David Meltzer, wordsmith, novelist, jazz versifier, folk musician, frontman of psychedelic rock band Serpent Power, has spent a life-time avoiding glib categorisation, determinedly ducking when critics and commentators have dubbed him a Beat poet. In fact, he has consistently railed against the mythography of the Beat Generation – “it’s the looks, not the books” he has said, attacking the triumph over style over content in the histories that have been told. But Meltzer, still active as writer and educator in the Bay Area that has been his home since the middle Fifties, seems to have softened his views, in some ways, on the misrepresentation of Beatdom.

He acknowledges there was a movement; he even appears to accept that he had a role in that community’s evolution, despite his tendency, over the years, to keep such an interpretation at arm’s length. It seems that it was only his youth – he was one of the youngest, one of the last, poets to ride the original North Beach rollercoaster as live verse resonated in basements and bars of San Francisco, before Beat became a little more than a tourist sham, as token bongos and hastily-sprouted goatees displaced the utopian visions of the first wave – or his modesty, that stopped him basking in the reflected limelight of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and co.

Yet Meltzer, despite certain shifts brought on, perhaps, by the mellowing of maturity, has not, in any real sense, swallowed the myth of Beat whole. His latest work, a long poem on a near-epic scale, doffs a cap to the movement – the piece is called Beat Thing, after all – but then proceeds in a 160-page torrent to challenge many of the premises of the Beat Generation, or at least those media-shaped assessments that have poured forth for the last half century. More pertinently, Meltzer is committed to seeing post-war experience as a great deal more than the cool, existential posturing of a new literature.

In a text that is dense, frenetic, spiky and often tangled in the roots and branches of the socio-political, the writer attempts a panoramic overview of America’s later 20thC, foregrounding movies and music, McCarthy and racism, the eye-ball searing flash of the H-bomb and the mind-scalding impressions left by the death camps. Beat bubbles behind the glass but Meltzer feels honour bound to set it in perspective and not over-privilege its part in recent decades.

Beat Thing is not a single, sustained blast – it comes in three sections and, like the very jazz Meltzer rapped and rolled over in The Cellar in 1959, it is delivered in various forms, various voices: the rat-a-tat of the riff, the longer-lined elegance of the refrain, sometimes the angular abstraction of the bop solo. Sometimes there is a torrent of ideas folding over each other in waves; sometimes the poet stops to take breath and surveys a scene, a moment, coolly and carefully. Line lengths shift, blank verse transmutes into prose stanzas, then back again.

In the opening passage “The Beat Thing Looms Up”, Meltzer subjects the word, the concept, Beat to a relentless deconstruction, an unforgiving critique of Beat’s use, its appropriation, its commercial exploitation in the years that have followed the initial, and perhaps golden, age. “Beat wax museums in Fisherman’s Wharf downtown Lowell McDougal Street & Beat Thing Hall of Fame wing of Planet Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard” mouths Meltzer disparagingly, then adds: “Beat superstar on MTV fastcut scratch 50s newsreel footage intercut w/ sitcom knows best voices over Kurt Loder asks Burroughs about killing his wife”. In fact, the writer rather economically, if elegiacally, sums up his own position when he says: “don’t wanna be forgotten but don’t wanna be remembered in rememberings’ dismembering”.

Yet the elongated account that follows is a warm, nostalgic and splendidly evocative re-telling of everyday Beat life as it was, contemplating writers in the ring - like Ray Bremser, Gary Snyder and Richard Brautigan – and musical compadres like Dino Valente, David Crosby and Nick Gravenites - and casual connections in the saloon and the lunch-counter, the lounging, ligging and loving, even an analysis of the genesis of jazz poetry, But it is when Meltzer wallows in the detail of the cafes and the cuisine of his Bay memories that the writing truly hits the taste-buds “What about Beat food?” he asks, then answers:

… .sushi especially wasabe bullet train blasting eyes into inland seas of kelp hurricane weep or shrimp cocktails at Swan Oyster Depot on Polk dip pink volt into red horseradish tomato karma lemon after rye toast soaked in Blum’s sweet butter or linguine dreamy shimmer glazed with green Pesto paste…

Poetry as soul sustenance - and almost literally!

But the fare that follows is meatier and much, much darker. By the time “Beat Thing: Commentary”, a prequel in essence, commences, the shadows of a pre-Beat terror cast their dark and terrible shape:

it was the Bomb
Shoah
it was void
spirit crisis disconnect
no subject but blank unrelenting
bust time
no future
suburban expand into past
present nuclear (get it) family
droids Pavlov minutiae
it was Jews w/ blues
reds nulled & jolted
Ethel & Julius brains smoke
pyre of shoes & eyeglasses
weeping black G.I.s
open Belsen gates

The remainder of the poem, including the extended coda “Primo Po-Mo” paints an extraordinary and deeply unnerving canvas, weaving threads as diverse as Hollywood and jazz, Holocaust and anti-Semitism, briefly pausing to state with calm and devastating assurance that, in the wake of nuclear typhoons and racial genocide, 1945 “closes Modernism’s file; melts febrile glue of liberal humanism’s Enlightenment’s utopic elan & generosity; splatter into Nowheresville all socially sustaining (& framing) institutions & discourses”.

In short, Beat Thing, is a remarkably moving but also gravely pessimistic piece. While its language is charged with a frenetic energy, its imagery is jagged, fragmented and disquieting, a neo-expressionist description of civilisation’s shattered and un-fixable mirror. Certainly, for those of us who placed faith in the liberal, anti-establishment projects that came in the wake of the Second World War, this contemplation is profoundly unsettling; it positions the impact of Beat and its humanist hopes in a very minor place. Quaint, convivial, charming in its way when young men gathered over beer and coffee to hear mystic visions through cigarette haze, its subsequent incarnations were merely shallow dilutions concocted by money-makers and their cheap lines of commodified relics.

As Meltzer, quite early in the piece, most potently declares:

Beat Gap line of chinos lumberjack flannel shirts Dr Dean beat shades Joe Camel unfiltered beat smokes Armani blue black basement zoots to suit up in & walk down to theme bar restaurant Coolsville chain owned by three publishers owned by a transglobal media conglomerate owned by a network of oil companies owned by a consortium of arms dealers owned by a clot of drug producers owned by a massive webwork of Swiss bankers & German brokers in silent partnership with Japanese alchemists in collusion with Chinese gerontologists as proxies for Reverend Moon

Note: The publisher La Alameda Press (www.laalamedapress.com) of Beat Thing is distributed by the University of New Mexico Press