BAY AREA POETS REVIEW 

DAVID MELTZER:
Master of the “Creative Gesture”

“THE CREATIVE GESTURE breaks through the monotony, the dial-tone of so much that constitutes life in our culture,” says David Meltzer. If that statement does not make you stop to think it over, you, as poet, artist, musician, agent of cultural transformation, yes, you may need to take the candle to what’s waxing in your ears.
    As he approaches his seventy-fourth year, poet David Meltzer is still capturing, filtering, synthesizing, and tossing back into the zeitgeist multileveled “creative gestures.” His contributions have been vast but underappreciated. He has produced 22 books of poetry, 11 novels, several music or spoken-word recordings, and a number of anthologies of the work of others; in addition, he has been widely anthologized, including in the seminal book, The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 put out by Donald Allen in 1960. As publisher, Meltzer has made available to English readers the writings of obscure but important thinkers like Edmond Jabés. As an editor, he has produced several books about jazz, as well as provided insight into America’s most magnetic literary tradition, the Beats, in his book of interviews, San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (City Lights).
    It doesn’t surprise, therefore, to learn that Meltzer has cultivated some sophisticated thoughts about what it means to be a poet-creator in our particular time and place--America at the turn of the millennium. “The act of creation is defiance,” he asserts, “whether it is a negative or positive critique.”  He offers up the Irish playwright and poet Samuel Beckett as an example of someone who has often been misunderstood as harboring a pessimistic vision of the modern human condition.

     In Meltzer’s twinkling brown eyes, Beckett reveals the power of “going on.” In the act of simply picking up the pieces and stepping forward, there is defiance yet affirmation, rejection and acceptance, and this is emblematic of the role of the artist in our time.
    When I interviewed Meltzer this past summer, he had just returned from a national tour per-forming with Rockpile, a trio including Michael Rothenberg, Terri Carrión and Clark Coolidge. Rockpile presents poetry in unique collaborative and improvisational programs with musicians. The group is not Meltzer’s first experience of poetry-music liaisons. In the first place, both of his parents were musicians (his father, a cellist, his mother, a harpist, met at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York). As early as 1958, Meltzer was performing his poetry to jazz accompaniment in Los Angeles and later in San Francisco’s Jazz Cellar. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he and his wife Tina were members of Serpent Power, a psychedelic rock band that incorporated Meltzer’s poetry and lyrics and Tina’s haunting voice.  Together, they produced “Poet Song” an album featuring Meltzer‘s work. Most recently, Meltzer has been working on a serial poem about the music of the 1960s entitled “Was It?”

     Meltzer considers himself “too young to be
a beatnik and too old to be a hippie.”

    Born in 1937, Meltzer lives within a relatively small pool of pre-baby-boom artists who reached adolescence in the 1940s and 1950s, prior to the tidal wave of turbulent mass movements that began in the late 1950s and characterized the subsequent two decades. Yet, to speak of time and generation doesn’t accurately place Meltzer; in many ways, his work and life has transcended the era he has lived through. 
    As a deep reader and lifetime learner, as a musician and music scholar, Meltzer’s contributions frequently reach beyond his own particular historic moment. His rooms are lined floor-to-ceiling with shelves of books on diverse topics and music CDs. Add to this, his interest in the centuries-old wisdom embodied in Jewish mysticism, his period of writing pornography as well as poetry, and his activism in social and political issues, and you get the picture of a rather earthy Renaissance man who has devoted much time and energy to the projects he feels most passionate about, such as his recent work with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade--a citizen-based group formed in 1995 to help those grappling with their proximity to oil refineries. The group has had its work cut out for it since this past summer’s BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
    A lot of what has been written about David Meltzer emphasizes his association with the Beat generation. Yet, his poetry and personality equally reside in the Lurianic kabbalist tradition which Meltzer has studied and taught. Here is the man who not only created song/spoken word recordings in that ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ and ‘Incense and Peppermints’ vein, but also brought the work of the Egyptian-Jewish poet Edmund Jabés to the attention of English readers.


     Meltzer’s poetry combines elements of Beat punch and its jazzy, inebriated rhythms with the languid liquor of ancient Chinese poets: you know, the ones with greying-hair, sitting on the riverbank, getting drunk and contemplating the ephemeral.    

    Aside from Beat and kabbalistic influences, there are vestiges of the confessional and notes of the colloquial in Meltzer’s verse. One wonders where it all came from. “You can blame it on Mrs. Callahan,” he says, of his 6th grade teacher who had assigned him to write a free-verse poem for some New York City commemoration. Meltzer says he had “no idea what poetry was, let alone what a free verse poem should be.” To compound the pressure, the lovely Carol Grossman (who sat across from David in the classroom) warned that if he failed to produce the poem, he would no longer be welcomed to her living room to hear her play “Malagueño” on the piano.
    What’s an 11-year-old Brooklyn kid to do? It was homeward bound to dad, who pulled the vintage anthology Magic Casements off the shelf and sent the lad to his room to study. Meltzer liked Amy Lowell’s “Patterns,” especially its mysterious ending: “Christ! What are patterns for?” But another aspect of poetry intrigued him: “there was a lot of white space around the writing on the page.”
    He jokes about how the spacious appearance of a poem on a page  “appealed to my sense of sloth.” But perhaps another element entered his youthful imagination, later to be fed by his encounters with the Zohar¾a key text of kabbalah. To wit, the blank sections of a page (or the presence of absence) are equally open to philosophical inquiry, investigation, interpretation, and imagination. This root of Judaism’s literary heritage, as exemplified by the Talmud with its non-linear page layouts, often represents voices-across-time. How different from looking upon crowded television screens and web sites where every bit of space is filled with bold headlines, banners, pop-ups, and designer mayhem?
    Although Meltzer eventually came to write book-length poems, his first effort was a short poem about the subway. As he wrote, he says, the poem “breathed through” him; he experienced an elevated sense of words, their sounds and meanings and their “rhythmical economy.” “At that moment, I thought I had invented poetry!” From this  inadvertent stumble into creative gesture, Meltzer continued to write and read poetry. Eventually he was drawn away from the neighborhoods of Brooklyn--rich with America‘s linguistic melting pot--to the Bohemian world of Greenwich Village.
    By the late 1950s, Meltzer had embraced the artist‘s path. He left New York and lived for a time in Los Angeles where he got to know artists, musicians and poets Ed Keinholz, Wallace Berman, Robert Alexander, John Altoon, Dean Stockwell, Dennis Hopper, and Lord Buckley. By 1957 he completed his migrations and was living in, the mecca for West Coast Beats. He became associated with the Jazz Cellar in San Francisco and met Jack Spicer, Lew Welch, Joannne Kyger, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, and John Wieners. His knowledge of these poets was set down in Beat Thing, a book of poems that won the Josephine Miles PEN Award in 2005, and in San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (City Lights, 2001), an anthology of interviews he conducted and edited.
     For most of the 1960s, Meltzer worked
at the Discovery Bookshop in North Beach.
     One day poet Robert Duncan and his partner, the artist Jess, came into the Discovery Bookshop where Meltzer worked. Meltzer had frequently given them “obscene discounts” on book purchases. Duncan had returned from the men’s room and held out a copy of  a library book that had been left behind: “How dare this book not be in circulation?,” he questioned, announcing he would drop it into the nearest mailbox (one way to return books at the time). Meltzer took a look at the title: it was Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941); he was curious that Duncan thought so highly of the book.
    Although born to a Jewish family, Meltzer’s parents were second-generation Jews who were slightly embarrassed by anything that smacked of the “old country.” (In fact, his mother had to remind him that he did indeed have a bar mitzvah--out of deference to a dying grandparent.) At first, Scholem’s scholarly tome did not have much impact. “I got a copy and took it home and didn’t like it at all,“ he says. Then, he read the chapters on Abraham Abulafia. There was something about the 13th century philosopher’s idea that the mind must be prepared and cleared in order to “receive prophecy“ that intrigued Meltzer. In esoteric Judaism, every letter, each word, takes on expansive symbolic power. In the Hebrew language, each letter also represents a number, so there is a lot of play with numerology--called gematria--to discover hidden meanings or powers of prediction in the way letters and words are combined. To Meltzer, this is much like poetry itself. Eventually, Meltzer published the only book of Abulafia’s that had been translated into English, the Sefer ha-Ot or The Book of the Sign (translated by Jack and Bruria Finkel). As his study of kabbala deepened, Meltzer started Tree, a literary magazine that attempted to fuse classical kabbalah with modern writing, with Jack Hirschman. Later, he published Jabés in translation by Rosmarie Waldrop. For thirty years, Meltzer taught poetry and kabbala at the now defunct New College in San Francisco, along with Diane DiPrima, Lyn Hejinian, Robert Duncan, Duncan McNaughton, Leslie Scalapino and others.
 
  Meltzer’s most recent book of poems was David’s Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer, edited by Michael Rothenberg and with an introduction by Jerome Rothenberg (2005). A new collection is forthcoming from Lawrence Ferlinghetti‘s Green Integer press.
                         - by Jannie M. Dresser

POEMS BY DAVID MELTZER

so sheer between what’s right
and will be wronged, let’s say
the Taiwanese couple on stage tonight
in their launderette
washing and drying clothing
watched by two teenagers
in a non-descript Duster
windows fogged over with
potsmoke, fear and talk
with one gun between them
and an idea to rob
not for money
but to knife that veil
between them
and the good life        

(from The Veil)

FOR ZAP THE ZEN MONK (1960)

Cold grove to grow top pot in.
Wet dew sops through sleepingbag.
Hibachi’s rusty, crudded,
covered with dove shit, dung of cranes.

Wind tears down bamboo tent
and tender flesh bruises.
Only the mind hardens like ice
to crack and melt into a stream

touching roots (like nerve-ends)
closest to this dream of earth.
            (from The Dark Continent, 1967)


Who bends the broken branch back into place
destroys the tree

enough pruning shaping revision
what’s rooted reaches deep
is organized to ascend
is mirrored in its own unfolding

the eyes get lost in partiality
the mind invents wholeness in flight from it
                (from Others)

“Nexus” Poet Neeli Cherkovski Walks the Past Into the Future

   
“BEING OLDER, YOU THINK about all the history you contain,” says San Francisco poet Neeli Cherkovski. In his Bernal Heights home which he shares with Jesse Cabrera--his domestic partner for more than 20 years--and Cosmo, their Catalonian sheep dog, Cherkovski is surrounded by papers, books, and art that comprise a personal history stretching back five decades.
    Just a few days before his 65th birthday, a delivery of attractively printed broadsides featuring his poem “Grotesque Empire“ was delivered. After a publishing dry spell between 1997 and 2004, Cherkovski is consciously making the effort to usher his work into print. This year, he brought out his 12th book of poetry, From the Canyon Outward, and he is also working and publishing excerpts from a memoir.
    As he proceeds, he is guiding an archivist in the organizing and cataloguing of his documents to prepare them for a permanent and public home. These are not ordinary papers: to literary historians, Cherkovski is considered a nexus person. He was a longtime friend and co-publisher with the late Charles “Hank” Bukowski (1920-1994), and spent many of his North Beach years with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia, and other seminal figures of northern and southern California’s literary legacy. In his 1989 book of essays, Whitman’s Wild Children, Cherkovski wrote about many of these writers, including several who have passed away. Beyond that, Cherkovski helped organize the San Francisco Poetry Festival, was an instructor at New College, and has written biographies of both Ferlinghetti and Bukowski.
    Perhaps it was the impending birthday, but Cherkovski recently waxed philosophical about the past, present and future. He shared a new poem that began with his observation of a deli-owner who is making him a sandwich, precisely setting out the ingredients in the way she had done it many times before. The poem goes on to relate a conversation Cherkovski had with Philip Lamantia about English poet Thomas Chatterton who died young and has been mostly forgotten (the English poet succumbed to arsenic poisoning in 1770, a possible suicide). In Cherkovski’s narrative lyric, language, memory, natural imagery, and a keen awareness of the past and present put me in mind of Robinson Jeffers, Walt Whitman, and Denise Levertov. When I mentioned this, Cherkovski seemed pleased, adding Robert Duncan, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Federico Garcia Lorca to my short list of literary influences.    
    Born in 1945 to Russian-Jewish parents who had strong Bohemian and socialist leanings, Cherkovski grew up mostly in San Bernardino. His father was a photographer, his mother and uncle were both artists. “My father was proud I was a poet,” Neeli says, showing off a photograph of his parents gathered with fellow artists and writers. (Here is another side of the American dream: a place where recent immigrants can find like-minded friends and share happy hours in intellectual freedom while discussing art and literature--even though they might all be bed-bug poor.)

Neeli’s dog, Cosmo


Neeli’s father owned a small bookshop where he stocked poetry and books about art, history, and politics, including the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. Cherkovski worked in the store and soaked up the poetry and politics. As a young man, he became involved in several Southern California political campaigns which eventually brought him to the Bay Area to work as a staffer for George Moscone, at the time a state senator. Cherkovski’s life intersected with history again when mayor Moscone was shot: Cherkovski recalls trying to get back across town to City Hall in the wake of the news.

As far back as he can remember, Cherkovski has felt himself to be a poet. Bukowski, known as “Hank“ to his close friends, had told him he was a poet because he had “been thinking about death since picking up a pen.“

    Cherkovski seems hardly the melancholic or morbid epitome of a struggling writer; instead, he claims nature and “curiosity about everything” as his birthright. The words used to describe his poetry are ‘lyrical,’ ‘philosophical,’ and ‘elegiac.’

“There’s nothing I am not interested in,” he says, “everything’s interconnected and death is just another interest.”

    Instead of being revolutionary or radical, Cherkovski considers himself a ‘revolutionary of the word,‘ calling himself a “middle-class guy with middle-class values.” In political engagements, he usually worked “within the system.” While that may be, he is also someone who much preferred a North Beach poet crowd to other social milieus (he describes a humorous attempt to mix with devotees of the San Francisco Zen Center in a recently published excerpt from his memoir where he found one of his poetry heroes, Philip Whalen giving a dharma talk that referenced several contemporary poets. Briefly, it looked as if the two worlds might have relevance to one another!)
 
   Cherkovski jumped into the open-mic scene in North Beach and felt warmly received by Ferlin-ghetti. Hoping the bookstore owner and publisher would eventually publish his own work, Cherkovski instead wrote a biography of Ferlinghetti, as well as Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski. For over five years, Cherkovski was writer-in-residence at New College of California, where he taught literature and philoso-phy, but his pedagogical approach was to encourage students to go to poetry for “experience“ rather than for learning in-and-for itself. 
    Until he was about 55, Cherkovski characterized his relationship to the past as being more influenced by nostalgia than it is now. He is keenly aware of how the past brings us into the future, explaining that “the past walks us into the future,” with the emotions providing us with the instructions we need for tomorrow. The past is one field of experience that moves us forward carrying both the pain of loss and the “shock of losing a contemporary or your parents.” He is currently allowing influences to free him to explore new ways of writing. He has been reading Adriano Spatola, a modern Italian poet published in a wonderful series of books by Green Integer, who did not use punctua-tion, as well as Greek poet George Seferis whose poems often brush up “the dust of the past.”
    When he visited Greece a few years ago, Cherkovski recalls he was impressed by how knowledgeable average citizens were of their history. “You could ask a waiter, ‘talk to us of Parmenides,’ or a cook, ‘tell us about the battle of Salamis.’ They know their past.”
    Cherkovski is intrigued that his life once dove-tailed with that of a man who  lived through the October Revolution of 1917, and was sent to Siberia. The 92-year-old Russian wound up in the Sunset Boulevard neighborhood where Cherkovski lived, and by then had become a dentist and writer. The intersection between history and personal experience inspires him. “It’s good to know, for instance,” he says energetically, “that the Ohlone and Miwok tribes of California were walking in the very places we are today, that there were 80 different Indian languages spoken along the Pacific coasts.” The fact that their cultures are mostly absent is a wound that we need to understand, to know how we are all partly responsible for it and to ask “How are we going to change this and not further wound the planet?”

“I go to bed at night fascinated by the Paleolithic, thinking about this time period called ‘pre-history,’ a prejudiced way of putting it.”
   
    The creators of fabulous cave art at Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc make him think whoever created these paintings were “no less advanced than we are.” The images are, to him, a kind of writing: “If you close your eyes and look at the images behind your eyes, and think about what these people were like, and how they might have been like you and me. . . you’ll realize they wanted the same things: shelter, clothing, food, finding a meaningful way to care for the frail and elderly and to dispose of the dead.” His exploration of ancient history has led him to consider how poetry is like painting. (As a side note, Cherkovski and his partner Cabrera both paint and draw and decorate their home with their art). Cherkovski uses the language of vision when he talks about poetry writing, including the need to put imagine how the world could be. However, his most intense concerns--the role of the human species in history and our relationship to nature and the environment--are reflected in his writing. “This is a historical time for us to survive and maintain a sense of reverence.” A technological SNAFU like the BP oil spill into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico “shows how fragile the crystal is.”
           - by Jannie M. Dresser

POEMS BY NEELI CHERKOVSKI

Big Sur . . .

where
the coast is wildly at peace
and far beyond time

the trees and shrubs
are profuse, a creek runs there
and meets the ocean

the body finds its way
to the mind, when the body
goes, so goes the coast

so goes the canyon, yet
the gulls still fly, the language
of salt and sand and tidal pond

still twine, I hold every question
like a candle and hike
deep down the path

in my mind, here the grass
rustles in the breeze, all
possibilities drift

and we are free

The Writer

he smoked three packs a day
he sat morosely on the bus
thinking of writing
a great American novel, but
managed, in reality, to compose
a book on criminal genius, a
potboiler western and
a vast notebook of random
observations on life
in the city, a sad man
with a broken face

he had no alibi when he died
and stood before the gates



Poetic Couplet: Judy Wells and Dale Jensen

"I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. . . . a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!"    --Rainer Maria Rilke*

Inside the front door of the home that Judy Wells and Dale Jensen share in Berkeley, there is a small cardboard cut-out of a black and white Jack Russell. Puppy contemplation is in the works. When they met nearly 20 years ago, both poets were past 40 and childless-by-choice. Wells says “I’m not sure two poets living together with kids is a good idea unless they have good jobs, nannies, and a housekeeper!”

Two poets domestic-partnering? (I’ll no longer use “marriage” until the state applies its privileges equally.) The very idea courts disaster.  Emotionally sensitive, prone to melancholia, prone to substance-use/abuse, impracticality, navel-gazing: dang, got my number! But Wells and Jensen have forged an active creative and social life that seems to include “loving the distance between them" as Rilke prescribed.

Both are Bay Area natives. Jensen was born in Oakland in 1949 and attended Castlemont High School; Wells, a second-generation San Franciscan, grew up in Martinez where she attended St. Catherine’s and Alhambra Union schools. She is the elder of the pair, born in 1944. Between them, they have published 15 books and chapbooks, founded and supported literary ventures, coordinated and hosted several Bay Area reading series, and participated in perhaps as many as a hundred more. On a daily basis, they do all the things one must to sustain sanity and social dependability, with an added emphasis on nurturing their writing practices.  “Living with another poet isn’t just about poetic inspiration,” says Wells, “but includes paying the bills, caring for the house, planning the future, and sharing our books.”

Both started out in pursuit of an academic career. Jensen was well into a Master‘s Degree in Psychology at the University of Toronto but was dismayed by faculty in-fighting; he got his degree and got out, finding work in a factory for awhile, then settling into a 25-year career in the Social Security Administration. Wells was a French major at Stanford, then completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley. She was part of a group of women in the 1970s who pushed for a Women’s Studies Department and more gender balance on the faculty. For the past few years, Wells has taught in a Master’s Program at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, but prior to that she spent years as one of the Bay Area’s “freeway flyers,” part-time instructors in local colleges who work with few benefits, limited representation, and no job security. It inspired her 1991 prose and poetry book, The Parttime Teacher.

Wells and Jensen were fully ensconced in their separate yet bifurcated careers--making a living and living to write--when they first met, at a poetry reading of course. She was coming off a 5-year relationship and wasn’t looking to hook up with "another poet who needed a ride."Jensen was running a reading series at Oakland’s Coffee Mill. Their mutual friend Carla Kandinsky assured Wells that Jensen was not only nice but owned his own house.

   Jensen asked her to go see Japanese filmmaker’s Akira Kurosawa’s expressive, autobiographical 1990 film "Dreams." He was looking for someone who was  a writer, or who had a strong interest in poetry. "When you write, you don’t want to be disturbed," he says. He needed a partner who "understood that writing was a priority that had nothing to do with finances." The initial spark led to cohabitation in 1992 and a civil union ten years later.

"Dale and I write in such different ways,” Wells says. Her poetry is in a lyrical and narrative mode while Jensen’s stems from Surrealist/Dada movements, avant-garde and Beat influences, poets he had begun to read in grad school, such as the more accessible Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, and Gary Snyder, arriving finally at William S. Burroughs and Patti Smith. Jensen quotes Andrew Joron who has called this experimental group of writers and writings “otherstream.” Wells was inspired by the breakout of  feminist writers in the late 1960s and 1970s, and by poems like “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath and poets Anne Sexton,  Susan Griffin and Judy Grahn. When Wells first heard the type of writing that Jensen was doing, she thought “Oh, my God, what is this?” She didn’t understand it though she says she grew to appreciate it, while Jensen claims that his writing “has gotten more rhythmic because of Judy.”

This difference in writing styles and their critical underpinnings and practice has meant that there is less competition between them than there might have been if they were both pursuing the same literary magazines. Instead, they enjoy the fact that they have introduced each other to writers and have gained appreciation for how the other works. There‘s even a symbiotic affect that spurs on their work: “When I’ve got a reading, and Dale’s sending stuff out, it makes me want to send stuff out, and makes him want to be doing a reading,” Wells says, noting that she was raised in a large family where “there’s always a little looking over at what the other person is doing and saying, ‘maybe I could do that too.’”

Jensen is one of several coordinators of the reading series at Berkeley’s Nefeli Café. This past weekend, both participated in the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and while they often perform in the same venue, they do not do so as a couple.

Jensen writes daily, spinning out poems that may or may not come together in a longer piece. He frequently employs a “cut-up” technique pioneered by British/Canadian writer Brion Gysin in
The Troubles focused on the 1980s and Twisted History explored ideas about history. Wells, on the other hand, works project-by-project, creating poems for a particular manuscript; she excavated her Irish Catholic heritage in Everything Irish (1999); Call Home (2005) dealt with childhood themes, the loss of her mother and relationships with siblings. Most recently, and under the influence of her academic curriculum, she published (1916-1986) and others; the poems are not always themed until he begins to put a book together. His book Little Lulu Talks with Vincent Van Gogh, a collection which posits dialogues between the cartoon character and some of the West's great thinkers and artists.

  Since completing his most recent book Oedipus’ First Lover, from Beatitude Press,  Jensen is working on a “non-literal autobiography.” Explaining that his life wasn’t characterized by the traumas and exploits of the stereotypical poet--“I wasn’t a junky, I didn’t live in Sudan waiting for the waters to subside, and I never got into hang gliding"--he is instead exploring the emotional realm of his life using  playful techniques such as knocking off prefixes of words, paring words down to smaller suggestive units of sound, and using spelling tricks to jolt readers and listeners to hear language in a fresh way.

Wells is working on a family history project that will undoubtedly work its way into poems. She is transcribing 150 letters written in the 1860s that were passed down from her ancestor, woman of English descent from Massachusetts who came to California in 1864, married a rancher and started a family. “Since we don’t have the letters that Phebe Dickinson wrote, I have to recreate them.” And, yes, Wells discovered in doing family research, that she has ties to that other Massachusetts Dickinson.

* Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters on Love” in Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties (W.W. Norton & Company., Inc., New York, NY; 1975).