No Eyes: Lester Young [Hardcover]

David Meltzer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2000

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."

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

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-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Black Sparrow Books; First edition. edition (January 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1574231308
• ISBN-13: 978-1574231304
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,906,335 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Prez in a Swinging Poetic Voice, December 1, 2000

By 

[e-mail] (Cedar Park, Texas USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Eyes: Lester Young (Hardcover)

David Meltzer's long meditative poem on jazz giant Lester "Prez" Young is a moving (both swinging and poignant) tribute to this unique tenor sax stylist. Based on the last year of Young's life, which he spent mostly in a hotel room in New York City, and on a photograph of the great jazzman printed in the New York Times that shows him sitting on his bed cradling his horn, Meltzer's poem reproduces Prez's jivy speech patterns and diction as a way of exploring the jazz master's music, his attitudes toward his audience, his imitators, his detractors, and his experience with racism in the military that has been blamed for his near mental breakdown and his increasingly reclusive nature. Meltzer also incorporates popular song titles and phrases into his poetic lines in order to delve into the jazzman's psyche, utilizing especially the song "All of Me" as a way of suggesting, for example, that when the police found his lifeless body in his hotel room they confiscated his few possessions but did not take "all" of him because his music lives on. Beautifully designed and printed, with photos of Young and musical motifs at the beginning of Meltzer's beat, bop-like meditations, this is a striking edition and the long poem is fully worthy of Black Sparrow's fine production. Meltzer's poem is one of the most convincing literary treatments of jazz ever conceived and created.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Big Eyes, September 25, 2002

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Eyes: Lester Young (Paperback)

I kind of trashed Meltzer's "Reading Jazz," so let me make it up here with a big thumbs up for a really fun collection. The poems in No Eyes are accessible and lyrical with a great feel for the music--they spread down the page like tasty sax tootles in a classic Young solo. I especially like how Meltzer balances the beauty of Lester's playing against the tragedy of his life. Snippets of song lyrics, conversation and Young's private slang weave through the poems to give a clever snapshot of the man behind the sax. And Meltzer's love for the music is clear from the downbeat. Big eyes for this one.