David Meltzer, SF Beat generation poet and musician, dies

David Meltzer, the prolific poet and musician who merged his two passions, creating work that goes back to the Beat generation and San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and ’60s, has died. He was 79.

Mr. Meltzer died peacefully Saturday at his home in Oakland after suffering a stroke, said his daughters. He was surrounded by loved ones.

Fellow Bay Area Beat poet Diane di Prima called Mr. Meltzer “one of the secret treasures on our planet. Great poet, musician, comic; mystic unsurpassed, performer with few peers.”

His friends Greg and Keiko Levasseur wrote on the poet’s website that “We have lost a great poet, scholar, musician, and jazz historian. He was a loving husband and father, and a great soul. He was a wonderful friend whose gentle spirit, sense of humor, and astonishing capacity for sake made him a joy to be with.”

Mr. Meltzer wrote more than 40 volumes of poetry, among them “Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957-1992,” “Name: Selected Poetry, 1973-1983” and “Beat Thing” (2004). His nonfiction work includes “Reading Jazz” (1993), “Writing Jazz” (1999), “When I Was a Poet” (2011) and “Two-Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook,” a collection of anecdotes and quotations published by Oyez Press in 1977 and rereleased by City Lights Publishers in 2015.

In praising his poetry collection “David’s Copy” (2005), Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of City Lights, wrote that Mr. Meltzer was “one of the greats of post-World War II San Francisco poets and musicians. He brought music to poetry and poetry to music!”

Raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Mr. Meltzer got an early start as an artist; he entered a competition at age 11 with a poem about the New York subway system.

“I owe my own fluency with language to Brooklyn,” Mr. Meltzer said in a 2015 interview with The Chronicle. “Everyone talked about everything, from the Dodgers to the revolution.”

Mr. Meltzer was bar mitzvahed, he added, “but the library was my real synagogue. For Jews, the book was sacred and subversive, too.”

“Pushed into exile in California,” as he put it, living “as an alienated teen in L.A.,” Mr. Meltzer met artists who fueled his creativity. By age 20, he was recording poetry with jazz musicians in Los Angeles.

According to the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, Mr. Meltzer was the youngest poet to be featured in Donald Allen’s anthology “The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.”

He also wrote fiction.

“I wrote 10 novels for a company run by gangsters,” Mr. Meltzer told The Chronicle. “The books were pornographic and political, too. I call them ‘agit-smut.’ ... I lived at the back of a repair shop for radios and worked in a warehouse for books called Paper Editions. We had ‘tea’ breaks and smoked marijuana.”

In the 1960s, having relocated to the Bay Area, Mr. Meltzer was a singer-songwriter and guitarist for Bay Area bands that included the psychedelic folk-rock group Serpent Power. He also played the piano, mandolin and harmonica, often performing at Bay Area venues with his late wife, Tina, the lead vocalist on two albums, “The Serpent Power” and “Poet Song.” Mr. Meltzer married Julie Rogers five years ago, and the couple would read together at Bird & Beckett Books and Records in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood.

Mr. Meltzer also spent time as a bookseller, working at the now-defunct Discovery bookstore, and he was a longtime teacher. From 1977 to 2007, he taught in the Humanities and Graduate Poetics programs at the New College of California in San Francisco.

“The poem is perhaps the highest verbal form of communication,” Mr. Meltzer wrote in “Two-Way Mirror.” “It illuminates and it conceals. It is as precise and as vague as a mirror.”

The titular poem in Mr. Meltzer’s volume “When I Was a Poet,” published by City Lights, succinctly sums up the artist’s life in short, propulsive lines — contrasted with an awareness of his mortality:

Mr. Meltzer is survived by his wife, Julie Rogers; four children from his marriage to Tina Meltzer: Jennifer, Margaret (Maggie), Amanda and Adam; sisters, Joan Wile, Bonnie Richter and Paula Wolfe; three grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

Donations may be made in his name to the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.