A longish poem addressing his father, The Eyes of Blood, and then the poems experimenting with Kabbala are what caught me either in my return to Bloomington or right after, in the Pacific Northwest. Neither example fit the typical 20- to -28-line poems that filled the literary magazines, and each one worked a different vein – one essentially lyrical, the other, bullets.
At the time, I was reading and enjoying a wide range of the San Francisco poetry outpouring – I've long felt more at home there than I did with the New Yorkers of the era. Smeltzer's on my list over some other better-known colleagues, probably because of a feeling of connectedness.
Despite acquiring a handful of his chapbooks, I wasn't aware of his role in the San Francisco Beat scene, including jazz performances, but that detail has me wanting to go back to revisit his work, once we have room here for what's currently in storage at the other end of Maine.
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