The Brooklyn Rail

Neeli was so much more than a latter-day Beat and he lived and wrote long enough to outdistance these poetic origins, even as he used his undeniable Beat cache to cultivate a reputation in Europe and beyond. If you knew Neeli, you were besieged with reference to “my Albanian translator,” “my Greek translator,” “my Turkish translator,” and so on. “There’s a guy in Kosovo translating me,” he’d say. “You need to send him forty pages of your work!” This gets at the heart of Neeli, in a way; occasionally exasperating, needy, desperate to be read and loved, he was no less desperate for the poets he loved to be read and loved, and he loved a lot of poets. And by this I mean not his pantheon or his peers, but generations of younger poets, whom he read with a discerning eye. Perpetually curious and voracious as a reader, he kept up with new poets to his dying day. There are poets who want to lord what they have over you and poets who want to share what they have with everyone they esteem, and Neeli was firmly in the latter camp. I don’t know how he kept up with so many poets, and I’m almost thirty years younger. It takes a generosity and largeness of spirit few possess, and poets like Neeli are valuable for the continuity they impart to the vast and ever changing ocean that is poetry.
 
Coming of age in the shadow of giants like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Bukowski, Neeli had needed time to overcome their influence. But he certainly came into his own and his reputation eventually grew commensurate with his powers and gifts as a poet. He was the real deal, a poet obsessed with his chosen art, and they don’t make poets like him anymore. One of the great aspects of his later life was that he was finally taken on by a publisher who truly understood the value of the man and his work, issuing a series of volumes with Danny Rosen’s Lithic Press, which in May 2024 issued a four-hundred-page Selected Poems: 1959–2022, edited by the redoubtable Kyle Harvey and introduced by Charles Bernstein. It’s a culmination of his life’s work. This will be followed by a new volume of poem portraits to be published next year by City Lights, fulfillment of a longtime desire of his. If he didn’t live to see it, he at least lived to write it and know that it was scheduled for publication.

As I wrote this, a friend sent me a poem Neeli had emailed a few years ago called “No Going Home;” I’m not sure where or whether it was published, but it seems like the right note to end on. Exacting and unsentimental, the poet carves his own epitaph:

I have no son or daughter
to mourn my final moments
but I will go anyway
and not go home
on the way
 
no one will go with me
to the darkness
 
I will not go home