David Melnick (1938–2022) was a gay avant-garde American poet.Silliman, Ronald. In the American Tree. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986. 602. He was born in Illinois and grew up in Los Angeles, California. He attended the University of Chicago and University of California, Berkeley.
Book One of Melnick's homophonic translation of Homer's Iliad, titled Men in Aïda, was published in 1983 by Lyn Hejinian's Tuumba Press. The farcical bathhouse scenario presented in Melnick's translation suggests underlying homoeroticism in the original text.Perelman, Bob. The marginalization of poetry: language writing and literary history (book). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 24. . . Retrieved 24 December 2009. Melnick's work has been included in Ron Silliman's 1986 anthology of Language poetry In the American Tree. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith wrote about Melnick's Men in Aïda in relation to conceptual poetics in 2010's Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Often grouped with Language poetry, Melnick's Men in Aïda has been compared to Celia and Louis Zukofsky's CatullusDworkin, Craig Douglas, and Kenneth Goldsmith. Against Expression: an Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011. 418. and PCOET has been discussed alongside Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov's zaum poetics.Lutzkanova-Vassileva, Albena. The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry: Reference, Trauma, and History. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 175-181.
Bibliography
Eclogs, Ithaca House, 1972 "The ‘Ought’ of Seeing: Zukofsky's Bottom" in Maps. John Taggart, ed. 1973.Mark Scroggins. "David Melnick: PCOET" Culture Industry. 20 April, 2005. PCOET, San Francisco: G.A.W.K., 1975 Men in Aïda, Book One, Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1983 A Pin's Fee, 1988 Men in Aïda, The Hague & Tirana: Uitgeverij. 2015. . This edition collects three books of Men in Aïda in a single volume.
References
External links text of Eclogs text of Men in Aida, Book One text of Men in Aida, Book Two text of A Pin's Fee