The Brooklyn Rail

“There is a reality beyond the ordinary, a poetic, as opposed to a prosaic, view of the world, an unpremeditated outlook relying on spontaneous revelation of world and word.”

— Neeli Cherkovski, Autobiography, Contemporary Authors Series no. 42 Gale Research Inc, 1996

Two strange things happened when Neeli Cherkovski died. First, the phone stopped ringing. This is a joke, for he was famous for calling all his friends every day, usually several times a day. The second strange thing was… I realized he was a great poet.

It occurred to me that for as long as I’d known Neeli (forty-seven years), he consistently got in the way of his own work. His personality was so present and intense, so insatiable and needy, you were always backed up against a psychic wall, on your guard. If you said you liked a poem he read you three more, or emailed half a dozen. But he had a great heart and was more fun than almost anyone I’ve ever known. He loved to let his imagination run free, spinning hilarious surrealist fantasies of unrequited ambition, guilt, desire, eros, and god knows what else. Imagine a Borscht Belt comedian whose routine also included quotes from T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and uncanny imitations of all the Beat poets. We laughed constantly.

But back to the poetry. I suppose I took it for granted, because it was always there. Poetry was his state, and he was never out of it. In his later years he came to trust himself fully and immersed himself in the flow of words and images that he entered at will, half trance-like. This was not a literary device, rather a true dialogue with the forces that give rise to poetry—whatever those may be. In his Introduction to Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki categorized Satori as: irrationality, intuitive insight, authoritativeness, affirmation, exhilaration, and momentariness. I always thought this description perfectly summarized Neeli’s work.

When I write a poem it’s like I’m building a temple, or a pagoda, and I’m putting things inside it. The organizing principle for a poem might be just one word, which then sparks another word. I’m not a great listener on the outside, but I do listen to myself. All I know is that it all makes sense to me, because it’s telling me that it all makes sense. It’s all internal, like you’re listening to a voice. It’s a constant dialogue with yourself.

It’s only been in the past twenty years or so that we’ve really come to understand the nature of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This was something Neeli struggled with all his life, and he speaks poignantly about it in Kyle Harvey’s wonderful 2020 documentary film, It’s Nice To Be With You Always: A Film About Neeli Cherkovski. He was scattered, everywhere at once—unfocused, but then suddenly laser-focused. He learned to integrate this condition into his method and work. Then lo and behold, in our great Age of Distraction, he emerged propitiously one of the truest poets of his time.

Ironically, for someone so closely associated with the Beats, when thoughtful literary appreciation finally arrived it did so from an entirely unexpected quarter: the Language poets. It was Charles Bernstein, Bernadette Mayer, Ron Silliman, and Clark Coolidge, among others, who saw the true value of his work and promoted it. This made perfect sense. The interiority, the radical disengagement of language from ostensible meaning, the composition of the poem being one with its subject—these are the hallmarks of his work. “From time to time I carried on a dialogue between myself and an imaginary Ferlinghetti who cautioned me to keep the populist voice,” Cherkovski wrote. “Bukowski played in the same courtyard of the narrative poem, but I gradually developed an aesthetic that led me elsewhere. What I’ve come to realize is that each poem, at the moment of conception, finds its own form, intuitively.”

I recall a wonderful exchange during a Q&A after his reading at the Walt Whitman birthplace in Huntington Station, Long Island:

Q: What is your discipline?

A: Discipline?

Q: I mean your work.

A: Work?? [Laughter] I’m compelled to do it.

The first poem he fell in love with was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”:

What the poem taught me was the importance of listening to the rhythms of my own body, of my own intellect, and to connect them with my work. There’s a vital resonance between Coleridge’s wild, swinging music and the words I heard in the synagogue as the rabbi chanted from Hebrew Scripture.

For Neeli, poetry meant absolute freedom—in the moment of creation: “There was no alternative to poetry. Nobody stood over me when I wrote. The words were my own.”

I met Neeli in the fall of 1977, at the Caffe Trieste in San Francisco. He showed up every day, a bounding rumpled bohemian with a string of hippie beads and a black binder full of recent poems. We immediately hit it off. I was twenty, he was thirty-two. Neeli always loved being around young people, he thrived on that energy, and it brought out the teacher in him. He loved to quote Bob Dylan’s song “Forever Young” (for Neeli, Dylan was scripture). He always said it was important for a poet to understand the wisdom of the youth. “Any intelligent youth will understand the wisdom of an older person, but how many old people understand the wisdom of youth?”

Neeli’s apartment at 28 Harwood Alley had a spare room for rent. Bob Kaufman was staying there after a hotel fire, but Neeli was gently pushing him out—Bob’s domestic comportment too chaotic even for Neeli. The rent was 85 dollars a month, so I jumped at the chance. Over the years, I’ve heard people attribute the creative magic of North Beach to any number of things, including the particular roast of coffee beans in the Italian cafés. In fact, it had everything to do with cheap rents. We were all living on the margins of society, but a fairly wealthy society. One could always find some way to grab a piece of the action. We were living off the fat of the land, so to speak.

Neeli was warm and welcoming, and every poet in North Beach (or passing through) knew they could stop by for coffee, a drink, or a meal… at any hour of the day or night. Mostly I remember the sound of Neeli’s typewriter, when he would retreat to his bedroom (at any given hour) to write up the day in a poem. One of the first things I noticed being around the Beat poets was, as much as they enjoyed having fun, they were extremely serious about their work.

Every now and then if we were bored with North Beach we’d walk for miles over the hills and across the city to explore a new neighborhood. Neeli seemed to know everyone everywhere. When we went to the Zen Center he knew Philip Whalen. When we went to the Mission he knew Harold Norse. When we went to the Castro he knew Diane di Prima. When we went to Bolinas he knew Joanne Kyger and Richard Brautigan. In addition to being a fine poet Neeli was also a lively memoirist. He celebrated poetry, but he also celebrated poets. I think that’s important.

Neeli was my oldest friend, and we spoke almost daily on the telephone for forty-seven years. He told me I was the only friend with whom he’d never had a falling out. The last time I saw him was two weeks before he died. We spent an afternoon in a new Bob Kaufman-themed wine bar in North Beach called Golden Sardine. (And before people scream exploitation, I can assure you, Bob would’ve loved it—if he didn’t get 86’d.) We spoke about all the wonderful people we’ve known and great times we’d shared, and he had nothing but gratitude. His only wish was to live to see his City Lights book published in 2025, but he knew that was not likely. “My days are numbered, and I am not kidding.”

The last report I got of him was a week later: Lisa Brinker described seeing him ascending a big hill in Bernal Heights, walking his dog with one hand, reading a book with the other.