throughout the the tri state & New England area, (the Knitting Factory in NYC, The Bowery Poetry club, Cornelia St. Cafe, Stone Soup Poets in Boston, The Barron Arts Center in N.J.) as well as in various parts of the country including New Mexico, San Francisco (Above Paradise), New Orleans (Maple Leaf Bar), Colorado (The Penny Lane), Seattle (B&N), & at the Cherry Valley Arts Festival in 1998, a 30 year tribute to Beat & Bohemian influence. June (2000); Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles), & in Atlanta in 2006 for the Popular Culture Society.
She is also a member of Pen.
She does NOT relate well to authority figures.
from the fire
the fire girls jumped off
a factory roof to escape*
trapped over 100 others 20 years before
my mother, a millinery copyist in
another factory, could smell the smoke
whenever anyone spoke of
someone they knew...
worse than what there couldn't ever be
anything worse...she said;
words
I walked past thorough
ignorant of the embers
long before
you fleshed out of my fantasy
and after even after
I smelled it awful
like nothing I had ever known
couldn't get away from,
you knew instinctively, whose lungs
40 years of Pall Mall smoke blackened;
death's crackling
I couldn't hear in my mother's words
or stop hearing now
blocks from where I lived...
...kept seeing that sky, crowded with so many
from so high to fall
my mother couldn't have imagined
as flame winged
they flew down
90 years ago
how many more would fly
even further down
one at a time
slam into the earth,
couldn't ever be anything worse...
But I know now
what you did...
there's no bottom to anything
always
"still a down and
further still to fall and faster than i
thought..." **
twin-souled and yet
10 months before
I had---there was... urned proof,
as you talked me safely out
of lower Manhattan through our life
back to Brooklyn
loved me past mortal flesh
I didn't even have a clue...
you were already speaking to me
from the fire.
* *Triangle Factory Fire on March 25, 1911
**quote from "Liquid Jesuit" by Andrew Gettler
An American Sound
my west Indian neighbor rides an imaginary horse
across his landed fantasy
squeezed between two buildings
on a vacant lot
turning in the huge cement rollers
as the clock turns toward his settlement money
lists of foreclosed buildings
tease him from a computer screen
cushions his physical pain
day something slipped in his back
while making a delivery
and all the days with nothing to do but think
slipped out of being grateful just to have a job
why he's here not back in the Islands
he loves more than he'll ever love this country---
my neighbor's window adjacent to mine
faces another building being gutted & rebuilt
a floor higher to rent out
wakes me not him every morning at 7 am
the sound he hears is louder than
a drill or jackhammer
is what
my father heard in Amsterdam
waiting three years for entrance to this country
half a century ago
kept hearing in failed business after business
the sound of the dollar bill
thunder of a hundred thousand dollars
purchasing his freedom...
from a green truck
the owner's voice whips down
on his workers who aren't new immigrants
like my 20 something neighbor
claiming squatter's rights
on his 40 acres of fantasy earth
too many hungry years
cut scares across their minds
too deep to let their own voices
blast thru our windows
turn up the volume on their radio
people complain slam down windows
nobody hears anybody--
when my father came home after
cashing other people's needs in
a grocery store all day
he'd out scream the words he didn't own
to say what I couldn't hear
through all that noise
you know how it is when something
gets struck in your throat--
feels like trying to cough up what
I have no memory of swallowing
Art found
climbing up cable wires
knocked loose by a storm
on one side of a cement slab
separates renovation work
from where I live
brought down trees ungreened a garden
to green the new owner's property
I’d called Time Warner to complain about
whose promises fell thru the cracks
way people do in
up beat gentrification times
cracks ivy rose up from
greened & thickened around the wires
in the worsening dustnoise
I opened my window
to yell out when
a vision
... a giant green up yours finger
sticking it to the destroyers
took my breath away
The City Feeds Me Hungry
back to the streets
every few years graffiti walled free spoken
morality cleanses & depending on which
side of the alphabet street I'm job seeking on
learn to navigate my way
down the correct language
for what will pay the rent
on an apartment that doesn't exist
at that price
my mother's warning:
the more you get the more you want
about sex... becomes about everything now
urgent need replaces want
I've walked miles of cyber hot paved concrete
burning the skin off
my soul streets
till I feel the full moon
on a blazing hot summer's day
sitting in an outdoor cafe drinking coffee
walked out the loneliness
that's not as bad
since my lover unfantasized
& worse since he slipped back
streets on which I've sheltered
someone from death in poems
I cannot write enough of to keep him breathing
pulled off Houdini escapes in
street jazz sounds that feed me till I'm famished
back where I started from
the wheel keeps turning
After Reading Jack Wiler On a Full Moon Night
and thinking about my latest rent increase
moving to a cheaper apartment
where I don't want to live
or taking a trip to India
I move from the living room to the bedroom
consider getting more work
to pay for what it won't next year/
India sounds better...
try not to think of
my lover who reneged
on his 'forever' promise by dying
look for what we had elsewhere
even if it doesn't exist
we didn't have all of it anyway
although we did
& move to the window
consider going out later
to look at the stars
imagine what it's like to be
Jack Wiler looking at the stars
be like my lover who can't see them
...once in Taos New Mexico
a friend drove me to the Grand Canyon
I stood at the edge peering down
a car tiny like a child's toy
smashed at the bottom...
I wondered if there were people
skeletal remains inside
how easy it would be to slip
stared at it as I'm now staring
at a world that could end any moment
the what if / in case poverty / illness
a fanatic's heaven explodes
death at my doorstep again
I move to the kitchen
a hunger for what I can't name to find...
one time visiting a friend in another city
told to walk west from the train statio
then turn left till I came to a rite aid
and head north to some grocery
around the corner from a Macdonalds
across from a pizza shop
or was it laundromat & walk diagonally
down the chance
I'd find my way out
& get to her house---
I look up at the stars
guiding me nowhere / everywhere
& the moon that crazy sky balloon
floating out of my head:
I could burst it
just like that I think
like this: not moving anywhere
nowhere at all
state of mind: cloud in a makebelieve sky
I turn on / up
jazz as a dam a levee
to hold back the onslaught of ugliness;
tried it with Miles
after the toilet bathtub overflowed
sewage spoiling through my apartment,
but he's way too cool / polite
so maybe Prez or Ornate
but they cannot get out the odor;
even after someone comes in to sanitize
and a neighbor says it's gone now/
isn't another sense picks it up,
something more wrong than the plumbing
construction work outside...
this is no place to dream;
my neighbor says home is a state of mind,
she blocks out the noise...
i cannot put my books photos
in a state of mind
and tell me, how do you separate
Miles from his trumpet
the poet from the space she breathes in
her soul wailing through it
one flowing into the other
how do you avoid contamination
in this apartment this city
this life
tell me how do you separate
how do you