David Meltzer: Two-Way Mirror

Thursday, September 24, 2015, 4:30 pm
Photo of David Meltzer wearing a gray sweater and scarf
David Meltzer’s return visit to The Poetry Center focuses on the recent reissue of a special edition of Two-Way Mirror. First published in 1977 by Oyez, it's back with a new introduction and an ample addendum written almost 40 years later. Two-Way Mirror is a classic book of poetics. Written in short remarks, autobiographical anecdotes and quotations drawn from philosophical, ethnographic and literary sources, Two-Way Mirror is both a non-didactic guide to the art Meltzer has devoted his life to, and a literary pleasure in itself. Free.
Location: 
Humanities Building, The Poetry Center
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Website: 
The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives
Facebook: 
https://www.facebook.com/events/1105277899500107/
Sponsor: 
The Poetry Center
Contact: 
The Poetry Center
E-mail: 
poetry@sfsu.du
Phone: 
415-338-2227
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A poet at age 11, raised in Brooklyn, David Meltzer began his literary career during the Beat heyday and was a prominent participant in the San Francisco Renaissance of the late 1950s and ’60s. He came to prominence as the youngest poet to have work included in Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945 – 1960. At age 20 he first recorded his poetry with jazz musicians in Los Angeles and later became a singer-songwriter and guitarist for Bay Area bands during the 1960s, including The Serpent Power, whose album Rolling Stone recently cited as among its Top 40 albums for 1968.

Meltzer is the author of many volumes of poetry including When I Was A Poet, published in 2011 in City Lights’ Pocket Poets Series. Meltzer taught at New College of California in San Francisco for 30 years. Two-Tone Poetry and Jazz, a CD featuring Meltzer, his wife, poet Julie Rogers and saxophonist Zan Stewart, was released in August.