The Brooklyn Rail

I came to Neeli Cherkovski late and that’s made all the difference. I don’t know whether it was he or I took the road less travelled: it turns out we took it together. Neeli is a poet of San Francisco in the way I am a poet in New York, but we both inhabit the same city of poetry: we are building it together and it has taken a lifetime. I say that Neeli and I are fellow travelers not to emphasize a close kinship but rather in the sense of two people from different places whose work has crisscrossed more often than a leopard’s spots or the return of the repressed. Eventually is a long time in every place but poetry; that’s what poetry’s made of.

Cherkovski’s poems are filled with losers and dreamers drinking cheap beer in all night cafes, reeling from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or from the countries or families they’ve had to leave. The forgotten ones, sure, but in these poems, also, the ones who’ve forgotten themselves. The voices of grandmothers, the unemployed, poets, grifters bubble through his poems: flashes of disappointment and elation toggling for attention in a poetics that learns from ADHD, which has been hard-wired into Cherkovski’s brain since adolescence. These are poems of accelerated process, grafting together a series of minute perceptions as verbal syncretisms. The poems are like a series of drawings of the human parade: not describing from outside but from within the crowd, as one of the unwashed, recognizing secular saints as vernacular geniuses.

In Neeli Cherkovski’s poetry, beat rhetoric melts into wild riffs then returns to metaphor; bunts, dodges, bows head in respect to disrespect: onward, impulse as image, becomes phrases, becomes sublime moment of stutter, stagger, implosion; till waves of loss get tossed in a walk down a lazy street, as memory of a friend, the darkening night of the soiled –– soaring –– souring –– soul, the benediction of artfulness and refusal of refusal.