Beat Thing

I saw this book showcased in the library in 2005. I read it and thought, along side Ginsburg's "Fall of America", this is my favorit Beat Poet book, I had never heard of him before seeing this book, but I tell ya, he is great! & this is an apt title. Being an ignorant american with a slim vocabulary ,as well as person who can't spell, i would say this book is totally as accessable as rock'n roll, yet has a cadence and a verve that is effortlesssly engageing, captivating, even for people with ADD attention spans, and that says a lot, it' direct, straitforward, trippy and dreamy at the same time. Having said that, isn't that what beat poetry is all about?

Beat Thing is a rare specimen, a brilliant gem. Poet Jack Hirschman shares that this is "Meltzer's most important lyri-political work to date and that like all great works, this entire book is a single simultaneous moment in progress, written by a poet who, in terms of the rhythms and verbal inventiveness and the naming of figures of popular culture, is without equal anywhere." Beat Thing rises up as an ecstatic chant of defiance and celebration; it is the real deal. David Meltzer has dared to capture history in an amazing jar complete with jagged edges, cracks and flaws. La Alameda Press has hit another home run with this production. Meltzer is many things to many people. He is a first-rate poet, a musician and a comic. He is a piece of living history and a legend at the same time-a welcome voice for those souls among us who are crying out for a nostalgic romp through the 1950s poetry scene. Meltzer was active in the '50s in San Francisco's North Beach and often read with various jazz musicians at local bars and coffeehouses. His new book is part poetry and part exposé, both a tribute to down-in-the-street wildness as well as a rant against the romantic notion which surrounds the Beat Generation. Invoking real people as real history, Meltzer takes aim at the fantasy which Beat has become and juxtaposes simultaneously its still-needed legacy. He brings forth the original Beat spirit in an encyclopedic cascade of details whose dense, deep, fierce, funny, free-associative jazz energy infuses every line. This is a hipster vision looking back at a period in which the still-current memory of Auschwitz, the development of the H-bomb, and the right-wing witch hunts of the McCarthy era prevailed side by side with a pervasive cultural complacency. This is both scary and lovely stuff: a wide range of writers, artists and musicians refused to submit to its numbing protocol and this resistance continues over 50 years later in Beat Thing. Still living in the Bay Area, David Meltzer is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and prose and has edited numerous anthologies; among them, Reading Jazz, Writing Jazz and San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets. He is also a founding editor of the music/poetry zine Shuffle Boil. Beat Thing by David Meltzer; Reviewed by Jeanie C. Williams