SERPENT POWER: City Lights Looks Forward to David Meltzer's Two-Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook

At City Light's blog, Abandon All Despair Ye Who Enter Here, Ryan Haas guides readers through the David Meltzer archives, from Meltzer's iconic 1960s band, The Serpent Power, to his newly published When I Was A Poet (City Lights, 2011) to Meltzer's 1977 Oyez Press tract Two-Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook, which City Lights is bringing back into print later this year. From Abandon All Despair:

If San Francisco poetry has its own Zelig, a figure who seems to pop up and blend in with all the scene’s different incarnations, then it must be David Meltzer, who turned 78 this past Tuesday. Meltzer moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles in the 1950s and wound up in a circle of writers and artists that had formed around Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, two key figures in what’s known as the “San Francisco Renaissance.” This in turn led to his inclusion in Grove Press’s groundbreaking 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen, which also included work by Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, and many others–all obscure figures at the time.

Meltzer also hung around with poets like Kenneth Rexroth and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, sharing bills with them at venues like the Cellar where they read their poems to live jazz accompaniment. This latter group facilitated the evolution of the “Renaissance” into the Beats, which later leaked or was assimilated into the water supply of popular culture as the hippie movement of the 1960s.

Even so, Meltzer didn’t fail to find a foothold in the Summer of Love with his psychedelic rock band, The Serpent Power, whose self-titled 1967 album is now considered by eminent rock critic Robert Christgau to be one of the essential records of that period.

After his time spent as guitar player for the Serpent Power, Meltzer continued to write poems and participate in the Bay Area poetry culture, giving readings and teaching writing workshops at the New College of California.

Although Meltzer has enjoyed a long association with Ferlinghetti and City Lights–he conducted and edited an excellent collection of in-depth interviews with Beat-era poets for us some years back–and has published work with a number of independent and major trade presses over the years, his first volume of poems with City Lights didn’t come out until 2011. [...]

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