On David Melnick — Benjamin Friedlander, Jo Aurelio Giardini, J. Gordon Faylor: February 15, 2024

The Poetry Center and Small Press Traffic co-present an evening devoted to the life and work of David Melnick, to help mark the publication of Nice: Collected Poems of David Melnick (Nightboat Books, 2023), edited by Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich, and Ron Silliman. Noah Ross, of Small Press Traffic, provides the introductions for presentations by three guests: Benjamin Friedlander, Jo Aurelio Giardini, and J. Gordon Faylor. The program takes place at Et al., bookstore and gallery on Mission Street in San Francisco. 

Publisher
BECA (Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts)
Location
Et al., San Francisco
Date
2024-02-15
Event Run Time
01:09:44
Contributors
Noah Ross
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Benjamin Friedlander (00:14:36)

Benjamin Friedlander opens the night, providing some biographical information and personal anecdotes about the poet David Melnick. He discusses Melnick's humility, his tendency to destroy his work, his shift from mathematics to literature while at the University of Chicago, the influence of Louis Zukofsky's Bottom: On Shakespeare, his membership in G.A.W.K (Gay Artists and Writers Kollective), his participation in Robert Duncan's Homer reading group (the Homersexuals), and the love of his life David Doyle, among other things. 

Jo Aurelio Giardini (00:19:19)

Jo Aurelio Giardini begins by reading passages from David Melnick's Men in Aida, as a means of getting his "words moving through the room." Their talk focuses on the contexts for Melnick's work, framing its slipperiness with regards to narrative as a queer practice, and thinking through the ways Homer's Illiad and Melnick's Men in Aïda deal with loss and the body. 

J. Gordon Faylor (00:27:03)

J. Gordon Faylor reads a series of works, illustrated with projected text and images, that are influenced by David Melnick, focusing specifically on AI generated poems that resemble (or attempt to resemble) the 'private language' of Melnick's PCOET. 

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