David Meltzer

No Eyes: Lester Young David Meltzer

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."