Enjoying David Meltzer’s When I Was a Poet from The Pocket Poets Series. I should know him so much better, but don’t, and actually have a copy from the early 70s of The New American Poetry 1945-1960 when I will have read him but sadly didn’t continue.

I was reminded of him and to buy this book as I was listening to and reviewing a song from his band The Serpent Power anthologised in the current Vanguard retrospective of late 60s/early 70s music on their predominantly folk label, Meltzer’s track being wonderfully psychedelic and lyrical.

I was unnerved when reading his poem Cold which I assumed was about a lost love/lover as the poem traced this woman’s life across a sequence a brisk vignettes, only to discover at the end it was about his mother. But such clarity in its brisk, almost poetic asides:

To the end spoke in a little girl’s
high pitched sing song voice
insouciant but insistent

Meltzer doesn’t share his fellow Beat poets’ more expansive and free-flowing style, generally staying with his brief and closely-focused detail. There is a beauty in the sounds he crafts so effortlessly and simply. I’ll finish on one example – as this is meant to be a snapshot of a recent and pleasurable re-discovery – and I would love to be able to write like this, the first two parts from Night Reals:

1.

Night when it’s light placed on paper,
tracked-down. Dear lights
haunt me. I seek it in black.
Her round hills still give me thrills.
Song against dark. O mere words.
Mother tongue furl to scoop tar out of milk.
Endless possible sea.

2.

Night the canopy our poem shapes.
Bend over song.
Pull long veils down majestic hallways
or stalled on a Freeway to stammer
ultimate truth. Any moment.
Night the canopy blesses bent-over peon
tills royal soil of invented earth.