The first book I ever blurbed must have been David Melnick’s 1972 Ithaca House volume, Eclogs. Would that all of my blurbs stand up to 33 years of hindsight half so well as this:
One’s immediate attraction to these poems lies in their clear craft and almost infinite suggestiveness. Yet beneath this dreamy, erotic world of glimpses awaits a powerful and complex machine, a structure which can be perceived through the jeweled surfaces if only the reader will understand the title of “These are the Aspects of the Perfect” to be a statement of literal fact. Uniting for the first time the “French idiom” of the
There’s hubris, no doubt, in the idea that modernism has (or had) goals, let alone ranking them, and yet in an important way, I still feel that I got this exactly right. Eclogs is a hinge text, one of the last great books to accept the premises of the New American Poetry &, in the same instant, one of the first to assert a new one, one that envisions materiality for language as physical as paint is to a painting or stone to sculpture. It’s a close kin to Creeley’s Pieces or Ashbery’s Three Poems, tho far more Zukofskyan than either of them might have thought possible back in the early ‘70s.
Composed of ten poems – the book is just 39 pages long – whose airy open field physicality belies the density of the writing itself, Eclogs is at one level completely autobiographical, yet seen & heard thru such minute fragments that one focuses instead on their presence more than on what lay hidden behind the arras veil. This is a focus that crystallizes in Melnick’s next volume, PCOET, and in his homophonic translation of the first three books of The Iliad, Men in Aïda. By these later works, reference has moved simultaneously in two different directions: toward Homer, through the ear, but toward a ludic surface more filled with the names of friends & other poets than any text of the late Ted Berrigan. It’s a double-edge that one finds first in Eclogs, most immediately in its third poem, “These are the Aspects of the Perfect” ( a title that anticipates Rodrigo Toscano’s Partisans by a quarter century), with its frank equation of sex with economic exchange & posed questions asking if in fact “Fresno (poets” – there is no later closed parenthesis – don’t represent the same principle. Melnick is thus capable of being the most playful & serious of poets, the texts themselves oscillating between pure joy & the deepest depression, each moment inextricably bound to the other.
All of these books – not to mention the work never printed as such – have become difficult to obtain. Happily, there’s a project at hand that should see them eventually issued as a single volume, tho possibly not for another year or three. When that volume does appear, those who have barely read Melnick are in for a treat.
