MELTZER, David

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Nationality: American. Born: Rochester, New York, 17 February 1937. Education: Public schools in Brooklyn and Los Angeles; Los Angeles City College, 1955–56; University of California, Los Angeles, 1956–57. Family: Married Christina Meyer in 1958; three daughters and one son. Career: Manager, Discovery Bookshop, San Francisco, 1959–67; editor, Maya, Mill Valley, California, 1966–71; teacher, Urban School, San Francisco, 1975–76. Since 1970 editor, Tree magazine and Tree Books, Bolinas, later Berkeley, California. Since 1980 core faculty, Graduate Poetics program, and since 1988 chair, Undergraduate Writing and Literature program, Humanities, New College of California, San Francisco. Composer, musician, and singer: performed with Serpent Power and David and Tina, 1970–72; member of MIX, a performance ensemble, with poet Clark Coolidge and vocalist/songwriter Tina Meltzer. Awards: Council of Literary Magazines grant, 1972, 1981; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1974, for publishing, 1975; Tombstone award for poetry from the James Ryan Morris Memorial Foundation, 1992. Address: Box 9005, Berkeley, California 94709, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Poems, with Donald Schenker. Privately printed, 1957.

Ragas. San Francisco, Discovery, 1959.

The Clown. Larkspur, California, Semina, 1960.

Station. Privately printed, 1964.

The Blackest Rose. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1964.

Oyez! Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1965.

The Process. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1965.

In Hope I Offer a Fire Wheel. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1965.

The Dark Continent. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1967.

Nature Poem. Santa Barbara, California, Unicom Press, 1967.

Santamaya, with Jack Shoemaker. San Francisco, Maya, 1968.

Round the Poem Box: Rustic and Domestic Home Movies for Stan and Jane Brakhage. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1969.

Yesod. London, Trigram Press, 1969.

From Eden Book. San Francisco, Cranium Press, 1969.

Abulafia Song. Santa Barbara, California, Unicorn Press, 1969.

Greenspeech. Goleta, California, Christopher, 1970.

Luna. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1970.

Letters and Numbers. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1970.

Bronx Lil/Head of Lillin S.A.C. Santa Barbara, California, Capra Press, 1970.

32 Beams of Light. Santa Barbara, California, Capra Press, 1970.

Knots. Bolinas, California, Tree, 1971.

Bark: A Polemic. Santa Barbara, California, Capra Press, 1973.

Hero/Lil. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1973.

Tens: Selected Poems 1961–1971, edited by Kenneth Rexroth. New York, McGraw Hill, 1973.

The Eyes, The Blood. San Francisco, Mudra, 1973.

French Broom. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1973.

Blue Rags. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1974.

Harps. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1975.

Six. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1976.

Bolero. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1976.

The Art, The Veil. Milwaukee, Membrane Press, 1981.

The Name: Selected Poetry 1973–1983. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1984.

Arrows: Selected Poetry, 1957–1992. Santa Roas, Black Sparrow Press, 1994.

Recordings: Serpent Power, Vanguard, 1972; Poet Song, Vanguard, 1974; David Meltzer Reading, Membrane, 1981; Nurse, STapes, 1982.

Novels

Orf. North Hollywood, Essex House, 1968.

The Agency. North Hollywood, Essex House, 1968.

The Agent. North Hollywood, Essex House, 1968.

How Man! Blocks in the Pile? North Hollywood, Essex House, 1968.

Lovely. North Hollywood, Essex House, 1969.

Healer. North Hollywood, Essex House, 1969.

Out. North Hollywood, Essex House, 1969.

Glue Factory. North Hollywood, Essex House, 1969.

The Martyr. North Hollywood, Essex House, 1969.

Star. North Hollywood, Brandon House, 1970.

The Agency Trilogy. New York, Richard Kasak Books, 1994.

Out. New York, Richard Kasak Books, 1994.

Other

We All Have Something to Say to Each Other: Being an Essay Entitled "Patchen" and Four Poems. San Francisco, Auerhahn Press, 1962.

Introduction to the Outsiders (essay on Beat Poetry). Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Rodale, 1962.

Bazascope Mother (essay on Robert Alexander). Los Angeles, Drekfesser Press, 1964.

Journal of the Birth. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1967.

Isla Vista Notes: Fragmentary, Apocalyptic, Didactic Contradictions. Santa Barbara, California, Christopher, 1970.

Abra (for children). Berkeley, California, Hipparchia Press, 1976.

Two-way Mirror: A Poetry Note-book. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1977.

Editor, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure, Journal for the Protection of All Beings 1 and 3. San Francisco, City Lights, 2 vols., 1961–69.

Editor, The San Francisco Poets. New York, Ballantine, 1971; revised edition, as Golden Gate, San Francisco, Wingbow Press, 1976.

Editor, Birth: An Anthology. New York, Ballantine, 1973.

Editor, The Secret Garden: an Anthology in the Kabbalah. New York, Seabury Press, 1976.

Editor, The Path of the Names, by Abraham Abulafia. Berkeley, California, Tree, and London, Trigram Press, 1976.

Editor, Birth: An Anthology of Ancient Texts, Songs, Prayers, and Stories. Berkeley, California, North Point Press, 1981.

Editor, Death (anthology). Berkeley, California, North Point Press, 1984.

Editor, Reading Jazz: The White Invention of Jazz. San Francisco, Mercury House, 1993.

Translator, with Allen Say, Morning Glories, by Shiga Naoya. Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1975.

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Manuscript Collections: Washington University, St. Louis; University of Indiana, Bloomington; University of California, Los Angeles.

Critical Studies: David Meltzer: A Sketch from Memory and Descriptive Checklist, Berkeley, California, Oyez, 1965, and 6 Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, Fresno, California, Giligia Press, 1967, both by David Kherdian; The Secret Record: Modern Erotic Literature by Michael Perkins, New York, Morrow, 1976; in Vort (Berkeley, California), 1979; Apocalyptic Messianism and Contemporary Jewish-American Poetry by R. Barbara Gitenstein, Albany, State University Press of New York, 1986; "A Poetics of Absence: Kabbalist Allegory in the Poetry of Paul Celan, Edmond Jabes, and David Meltzer" by Bruce Ross, in Allegory Revisited: Ideals of Mankind, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academy, 1994.

David Meltzer comments:

A fracturing of forms and vocabularies gradually empty and/or useless in advancing the ongoing art and craft. Clear division between poetry as institution and in-house practice for a professional class and caste of practitioners and that of experimental, populist, eccentric, amateur ranters and ravers. The upward/downward spiral of cyberspace is wired expansiveness, yet with tendency toward reduction and containment framed in soothing clique speak of technocrat consumers. In a fin de siècle moment the postcolonial fusions of languages, the play and resistance of rap, radiates more energy and possibility than art zooed by any so-called dominant cultures. Epistemic earthquake, a whole lot of shaking going on, as the old waxworks gets reinvented, reclaimed, and rewritten.

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David Meltzer's poetry is well known, as the presence of a third volume of selected poems (Arrows, 1994) indicates. He has said that his first poem, at age eleven, was a "trance-mission." He has indeed had a long career.

As he gratefully acknowledges, Meltzer was first made known through the efforts of Kenneth Rexroth. Some of Meltzer's affiliations are indicated by his Golden Gate interviews with Rexroth, William Everson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lew Welch, and Michael McClure, one of the few collections of interviews in which the interviewer is also interesting. For example, Welch mentioned that he had learned how fast he could run when he was a boy beset by other boys. Meltzer then asked, "How did you become interested in language? For instance, you talk about your speed, being able to move… when did you realize that language was a way of moving too?" Welch responded, "That's a well-put question." Meltzer also appeared in the historically important Floating Bear, edited by Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). Although Meltzer's roots are with the San Francisco poets, he found that language was a way of moving in space and time.

One can scarcely sum up Meltzer's poetry. He has "home movies" and "Rustic and Domestic Home Movies for Stan and Jane Brakhage." He has "translated" a Chinese rice paper notebook containing his scrawls into poems for Jack and Ruth Hirschman. He has notes for a poem to H.P. Lovecraft, and he admonishes us that "the gods exhort us to understand the form of light." He seems to phrase the question for us: "Who is it in there. / Wiring these poems" (Blue Rags). (Period. No question mark. "Questions are Remarks," Wallace Stevens wrote.) But there is no obvious answer. It is not necessarily true that "the Jew in me is the ghost of me / hiding under a stairway" (The Dark Continent), because his poetry also has a wide range of Hebraic lore, as if we were threatened by having a golem's shapeless mass:

Without Neshamah (light of God)
the Golem's intelligence was small.
Also lacking the other two intelligences:
Chochmah (Wisdom) & Bina (Judgement)

His poetry coheres by consistent ways of feeling rather than by conceptually calibrated systems:

Others balance by
Kneeling to pray.
I allow them their poem
 
This is mine.
A patchwork poem
Pathwork.

Patchwork. Pathwork. Fragmentation provides opportunity. One perceives through fragments and finds unexpected connections, as for example in "Lamentation for Lee Harvey Oswald": "the moment they long to see, / the shattered skull, the blood / We are all spies." In an epigraph from the Zohar to his book Yesod, the twenty-two fragments, the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, make perception possible, as the ten words (presumably the Sephiroth, the names of God) make analogies possible. (Yesod, basis, was perceived by Pico della Mirandola as analogous to the sphere of Luna.)

Meltzer has an energizing range of scholarly material. His anthologies Birth and Death collect ancient and modern myths, stories, texts, and sayings from South America, New Zealand, India, and elsewhere. In Birth the ten pages of sources and the checklist seem to be culled from much larger lists, because they are consistently interesting and important.

Meltzer's own mythmaking can put an amusing tone to serious purpose, as for example in his work Bark, a particular favorite among younger poets:

Dog didn't know he was a dog and climbed a tree, hung
from a branch with his tail, swinging back and forth,
singing a song that sounded like it came out of a tenor
saxophone.
"Dogs don't do such things," a master said, passing by the tree.
He put dog in his place and give him a name
and a collar
and trained him with rolled up newspaper never to sing again.

He can also be more immediate and with less of a parable:

It's simple.
One morning
Wake up ready
For new work
Pet the dog,
Dog's not there
Rise and shine.
Sun's not there.
Take a deep breath
No air
Look for the sun.
No sun.
 
It's simple
Wake up one morning
Ready for new work
& the animals are on strike
With the air, the
sea the Earth quit us
Casts us off
Like a sickness in the firey core.

A temporary resting place for Meltzer's poetry ("the end / Not the end") can be taken in his concluding words for the 1984 selected poems The Name:

each word the word creating
protecting life in lights of song or silence
all else goes against it

—William Sylvester