Saturday, August 7
The Nevada County Poetry Series presents
RENT PARTY!
Neeli Cherkovski & David Meltzer
7:30PM, $5 general,
seniors and students
$1 for those under 18
Refreshments and open-mic included
The Nevada County Poetry Series is having a Rent Party featuring the poets Neeli Cherkovski and David Meltzer – two of the West Coast’s literary icons. Bill Gainer says, "Yes, it is that time of year again – for us to start fundraising. This year the need is even more urgent. With all the funding cuts from the state and granting agencies continuing and the wider base of needs for environmental, social and community support organizations, the support of the arts and literary community has become more fragile. By repeating your generosity of the past, you can help insure the Nevada County Poetry Series' success in the future. Donate what you can, we'll take it! If it can be spent, sold, or pawned – we can use it! As long as we don't have to feed it – we'll take it. Cash is always welcome!" Of the readers, Gainer says, "When other poets talk about today’s literary king-pins Cherkovski and Meltzer are always on the short list. These guys are the big guns."
Neeli Cherkovski is a longtime contributor to the West Coast literary scene. Emerging from the Los Angeles underground of the Sixties, Cherkovski is an applauded poet, critic and literary biographer – a North Beach veteran still living in San Francisco. Of his new book of poetry, From the Canyon Outward, Sarah Menefee says, "Neeli Cherkovski has mastered the lyricism of the clear-seeing heart. In these poems, he sets down in the middle of the mystery of existence and experience." Among his many books of poems are the award winning Leaning Against Time, and Animal. He is also famed as Bukowski’s biographer, Bukowski: A Life. In the late 1960s he and Bukowski co-edited the L.A. poetry journal, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. Cherkovski authored Ferlinghetti: A Biography, and his book of critical essays, Whitman's Wild Children, has become an underground classic.
David Meltzer is one of the greats of the Beat Generation; he migrated across country from New York City to L.A. with his father as a teenager in 1954, became involved in the jazz and art scenes, moved to San Francisco in 1957 and continued on as an 'angel-headed hipster' ever after. A poet, Kabbalist and musician, he's published many books of poems including The Name: Selected Poetry 1973-1983, No Eyes: Lester Young, Beat Thing, and his newest, David's Copy, The Selected Poems of David Meltzer. Diane di Prima says, "David Meltzer is a hidden adept, one of the secret treasures on our planet. Great poet, musician, comic: mystic unsurpassed, performer with few peers. A kind of bop perfection pervades his work."
Tickets can be purchased at the door for $5 general, seniors and students, and $1 for those under 18 – bring whatever spare change you have to throw into the pot... Refreshments and open-mic included. The show will be in the Main Theater at the Center for the Arts, 314 W. Main St., Grass Valley, CA. For more information call (530) 432-8196 or (530) 274-8384.
Grass Valley, California 95945