A Baby Beat poet finds his voice
“Power Spots” (Edgework Press, 2025) by Ron Myers is a first press-published book of his poetry by someone who is of the “boomer” generation. In that sense, as now a book-published poet, you could say that he’s a “late bloomer,” or a “late boomer.”
But this would be misleading, as he’s been writing since his college days at Indiana University in the 1970s and has gone on to write poems that have appeared in such publications as Beatdom #24 and a dozen anthologies in the U.S., England, France and Italy. In a single short phrase, Ron Myers is the real deal. Trying “to find the right words to better say what can’t be said,” as he puts it.
Even with this late start in terms of books of his own work being published, he has worked his way into the pantheon of those that have been labeled “The Baby Beats” (a term that I coined during my years in San Francsico during the 1970s). “The cafes and living rooms where he once workshopped and loved have become ethereal, sacred sites, animated now by memory, stitched together like layers of soft shale by the pressure and patience of the word,” writes Geoffrey Callahan in his Afterword to the book.
And if that weren’t enough, Myers has been honored with the title of California Beat Poet Laureate for 2024-2026. He drew his poetic fire from many of the Beat Generation poets he knew in San Francisco and his poems resonate with that literary style and those legendary voices, with poems dedicated to mentors such as Gregory Corso, Harold Norse, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Neeli Cherkovski — all poets I knew during my years in San Francisco. In his book “Power Spots,” he brings the Beat voice into a modern present tense with subject matter appropriate for the present day.
One of the important aspects of this book, then, is his connection in life and on paper with the Beat poets in poems such as “Tales of Mt. Tamalpias,” “Sea Surge,” and “Short Fuse.” Another important aspect is his obvious connection to nature and the natural world in such poems as “Pascua Florida,” “Light Pollution” and “The Scapegoat.”
In “Tales of Mt. Tamalpias,” Myers names other Beat poets — Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, Kenneth Rexroth, and Philip Whalen. On his poetic walk while on Mt. Tamalpias he writes:
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“The silence deepens,
secrets reveal themselves
to the long list of bards
converging over the years.”
In “Sea Surge” he ruminates: “A knowing poet, a gnostic/initiate into ancient mysteries/like trees of knowledge growing/out of the chap book/in his back pocket.” Then in nature mode, Myers writes in his poem “Light Pollution,” “.... on the Olympic peninsula of Washington:/the road encroached by rain forests in/vast mossy valleys reasserting dominance of Nature –/the vast fungal networks all abuzz/with cryptid rumors ...”
And in “The Scapegoat,” Myers muses “In the vast Martian desert of southern Utah,/the way to Moab is sculpted by red formations,/chiseled down by wind and rain/to reveal their true inner form/over such a long timeline.” These are but a few examples of his binary focus for this book. Or, as he defines his title for the book: “Often sacred or natural places, power spots can be any place you feel a sense of wonder and connectedness with self and other beings. It could be a place of profound beauty or sacred to indigenous cultures. It could also be a funky bookstore, a corner dive bar, a good conversation — or the promise of the open highway.”
Even with all the natural and indigenous references in his book, Myers keeps pulling me back to literary San Francisco and his poignant observations and insights into the last 50 years there. “Your dining room an askew gallery/with vivid black-and-white photos/with all nine gray zones in between:/Bukowski, Corso, Ferlinghetti,” he writes in the poem “The Salon” about his good friend Neeli Cherkovski.
But this book is not only fun and games, Myers is also a realist and tells it like it is. “If we go extinct as a species,/it will be by our own hand,/not by asteroids tumbling like dice:/end of our shelf-life reached prematurely/despite the added plasticines/and preservatives of immortality,” he writes in the poem “The Crowning Race.” Or in his eco-poems like “Landfall,” he writes “How many bird species/nested in those burly trees/have gone extinct?/The God Bird of the southern bayous,/for One./It made great plumage/for some grand Victorian hats—/until they were gone.”
Harkening back to the past, he gives homage to our North American precursors: “The sage-like trees—/our wiser sisters and brothers—/were only felled for the common good/of villages and sacred ceremonies/of the indigenous Woodland peoples.” Myers then ends the book in an inspired and humble meditation and tribute to Indigenous peoples in poems like “Nowhere, New Mexico” where he autobiographically writes:“... gingerly navigated through stick figures, spirit birds and/sun wheels pecked into the varnished stone — enigmatic/messages shot like arrows across the coiled serpent of time;” The same admiration holds true for the younger generation(s) coming on and emerging: “... heralding a new era of inspired oracles/from the Great Beyond. Where do you come from,/so fully formed and adorable,/eyes wide with all human experience/way before your time—/as if you’ve tasted all of this feast before.”
And, therein, is the denouement of Myers’ vision of the future that reinforces the idea that his poetry doesn’t mourn so much as it testifies and that he carries the echoes of Beat mentors not as stylistic costume, but as ethical inheritance. This book is full of “power spots” and one feels when reading as if positioned on or in a sacred site.
(Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally published and recognized author of more than 30 books, including the multi-award winning nonfiction nature memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods.”)
