Jed Myers
Jed Myers was born in Philadelphia in 1952, a grandson of refugees from the massacres of Jews in the Russian Empire. A child in the Cold War era growing up in a working- and middle-class row house neighborhood, he absorbed the doo-wop rhythms and romances of Top 40 AM radio, watched cartoons and dramas on black-&-white TV, hunted salamanders in the unnamed creek at the edge of a golf course, and began writing songs and poems.
He remained involved with music and poetry through the social upheavals of the 1960s, took strong interest in Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, and studied poetry at Tufts University under the mentorship of the enigmatic Language School poet Robert Grenier. He went on to study medicine at Case Western Reserve, and trained in psychiatry at the University of Washington. Settling in Seattle, he and his wife raised three children while he maintained an independent therapy practice and taught at the University.
Upon the events of September 11, 2001, Myers resolved to participate as fully as possible in the life of the arts, recognizing this as a way to affirm the oneness of humanity and of the natural world across all the differences and hostilities. He began writing consistently and seeking publication, created musicand- poetry benefit events to support global charities like Doctors Without Borders and International Rescue Committee, and founded the open mic series NorthEndForum (whose community, now known as Easy Speak, has continued to gather for twenty years).
In recent times, he serves as editor for the online journal Bracken, participates in the music-and-poetry ensemble Band of Poets, helps arrange and performs in benefits for World Central Kitchen, and plays in Easy Speak’s house band known as The 52nd Street Band.
Can’t Be Far, Myers’s fourth full-length collection, was a finalist for the MoonPath Press Sally Albiso Award. His previous collection, Learning to Hold, won the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award. His other books are The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), and six chapbooks. Recent honors include the Northwest Review Poetry Prize, the River Heron Poetry Prize, and Sundress Publications’ Chapbook Editor’s Choice Award. Myers’s poems have appeared widely, in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, The Poetry Review, Southern Indiana Review, The Southeast Review, multiple anthologies, and many other publications.
Currently retired from his therapy practice, Myers writes, makes music, and walks in the nearby wetlands along the Lake Washington shore. He’s married to the writer and theater-maker Alina Rios, and lives in a small bungalow with her and his stepson.
Read the Kirkus Review of The Marriage of Space and Time.
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Poem from Can't Be Far
If I Leap
In the eye of the churn, an ether descends. This is where my brother and I might talk, in a spell of serenity, as if we were friends. As if the Isaac in me might choose to walk out over the sand to catch up with Ishmael before he’s a speck. Before we’re slammed again with the storm-wall, blind in the gale, eyes full of dust and soul channels jammed with mistrust, our throats bile-choke silent, hands again seeking the comfort of knives. Here now in the eye before we turn violent if I leap and fly to him, before God arrives.
The Marriage of Space and Time: $16.00
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Poem from The Marriage of Space and Time
Geometry of the Orbits
Did we speed up the stars? Night’s over, you’ve risen—what can I savor? Those high notes the birds utter usher a close. And the crocuses, already gone— have I shown you one? One dawn will be the last. The catch in my throat, a choke on the wind. We’re at the prow of a fast boat. Or the heart’s own sharp minute hand’s clicked past, nicking the larynx—a little clock joke. I did kiss the back of your neck. Its arc belongs to the long geometry of the orbits—there, the endlessness. And we are permitted peeks into the black behind each other’s irises.
