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No Eyes: Lester Young - SAVE 50%!

No Eyes: Lester Young - SAVE 50%!

by David Meltzer

Regular price $8.50 USD
Regular price $16.95 USD Sale price $8.50 USD
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Product Details

Black Sparrow Press

Softcover
ISBN: 978-1-57423-129-8
Pages: 188
Size: 6" x 9"
Published: June 2000
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In 1959, at the age of fifty, tenor man Lester Young—a lyrical player, his airy tone haunted by a breathy melancholy—died alone in the Arvin Hotel in Manhattan. David Meltzer's latest book is a poetic meditation on the last year of Young's life, a year of joyful playing and self-willed dying, of creation and negation. But what do "eyes" and "no eyes" mean? In hipster's parlance: "To see or not to see, to be or not to be, to do or to die." As Meltzer explains, "No Eyes is a book about death, and Young sits in for a metaphor for the artist living and dying for and with his art."

David Meltzer
David Meltzer grew up in New York and wrote his first poem at eleven, on the subject of the subway. His writing career began in earnest when he moved to San Francisco at the age of nineteen and joined the Beats led by Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. He has published over fifty books of poetry and prose while simultaneously developing a reputation as an accomplished jazz guitarist and Cabalist scholar.