David Meltzer

Davis Meltzer’s cover art for Clifford D. Simak’s ‘City’

For starters, best title ever. As with any medium, if you keep it primary it’ll dictate your life and play tricks on you. Poetry, “the most magical of the arts” as David’s friend John Wieners said, wants it all and doesn’t owe anything. The trick and charm is an invitation unknowingly received. Now you get to chase each other thru eternity because you were open enough to be found by it. No matter how you play hide-in-seek it always gets you with some stuff you have no idea about. You live together and haunt one another. Do you really keep me primary, oh you think you’re a poet? Has life interrupted again, so now I’m secondary, or worse tertiary, and don’t make me mention quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, and denary?! Hold up. Are these even words? Am I a poet even though I haven’t written a poem in a week? David wouldn’t sweat this, and during many goodbye shrugs in our shared space on Valencia he said “it’s a relation-ship, collaborate but stay individual,” “Intimacy. In-to-me-see,” “I’m no professor, I don’t profess anything! If I have to be pro, I’m a professional amateur!” Some random non-sequiturs, why not? Low key nonchalant asides, simple things offered for the complex. It’s labyrinthine but easy if you want. An alphabet of letters and laughter. Aleph correspondence. Jokes of life. I’m starting to sound like David. When I Was A Poet is David conjuring at his ever-present-always-best: HIGH PRIEST of Wit, Empathy, Pranks, City Living, Domesticity, Magic and anything else a polymath secretly shares. This book is an homage of past lives still living a future present which is NOW. Super important. The sequential poems melt together like one alchemical serial poem suit-cased into a book as a traveling talisman that you can wear in whatever world you arrive in. My favorite books always change and move me around whenever they want. The section French Broom is a shape-shifter that keeps me wandering into new zones to watch “Stars arise / Page after page of my book / Writes thru time / Lights sewn together / My poem is bits & splinters / Darkness allows me.” So humble. On and off the page, one in the same. I’ve been thinking about David’s drawings in most of his books. Especially those he signed. The last Christmas postcard he sent was a drawing of one of his faces that said “Joy in dim times!” I wound up getting it tattooed for free on Divisadero. His signature right above the back of my elbow. When I was a poet.

Tell Them I’m Struggling - David Meltzer / The Weight of Ink - Rachel Kadish  

Davis Meltzer, “Lunar Excursion Module Prepares to Dock with its Mothership,” 1960s

this piece is from the reform siddur mishkan t’fillah. i found this text when i was twelve, stuck in the depths of depression and it really resonated with me, four years later and it still hits home every time i read it.

The 10-billion-year life cycle of the Sun, illustrated by David Meltzer for National Geographic, May 1974.

David Meltzer certainly won't get that reference but my hard hitting attention to details journalism from ya boi, boy wonder