Meltzer ( David )

David_MeltzerDavid Meltzer, a leading poet of the Beat Movement, was raised in Brooklyn during the War years; performed on radio & early TV on the Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour. Was exiled to L.A. at 16 & at 17 enrolled in an ongoing academy w/ artists Wallace Berman, George Herms, Robert Alexander, Cameron; migrated to San Francisco in l957 for higher education w/ peers & maestros like Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Joanne Kyger, Diane DiPrima, Michael McClure, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, Jack Hirschman, a cast of thousands all living extraordinary ordinary lives. Beat Thing [La Alameda Press, 2004] won the Josephine Miles PEN Award, 2005. Was editor and interviewer for San Francisco Beat: Talking With The Poets [City Lights, 2001]. With Steve Dickison, co-edits Shuffle Boil, a magazine devoted to music in all its appearances & disappearances. 2005 saw the publication of David’s Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer by Viking/Penguin, a collection spanning over forty years of work that paints a vivid portrait of Meltzer’s life as a poet through poems taken from thirty of his previous books of poetry. With a versatile style and playful tone, Meltzer offers his unique vision of civilization with a range of juxtapositions from Jewish mysticism and everyday life to jazz and pop culture. Please visit David Meltzer’s website for more.

S. A. Griffin

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I remember sitting up half the night talking to S.A. Griffin in my book littered office about everything from poetry to crime to movies to getting drunk. I remember listening to S. A. read The Apes Of Wrath at the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe. I remember the crazy outlaw talk talk talk in John Macker’s converted roadhouse home out in Bernal and the walk out into the wilderness beyond his house where he had made a slab rock altar for Sam Peckinpah’s typewriter. I remember the hour long interview S. A. Griffin did with me on his blogtalk radio show. Mostly, what I remember about the times that S. A. I get together is the excitement of the conversation. Which is really more like plugging into a shared energy source. — Todd Moore Continue reading →