David Melnick, Nice: Collected Poems, eds. Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich & Ron Silliman

 

            I found Melnick’s work after moving to Berkeley, where helived in the late 1960s and early ‘70s before moving across the Bay to San Francisco.I had heard tell of his readings of PCOET—his “correct” pronunciations, howonly a few could remember the exact sounds his private language formed. I hadheard of his famous Homer Group, and read how Melnick’s voice was infectiousamong the other “Homersexuals,” how his homophonics perversely instigated akind of Bacchic frenzy. I remember being shown an event flyer from 1974, fromthe now-defunct Cody’s Books, featuring Melnick reading with Telegraph’s “BubbleLady,” Julia Vinograd. I would walk past the former Cody’s building daily tofeel their presences decades after.

Melnick’s workcreated a kind of orbit, tugging me to its center, but the force that propelledmy obsession was impossible to see. Was it that Melnick gave language to queerfeelings I had known somewhere deep inside me, but had been unable to voice?Was it that his work points to a kind of unspeakability of these very “qqrer!”feelings? I am left wondering what kinds of queer feelings we can represent inqueer (il)legibilities. Whether Melnick offers us a cipher, a code, a means ofreckoning with language and its limits, feelings and the limits of representingthose feelings, too. (Noah Ross, “(POETS; EXIST?”)

Ihadn’t even heard of San Francisco poet David Melnick (1938-2022) before thisnew collection landed in my mailbox— Nice: Collected Poems , eds. Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich & Ron Silliman (New York NY:Nightboat Books, 2023)—a book that includes preface on the author by poet and critic Noah Ross [see my ’12 or 20 questions’ with him here; see my review of his second collection here], and a collaborative introduction-proper by thefour editors. I’m fascinated by these seeming-reclamation projects that Americanpublisher Nightboat Books has been publishing over the past decade or so(possibly longer, but I’ve only been aware of their work for the past dozen-plusyears), all of which swirl around particular writers and writings, allowing documentationfor a wealth of literary activity, specifically: by, about and through queerwriters and writing. Some of the collections I’ve been particularly impressedby include their Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader , edited byJamie Townsend with an afterword by Alysia Abbott (2019) [see my review of such here], We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics , eds.Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel (2020) [see my review of such here] and WritersWho Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997 , eds. Dodie Bellamy and KevinKillian (2017) [see my review of such here]. I’d probably also include thecollection On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays (2022) by American poetand critic Douglas Crase [see my review of such here] to this list as well. Thereis something to be acknowledged and appreciated in Nightboat’s ongoingattentions to providing critical consideration, examination and celebration tothese histories that might otherwise have been overlooked, misunderstood oreven completely forgotten. As the first poem of Melnick’s posthumous collection,the five-page “I. LE CALME,” ends:

These languages passaway:

                :fellatio, ofsubjection

            now kings are dead
        becausethe head is lowered

                “eyes ripe asolives

                “a green seaknobby

bit by worms
stirred, in
the main stream

                “bee keeperseized the earth
                “size of a star

                Walking, sorrowslew me

Nice: Collected Poems collects four previously-publishedlimited-edition works by Melnick across nearly fifty years of scattered production:Eclogs (Ithica House, 1973), PCOET (G.A.W.K., 1975), Men inAïda (Tuumba Press, 1983) and A Pin’s Fee (Logopoeia website, 2002;Hiding Press, 2019). There’s a liveliness to this work, one that sweeps unapologeticallyinto experimentation and the playfully-ridiculous, a quality that is quiterefreshing; the earlier works clearly showcase a poet of his period, employinga particular flavour of 1960s and 70s experimentation, but somehow timeless,offering an expansive play across meaning, sound and the lyric through apoetics of subverted and invented language. It would be impossible not to be simultaneouslycharged and charmed by the expansive heft of the poem “Men in Aïda,” a homophonictranslation of the Iliad, a piece that can’t not be heard aloud, evenfrom within the bounds of quiet reading. The language really is propulsive, andmy ears can catch comparisons with language/sound poets north of the border,from bpNichol and Christian Bök to The Four Horsemen, Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts (among others). Such glorious gymnastics of sound! As Melnick’s poem begins:

Men in Aïda, they appeal,eh? a day, O Achilles!
Allow men in, everyAchaians. All gay ethic, eh?
Paul asked if tea moussesuck, as Aïda, pro, yaps in.
Here on a Tuesday. ‘Hello,’Rhea to cake Eunice in.
‘Hojo’ noisy tap ashideous debt to lay at a bully.
Ex you, day. tap wrote a ‘D,’a stay. Tenor is Sunday.
Arreides stain axe andRon and ideas ‘ll kill you.

Movingthrough the material, I’m simultaneously surprised and not that I hadn’t heardof this poet before this book landed, making me wonder just how much materialexists in the world by those otherwise-forgotten writers? We move so quickly tothe next book and the next book that there are probably dozens of poets leftbehind: “only alive as long as in print,” to paraphrase a line by the (since late)Canadian poet Patrick Lane. So much literary history is unrecorded andoverlooked, and this is a wonderfully vibrant collection, even through the darkelements of Melnick’s later work, as the collaborative “INTRODUCTION” writes:

In parallel with hislife, Melnick’s poetry also yields story, a compact one. Four books comprise his legacy: Eclogs (written1967-1970), PCOET (mostly 1972), Men in Aïda (1983), and A Pin’sFee (1987). As the dates of composition show, his years of creativity spana crucial two decades in the rise of queer community: his first book begunbefore Stonewall; his last written in the crisis years of AIDS. And each bookreflects a truth of its moment, though in a manner entirely its own. In Eclogs,the beautiful façade of coded language preserves an experience it screens fromview. PCOET yields to the joy of invention, creating a language all its own. Menin Aïda, the pinnacle of this span, is his epic: an act of gayworldbuilding, embracing the past and transforming it through homophonic translation.A Pin’s Fee, the shortest of the four, is anguished: its last word, “DEATH, “repeating forty-five times. After this, nothing. For the rest of Melnick’slife, another thirty-five years, no other poetry would surface.