'Howl' at 70: Meltzer’s half-century memory

Poet-musician’s essay reactivated

DAVID MELTZER is an undersung hero in the Beat landscape yet his multiple roles in the literary and musical revolutions of the West Coast in the later 1950’s, across the 1960s and beyond, should be remembered, respected and celebrated.

A New Yorker, born in 1937, who arrived in San Francisco as a novice penman in 1957, Meltzer was poet and a musician, a talented performer in the early days when spoken word met jazz, a little after a figure in the city’s folk scene of Garcia, Joplin and David Crosby and then the leader of Serpent Power, a psychedelic rock band who represented lyrical sophistication and a style linked to the rising hippie phenomenon.

He was also a political activist who was co-editor of the illustrious first edition of The Journal for the Protection of All Beings, overseeing the creation of the title with collaborators Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure in 1961, and he was in the frame for the famed Last Gathering of the Beats photos in 1965.

Pictured above: David Meltzer at a poetry reading

He was a good friend of novelist Richard Brautigan and politico poet Jack Hirschman and also the first of the Beat writers to make contact with Bob Dylan when he visited the Bay Area at an early stage of his career, prior even to his late 1963 connection with Allen Ginsberg in New York City. Dylan turned out to be a fan of Meltzer’s work.

At the start of the 1970s, he turned historian and ethnographer as he interviewed the writers of his city, creating The San Francisco Poets, an essential oral account, later revised, of that vibrant literary community. Furthermore, the multi-talented Meltzer was a jazz guitarist who edited two important books on that musical scene – Reading Jazz (1996) and (1999). In 2006, his live jazz poetry emerged belatedly on the CD Poet w/ Jazz 1958.

He released an acclaimed work of epic verse in Beat Thing (2004), in which he expressed long-standing suspicions about the commercial co-option of Beat, and David’s Copy, which gathered his selected works, followed in 2005. In 2011, City Lights published his When I Was a Poet.

In 2005, the poet wrote ‘Howling wolves’, a foreword to my own edited title Howl for Now, a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the first reading Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’. Twenty years on, with the 70th anniversary of the premiere performance on October 7th, 1955 nearly upon usOne, we revive that very essay by Meltzer, who died in 2016, as part of a series of R&BG celebrations of the legendary 6 Gallery event…

___________________________________________________________________

‘Howling wolves’

By David Meltzer

A displaced person from Brooklyn in Fifties Hollywood mañana culture of bus stop benches with funeral home and supermarket adverts splashed on the wood where we non-drivers sat waiting for the trolleys to take us either downtown to the train station to escape or down to the ocean into the Fun Zone.

The first City Lights books were available at the outdoor news-stand on Highland Avenue of Hollywood Boulevard. That’s where I read ‘Howl’ without buying it because I couldn’t afford it. (Was a sad sack booster unable to consider stuffing it into my jeans back pocket.)

What I knew was the underground energies of the NYC culture I’d been exiled from. I was a bebop baby, 11 years-old, going either with my father or alone to Birdland or Bop CityLandon Bob City to sit in the peanut gallery to dig Bird, Monk, Miles, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Mingus. Really Dug It. Bebop was ‘my music’ in the same way that, let’s say, punk was in its breakthrough and ultimate containment.

Everything about ‘Howl’ made sense to this shallow callow 18-year-old exile. The hipster subculture, NYC, the resistant Jewish cadences infused with Blake but really Whitman, the great modernist maestro of the urban vaudeville.

Fast cut 1957. 20 year-old David migrates to San Francisco. Takes a bargain flight with artist Wallace Berman – he’s spending the weekend, I’m going to stay and work at Paper Editions, a paperback wholesale warehouse.

Wallace and I take turns going to the bathroom with a round window to turn-on. There’s a full moon. I dig it. We have picked up by Elias (godfather of the light shows) and Idell Romero (mystic poet) and taken to their Potrero Hill pad, smoking the local we as we wend There through the night-time streets.

Start hanging out at City Lights. The implacable presence behind the counter is Shig Murao. Meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose Pictures of the Gone World I also read, for free, at the Highland Avenue news-stand.

Got involved with the local poetry scene with peers like Michael McClure, Lew Welch, Joanne Kyger, Lenore Kandel, Philip Whalen, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, roll credits.

First met Allen when he and Peter Orlovsky en route from Europe to the Journey to the East. Allen brought an immediate excitement and energy to everything. As the decades unrolled, I was convinced that Alan knew everybody and everybody knew Allen.

The power of ‘Howl’ was its roar of hope despite the post-war despair, it was a prophetic gesture in the sense that Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ was. It summed up, as it critiqued, the historical moment. More than that, it took poetry out of its captivity in the laboratories of universities.

Like Whitman, Allen returned the possibility of poetry back to a democratic constituency. He and his combines made poetry exciting, egalitarian public events, and inspired new generations of poetry.

Note: Howl for Now was issued through Route Publications. The book was a companion to a live show of the same name staged at Clothworkers’ Centenary Concert Hall, University of Leeds, UK, on October 7th, 2005