DAVID MELTZER was born in Rochester, New York, at the finale of the Great Depression in 1937 of bohemian parents and immigrated to Brooklyn in 1940. He began writing poetry at age eleven. In 1960, David Meltzer's poems appeared in the ground-breaking anthology, The New American Poetry. He has gone on to create a substantial body of work that is pervaded with "a kind of bop-perfection." Having arrived in San Francisco in 1957, he is associated both with the Beats and the San Francisco Renaissance, often reading with jazz musicians at bars and coffeehouses. His recent book, Beat Thing (La Alameda Press), winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles award, is both tribute to down-in-the-street wildness and rant against the romantic commodification which surrounds the Beat Generation. Meltzer brings forth the original spirit of Beat in an encyclopedic cascade of details whose dense, deep, fierce, funny, raucous, free associative jazz energy infuses every line. Beat Thing is an ecstatic chant of defiance and celebration. David's Copy: The Selected Poems, edited by Michael Rothenberg, has now come out with nearly 50 years of Meltzer's poetry and provides ample evidence of his stylistic breadth as well as the music and humor active in it.

SUNY Electronic Poetry Center http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/meltzer/index.html

Selected Bibliography

David's Copy: the Selected Poems of David Meltzer,
    edited by Michael Rothenberg, Penguin Books, New York, 2005
Beat Thing, La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, 2007

On-Line Complete

The Art/The Veil
Bark: A Polemic