by Simon Warner
We should, rather, be reminded of the social criticism that Beat writers delivered against the background of those times. ‘Poetry then offered this great uplifting to the masses, whoever they were – eccentrics, the battered, the disenfranchised and the people who were living, and often voluntarily, in marginal opposition to the stupefyingly uniform post-war abundance, consumerism and affluence. This was the great American revolution, the post-war economy and how it manifested itself in the sort of desire to standardise reality, make it uniform and containable.’52
The last 40 years have not seen Meltzer assume the role of passive observer though, in any sense. Now approaching 75, Meltzer has remained an active figure on the Bay Area scene from, in recent times, his base in Oakland. He has taught in the humanities and the graduate poetics programme at the New College of California in the Mission district of San Francisco and has continued to publish – gathering existing work but also forging considerable bodies of new material as well. His poems have been collected in The Name: Selected Poetry 1973–1983 (1984), and Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957–1992 (1994) and David’s Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer (2005). Two edited collections reflect his passion for jazz – Reading Jazz (1993) and Writing Jazz (1999) – anthologising some of the best writing on the subject, but also including his own critical commentary. His own verse has continued to appear, too. His book-length verse homage to a great tenor saxophonist, No Eyes: Lester Young, was issued in 2000, a long poetic reflection on Beat, entitled Beat Thing, emerged in 2004 and, in 2011, the sixtieth volume in the famed City Lights Pocket Poets series was Meltzer’s own When I Was a Poet – ‘When I was a Poet/Everything was Possible/there wasn’t Anything/ that wasn’t Poetry’.53
What of the arc of poetry from the mid-1950s to the start of a new Millennium? Has the place of this art-form altered in that half century? Meltzer comments: ‘In the ’50s, people were actually listening to poetry. It was being taken out of the academy and into the coffee houses. It became a whole culture which eventually moved over to be replaced by the rock ’n’ roll culture. Today, poetry is useless. So much conformity of American life is to do with the function of art – there is a puritan ethic which demands the utilitarian, the functional in all art. Art was always considered to be useless unless it was attached to functionalism.’ Yet he adds a note of optimism, acknowledging the potency of a street poetry like rap. ‘The most globalising art of all today is hip hop culture.’54
The East Coast boy who became the West Coast man, the young listener who was entranced by the rhythm of jazz, joined the Beat crowd on the streets and in the cafés and bars of San Francisco as a literary re-birth flowered, performed poetry and made folk music in the cafés, met Bob Dylan when few outside New York knew him and therefore played an intriguing role as a pre-emptive match-maker between the singer and Ginsberg, McClure and the wider Beat province, and made acid rock during the countercultural uprising, still appears to have his finger on the pulse. Says Michael Rothenberg, who edited David’s Copy, the 2005 selected poems: ‘When I read David’s poetry, read his words, I think of alchemical conjuring, Zen, beat, jazz rhythms, prayer, the everyday in a moment-flash, historical overviews, urban and domestic reflections. Meltzer’s work is sly and sardonic, twisted and awkward, non-doctrinaire, agit-smut in the face of love and desire, a commentary of the “real” that goes through a surreal/abstract filter, or is surreal.’55 Of the collection itself, Rothenberg adds that it is ‘a re-visioning of a poetic oeuvre, a selected moment in time, a songster’s epic-journey, the journey of a “savage word slinger” rummaging relentlessly through iconic shards and celluloid of culture, pop, and hermetic images and language, tempered with humour and love’.56
Notes
1Lisa Phillips (ed.), Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965, exhibition catalogue, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995).
2Ibid., pp. 22–3.
3Steven Watson, 1995, p. 238.
4See Steve Turner, Angel-Headed Hipster: A Life of Jack Kerouac (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 212.
5Richard Williams, 1992, p. 25.
6Ibid., p. 137.
7Anthony Scaduto’s Dylan (1973), Shelton’s No Direction Home (1986) and Williams’ Dylan: A Man Called Alias (1992).
8Miles, 1990), p. 333.
9Michael Schumacher, 1992, p. 405.
10Sean Wilentz, 2010, p. 69.
11See Simon Warner, ‘David Meltzer’, Beat Scene, No. 30, 1998.
12David Meltzer, personal communication, emails, 20 and 21 April 1999.
13Meltzer, email, 20 April 1999.
14Ann Charters quoted in Kevin Ring, ‘Ann Charters – A Beat journey’, Beat Scene, No. 16, 1993.
15Dennis McNally, Desolate Angel: A Biography – Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 298.
16Meltzer quoted Warner, 1998.
17Quoted in Warner, 1998.
18Jesse Crumb and Erica Detlefsen, ‘David Meltzer’, No. 30, Beat Characters, card collection (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1995). Note that this source quotes Meltzer’s first encounter with Parker as 1946. Dave Moore, personal communication, email, 28 May 2012, believes that Parker did not appear at the Royal Roost until 1948, the year the venue first staged live music.
19Ibid.
20Ibid.
21Ibid.
22Ibid.
23Ibid.
24Ibid.
25Ibid.
26Ibid.
27Meltzer, ‘Letter to Jim Dickson, 2 January 1959’, CD sleeve notes, Poet w/Jazz (Sierra Records, 2005).
28‘Editors’ statement’, The Journal for the Protection of All Beings, edited by Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and David Meltzer, No. 1 (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1961), p. 3.
29Meltzer, email, 20 April 1999.
30Ibid.
31Ibid.
32Meltzer quoted in Warner, 1998.
33Meltzer, email, 20 April 1999.
34Ibid.
35Meltzer quoted in Warner, 1998.
36Meltzer, email, 20 April 1999.
37Meltzer quoted in Warner, 1998.
38Meltzer, email, 20 April 1999.
39See Anne Waldman (ed.), The Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1996). Note that the title page ambiguously refers to a date of 1999.
40Meltzer, email, 21 April 1999.
41The group’s name had ‘an echo of ancient yogic and tantric practice’, says Jerome Rothenberg, ‘Introduction’, David’s Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer, edited by Michael Rothenberg (London: Penguin, 2005), p. xvii.
42When Rolling Stone named its ‘Forty Essential Albums of 1967’ in the second of its three fortieth anniversary special editions, 12–26 July 2007, The Serpent Power was placed at No. 30.
43See Alex Stimmel, ‘The Serpent Power’, All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/serpent-power-p143421/biography [accessed 22 December 2011].
44Coolidge published the book, Now it’s Jazz: Writings on Kerouac and the Sounds (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press), in 1999.
45Stimmel, All Music Guide.
46This track was produced by Samuel Charters, better known as Sam Charters, who produced Country Joe and the Fish between 1966 and 1970, and is also a noted writer on and historian of blues and jazz. He is married to Ann Charters, author of Jack Kerouac’s first biography, Kerouac, published in 1973.
47The San Francisco Poets (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971), was followed by another Meltzer edited collection – Golden Gate: Interviews with Five San Francisco Poets (Berkeley, CA: Wingbow Press, 1976). Later, San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2001) brought the two earlier volumes together in an updated edition.
48Meltzer quoted in Warner, 1998.
49Ibid.
50Ibid.
51Ibid.
52Meltzer quoted in Warner, 1998.
53Meltzer, ‘When I Was a Poet’, When I Was a Poet (San Francisco:
City Lights, 2011), p. 15.
54Meltzer quoted in Warner, 1998.
55Michael Rothenberg (ed.), ‘Foreword’, David’s Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer (London: Penguin, 2005), p. xiii.
56Ibid.
REVIEW 1 – BOOK: DAVID MELTZER, BEAT THING
(Albuquerque, NM: La Alameda Press, 2004)
David Meltzer, wordsmith, novelist, jazz versifier, folk musician, frontman of psychedelic rock band the Serpent Power, has spent a life-time avoiding glib categorisation, determinedly ducking when critics and commentators have dubbed him a Beat poet. In fact, he has consistently railed against the mythography of the Beat Generation – ‘it’s the looks, not the books’, he has said, attacking the triumph of style over content in the histories that have been told. But Meltzer, still active as writer and educator in the Bay Area that has been his home since the middle 1950s, seems to have softened his views, in some ways, on the misrepresentation of Beatdom.
He acknowledges there was a movement; he even appears to accept that he had a role in that community’s evolution, despite his tendency, over the years, to keep such an interpretation at arm’s length. It seems that it was only his youth – he was one of the youngest, one of the last, poets to ride the original North Beach roller-coaster as live verse resonated in basements and bars of San Francisco, before Beat became a little more than a tourist sham, as token bongos and hastily-sprouted goatees displaced the utopian visions of the first wave – or his modesty, that stopped him basking in the reflected limelight of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and co.
Yet Meltzer, despite certain shifts brought on, perhaps, by the mellowing of maturity, has not, in any real sense, swallowed the myth of Beat whole. His latest work, a long poem on a near-epic scale, doffs a cap to the movement – the piece is called Beat Thing, after all – but then proceeds in a 160-page torrent to challenge many of the premises of the Beat Generation, or at least those media-shaped assessments that have poured forth for the last half century. More pertinently, Meltzer is committed to seeing post-war experience as a great deal more than the cool, existential posturing of a new literature.
In a text that is dense, frenetic, spiky and often tangled in the roots and branches of the socio-political, the writer attempts a panoramic overview of America’s later twentieth century, foregrounding movies and music, McCarthy and racism, the eye-ball searing flash of the H-bomb and the mind-scalding impressions left by the death camps. Beat bubbles behind the glass but Meltzer feels honour bound to set it in perspective and not over-privilege its part in recent decades.
Beat Thing is not a single, sustained blast – it comes in three sections and, like the very jazz Meltzer rapped and rolled over in the Cellar in the later 1950s, it is delivered in various forms, various voices: the rat-a-tat of the riff, the longer-lined elegance of the refrain, at times the angular abstraction of the bop solo. Sometimes there is a torrent of ideas folding over each other in waves; sometimes the poet stops to take breath and surveys a scene, a moment, coolly and carefully. Line lengths shift, blank verse transmutes into prose stanzas, then back again.
In the opening passage ‘The Beat Thing Looms Up’, Meltzer subjects the word, the concept, Beat to a relentless deconstruction, an unforgiving critique of Beat’s use, its appropriation, its commercial exploitation, in the years that have followed the initial, and perhaps golden, age. ‘Beat wax museums in Fisherman’s Wharf downtown Lowell McDougal Street & Beat Thing Hall of Fame wing of Planet Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard’ mouths Meltzer disparagingly, then adds: ‘Beat superstar on MTV fastcut scratch 50s newsreel footage intercut w/ sitcom knows best voices over Kurt Loder asks Burroughs about killing his wife’. In fact, the writer rather economically, if elegiacally, sums up his own position when he says: ‘don’t wanna be forgotten but don’t wanna be remembered in rememberings’ dismembering’.
Yet the elongated account that follows is a warm, nostalgic and splendidly evocative re-telling of everyday Beat life as it was, contemplating writers in the ring – like Ray Bremser, Gary Snyder and Richard Brautigan – and musical compadres like Dino Valente, David Crosby and Nick Gravenites – and casual connections in the saloon and the lunch-counter, the lounging, ligging and loving, even an analysis of the genesis of jazz poetry. But it is when Meltzer wallows in the detail of the cafés and the cuisine of his Bay memories that the writing truly hits the taste-buds. ‘What about Beat food?’ he asks, then answers:
… sushi especially wasabe bullet train blasting eyes into inland seas of kelp hurricane weep or shrimp cocktails at Swan Oyster Depot on Polk dip pink volt into red horseradish tomato karma lemon after rye toast soaked in Blum’s sweet butter or linguine dreamy shimmer glazed with green Pesto paste …
Poetry as soul sustenance – and almost literally!
But the fare that follows is meatier and much, much darker. By the time ‘Beat Thing: Commentary’, a prequel in essence, commences, the shadows of a pre-Beat terror cast their dark and terrible shape:
it was the Bomb
Shoah
it was void
spirit crisis disconnect
no subject but blank unrelenting
bust time
no future
suburban expand into past
present nuclear (get it) family
droids Pavlov minutiae
it was Jews w/ blues
reds nulled & jolted
Ethel & Julius brains smoke
pyre of shoes & eyeglasses
weeping black G.I.s
open Belsen gates
The remainder of the poem, including the extended coda ‘Primo Po-Mo’ paints an extraordinary and deeply unnerving canvas, weaving threads as diverse as Hollywood and jazz, Holocaust and anti-Semitism, briefly pausing to state with calm and devastating assurance that, in the wake of nuclear typhoons and racial genocide, 1945 ‘closes Modernism’s file; melts febrile glue of liberal humanism’s Enlightenment’s utopic elan & generosity; splatter into Nowheresville all socially sustaining (& framing) institutions & discourses.’
In short, Beat Thing, is a remarkably moving but also gravely pessimistic piece. While its language is charged with a frenetic energy, its imagery is jagged, fragmented and disquieting, a neo-expressionist description of civilisation’s shattered and un-fixable mirror. Certainly, for those of us who placed faith in the liberal, anti-establishment projects that came in the wake of the Second World War, this contemplation is profoundly unsettling; it positions the impact of Beat and its humanist hopes in a very minor place. Quaint, convivial, charming in its way when young men gathered over beer and coffee to hear mystic visions through cigarette haze, its subsequent incarnations were merely shallow dilutions concocted by money-makers and their cheap lines of commodified relics.
As Meltzer, quite early in the piece, most potently declares:
Beat Gap line of chinos lumberjack flannel shirts Dr Dean beat shades Joe Camel unfiltered beat smokes Armani blue black basement zoots to suit up in & walk down to theme bar restaurant Coolsville chain owned by three publishers owned by a transglobal media conglomerate owned by a network of oil companies owned by a consortium of arms dealers owned by a clot of drug producers owned by a massive webwork of Swiss bankers & German brokers in silent partnership with Japanese alchemists in collusion with Chinese gerontologists as proxies for Reverend Moon
INTERVIEW 6
Bill Nelson, British rock guitarist and Beat follower
Bill Nelson has been navigating those choppy waters between rock and jazz, contemporary music and the avant garde, for more than four decades, never fully immersing himself in one style, always pressing on to find new means of expressing his musical voice. His career, documented in a recorded repertoire stretching to more than 50 released CDs, has embraced the blues and jazz, progressive and art rock, glam and the new wave, music for film and theatre, ambient soundscapes and drum ’n’ bass.
From the late 1960s he strove to combine elements of popular music and the visual arts – he was
both guitarist of reputation and a graduate of a British art school, sharing those characteristics with other major English rock stars from John Lennon to Keith Richards, Eric Clapton to Pete Townshend – seeking a synergy between his song-writing and the influences of those potent twentieth-century artistic impulses – from Futurism to Dada, Pop Art to US comic books – he had absorbed as a student.
Attracting the early attention of John Peel, the UK’s most influential popular music broadcaster in his years on BBC radio from 1967 to his death in 2004, Nelson’s recordings speedily gained national airplay and, when his band Be Bop Deluxe were signed by EMI, their sequence of four critically and commercially acclaimed albums revealed a distinctive marriage of inventive rock music and stylish album sleeve imagery, underlining their leader’s keen interest in both sound and vision.
After enduring the pleasures and pains that accompany the life of the guitar hero – he was corroded rather than encouraged by the adulation and expectation, scarred by the rigors of the nascent US stadium circuit – he dissolved Be Bop Deluxe, formed a band with new wave nuances called Red Noise, and then settled into a long period of making music as solo composer, as label owner – his own Cocteau Records ran in the 1980s – and collaborator, working with artists as diverse as Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra, Channel Light Vessel and the American avant gardist Harold Budd.