David's Copy

David Meltzer was born on February 17, 1937. He was a poet and musician who created work that goes back to the Beat generation and San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote more than 40 volumes of poetry including Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957-1992, Name: Selected Poetry 1973-1983, Beat Thing, and David's Copy. His nonfiction work included Reading Jazz, Writing Jazz, When I Was a Poet, and Two-Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook. He also wrote 10 novels. He taught in the humanities and graduate poetics programs at the New College of California in San Francisco from 1977 to 2007. In the 1960s, he was a singer-songwriter and guitarist for Bay Area bands that included the psychedelic folk-rock group Serpent Power. He died after suffering a stroke on December 31, 2016 at the age of 79.

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