The Brooklyn Rail

I came to know Neeli first through correspondence. He was that type of poet. A corresponder. A co-responder. His spirits could be lifted considerably by a phone call, or he’d later let me know that a conversation we’d had sent him back into the writing room. Neeli really had a Whitmanian democratic embrace, outsized for our era.

On a phone call with Neeli in December 2023, I brought up a renewed interest in William Carlos Williams’s Imaginations.

I think he loved that WCW couldn’t stop talking about his lovers and compañeros in his letters and writing, ’cause Neeli couldn’t either. He told me Kora in Hell was a bible for him when he first read it in high school—a pagan document that went all over the psychic map in open-hearted language. That’s really what I think of when I think of Neeli. His heart was always out in front of his speaking.

In a sense, he took WCW’s knack for bringing sociality into letters and carried it into the age of email. A few days ago, I counted up the number of emails he’d sent just in the last year and a half. It came to around one hundred and sixty. And these are novel email threads he’d started, often with a new poem just written attached to each one. For anyone cc’ed, they came fast with a lot of typos. Neeli liked to dictate his poetry late in his life, and he’d send it out widely and nimbly, dictation errors and all. The auto-corrects sur-realized the language, I think he liked that.

Here’s one of the last emails he sent to me. It embodies the sense of homecoming I know he felt when City Lights agreed to put out one of his latest and final books:

Subject: Good news

City Lights books will be publishing my ever seeing on my book in 2025 to coincide with my 80th birthday. I am overwhelmed with his dream come true as the old saying I.
Sent from my iPhone

(Attached is a picture of Neeli in his home library on October 24, 2022, holding a copy of Golden Sardine, signed by friend Bob Kaufman.)