Background
David Meltzer was born on February 17, 1937 in Rochester, New York, United States to Louis Meltzer, a musician and writer, and Rosemunde (Lovelace) Meltzer, a musician.
David studied at Los Angeles City College from 1955 to 1956.
From 1956 to 1957 he attended University of California in Los Angeles.
(One of the most respected poets of the Beat and San Franc...)
One of the most respected poets of the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance periods, David Meltzer has kept alive interest in the interface between jazz and poetry that exploded in the 1950s. This new edition of selected poems includes previously unpublished material and serves as a map to this very prolific and interesting poet.
https://www.amazon.com/Davids-Copy-Selected-Meltzer-Penguin/dp/0143036181/?tag=2022091-20
(One of the most respected poets of the Beat and San Franc...)
One of the most respected poets of the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance periods, David Meltzer has kept alive interest in the interface between jazz and poetry that exploded in the 1950s. This new edition of selected poems includes previously unpublished material and serves as a map to this very prolific and interesting poet.
https://www.amazon.com/Davids-Copy-Selected-Meltzer-Penguin/dp/0143036181/?tag=2022091-20
David Meltzer was born on February 17, 1937 in Rochester, New York, United States to Louis Meltzer, a musician and writer, and Rosemunde (Lovelace) Meltzer, a musician.
David studied at Los Angeles City College from 1955 to 1956. From 1956 to 1957 he attended University of California in Los Angeles.
A child prodigy, Meltzer performed on radio and television in New York beginning in the late 1940s. In 1957, after moving cross country in his youth to Los Angeles, where he became involved in the circle around Wallace Berman, Meltzer moved to San Francisco, where he associated with poets such as Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer.
A pioneer of jazz poetry readings, Meltzer formed a psychedelic folk-rock group called Serpent Power, recording for Vanguard Records in the late ’60s. In addition to his many books of poetry, he also published 10 erotic novels in the late ’60s and early ’70s, including the critically acclaimed “anti-porn” Agency Trilogy, revisiting the genre in 1995 with Under. He was an editor of anthologies including: The San Francisco Poets, The Secret Garden, Birth, Death, Reading Jazz, Writing Jazz and San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets. He was also an editor of magazines including the Journal for the Protection of All Beings, Tree and Shuffle Boil.
Meltzer taught for many years at New College of California, from the early poetics program in the ’80s up to the school’s closing in 2008. In 2005, Penguin Books published his selected poems, David’s Copy, and in 2011, City Lights published When I Was a Poet, No. 60 in the Pocket Poets Series.
He spent most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area. Meltzer died on December 31, 2016, after suffering a stroke at his home in Oakland.
(One of the most respected poets of the Beat and San Franc...)
(One of the most respected poets of the Beat and San Franc...)
David was a member of Science Fiction Writers of America and Before Columbus Foundation.
David married Christina Meyer, an artist and teacher, on April 1, 1959. They had four children: Jennifer Love, Margaret Joy, Amanda Rose, Adam Benjamin ben David.