One of the most respected poets of the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance periods, David Meltzer has kept alive interest in the interface between jazz and poetry that exploded in the 1950s. This new edition of selected poems includes previously unpublished material and serves as a map to this very prolific and interesting poet.
A milestone in City Lights history, David Meltzer's When I Was a Poet is number sixty of the famous Pocket Poets Series. The title work is an ambitious late masterpiece from a legendary poet at the height of his powers, a spiritual assessment of the meaning of a lifetime of writing poetry. Also included are reminiscences of California bohemian life, a series of mystical amulets, and profound meditations on love, loss, aging and death. Associated with the Beat Generation and late '60s psychedelia, musician, novelist and editor David Meltzer is one of America's foremost living poets. "Meltzer is a prolific poet of many modes and voices, quite a few of which are here, love poems, poems out of childhood, a series of "amulets," cryptic short wisdom poems, and much more. These are all tasty, often ironic and/or mysterious, pieces of Davidness to be savored . . . "--Richard Silberg, Poetry Flash
look/bird's eye poem see-all high!" says the poem "Night Before Morning," which begins with a recitation of odd, quirky musical instruments - "trump, bandora, kithara" - that illustrates Meltzer's ties to Beat poetry, the San Francisco Renaissance, and, especially, jazz. Along with his songwriter wife, Tina, and poet Clark Coolidge, Meltzer does performance pieces that incorporate music, poetry, and song. He also works as an essayist, anthologist, jazz reviewer, college teacher, and erotic novelist. No one would dare call these poems polished, but they have a high-energy, Ginsberg-like quality; deft, idiosyncratic humor (e.g., "a lice-fevered bear"), and moments of pure encapsulated description that take the breath away: "a brace of crow/discuss attack in the white exploding cherry tree." Many poems reflect an Eastern influence, with some short ones showing their cousinhood to haiku: "last night's seed/a trail of light down your thighs." --Library Journal
Over 15,000 years ago, a band of hunter-gatherers became the first people to set foot in the Americas. They soon found themselves in a world rich in plants and animals, but also a world still shivering itself out of the coldest depths of the Ice Age. The movement of those first Americans was one of the greatest journeys undertaken by ancient peoples. In this book, David Meltzer explores the world of Ice Age Americans, highlighting genetic, archaeological, and geological evidence that has revolutionized our understanding of their origins, antiquity, and adaptation to climate and environmental change. This fully updated edition integrates the most recent scientific discoveries, including the ancient genome revolution and human evolutionary and population history. Written for a broad audience, the book can serve as the primary text in courses on North American Archaeology, Ice Age Environments, and Human evolution and prehistory.
A poetic meditation on the last year of tenor saxophonist Lester Young's life, of joyful playing and self-willed dying. In 1959, at the age of fifty, jazz greaet Lester Young--a lyrical player, his airy tone haunted by a breathy melancholy--died alone in the Arvin Hotel in Manhattan. As Meltzer explains, "No Eyes is a book about death, and Young sits in for a metaphor for the artist living and dying for and with his art." An "inside" biography, No Eyes is a brilliant jazz-world evocation, composed in free verse whose flow is arrested to capture significant moments, Meltzer creates a layered narrative of vivid colors and textures, the material facts of Young's story dissolving into internalized, projected truths of erotic understanding and spiritual sympathy with the "sweet and isolate lovely other.
More than 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America, a continent that was then truly a new world. Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology. This dazzling, cutting-edge synthesis, written for a wide audience by an archaeologist who has long been at the center of these debates, tells the scientific story of the first Americans: where they came from, when they arrived, and how they met the challenges of moving across the vast, unknown landscapes of Ice Age North America. David J. Meltzer pulls together the latest ideas from archaeology, geology, linguistics, skeletal biology, genetics, and other fields to trace the breakthroughs that have revolutionized our understanding in recent years. Among many other topics, he explores disputes over the hemisphere's oldest and most controversial sites and considers how the first Americans coped with changing global climates. He also confronts some radical claims: that the Americas were colonized from Europe or that a crashing comet obliterated the Pleistocene megafauna. Full of entertaining descriptions of on-site encounters, personalities, and controversies, this is a compelling behind-the-scenes account of how science is illuminating our past.
In the late 1920s an exciting discovery was made at the New Mexico site of Folsom - spear points, found embedded between the ribs of an Iron Age bison - that was to resolve decades of bitter conflict amongst archaeologists.
Edited by Patrick James Dunagan. ROCK TAO is a rambling cohesive rock-n-roll poetics diary originally written in 1965 as Meltzer listened to KEWB in San Francisco transcribing lyrics of top hit songs. Along the way, he samples scientists, philosophers, psychologists, musicians, starlets... figures who defined what the sixties would come to be and how they would be remembered. ROCK TAO is penetrating in its critical view of the consumer culture taking shape in America. Meltzer said, "...I began examining what is famous in America as a way to sight those archetypal inventions peculiar to the land." He presciently anticipated the homogenizing walmartification of how the country would develop over the next 50 years. The rollicking collage form of ROCK TAO is a continuation of novelist John Dos Passos' epic, USA Trilogy. Poetry. Literary Nonfiction.
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