"As if 2016 needed to perpetrate one final outrage on our society, poet, musician, novelist, editor, anthologist, and all-around polymath David Meltzer died early in the morning on December 31, having suffered a debilitating stroke the day after Christmas. He would have been 80 in February. His loss is especially felt here at City Lights, with which he’s been associated since 1961 when he co-edited with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure the first issue of the Journal for the Protection of All Beings. David would later publish three projects with City Lights—San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (2001), a book of interviews; When I Was a Poet (2011), a book of poems; and Two-Way Mirror (2015), an expanded reprint of his book of writings on writing poetry—as well as write forewords for Marilyn Buck’s Inside/Out (2012) and Van Morrison’s Lit Up Inside: Selected Lyrics (2014). But this barely hints at the extent of his oeuvre as a writer and multifaceted cultural worker, and David always seemed to land on the coolest presses, like Auerhahn, Oyez, Black Sparrow, Semina. True to form, the productive and protean poet had just completed a new project, guest-editing with Steve Dickison a new issue of their music-oriented mag Shuffle Boil as the seventh issue of Nick Whittington’s Amerarcana."
Continued at: In Memoriam: David Meltzer (1937-2016)
Audio recording by David Highsmith.
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