David Melnick

David Melnick (1938–2022 ) was a gay avant-garde American poet. He was born in Illinois and grew up in Los Angeles, California. 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 Catullus and PCOET has been discussed alongside Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov's zaum poetics.