The Brooklyn Rail

Circa 2018, after a reading by Jason Morris at Wolfman Books in downtown Oakland, the audience migrates across the street to a crowded dive bar full of buzzing hipsters. Entering tentatively, Neeli says, “I’m more of a Burger King guy.”

I became aware of Neeli when I first arrived in San Francisco in 1971 and found poems by Neeli Cherry in Beatitude Magazine in the basement of City Lights. Had I met him then, we might have hit it off, both writing such wild, defiantly unconventional verse. But Neeli didn’t arrive until 1977, and by then we revolved in different circles. We didn’t meet until Aaron Simon introduced us at the Green Arcade bookstore in 2015. Neeli offered enthusiastic praise for my new book Marine Layer, which he said he was planning to review for Michael Rothenberg’s Big Bridge webzine.

The review never happened, but something else did; Neeli and I got to know each other, first through each other’s work, then via email, phone, and, eventually, in person. Neeli invited me to a memorable lunch in his kitchen on Bernal Heights, where he cooked, poured wine, made coffee, held forth, and put me at my ease. Later, we read together with Alan Bernheimer at Bird & Beckett bookstore, preceded by a home-cooked dinner at Neeli’s house with his partner of thirty-seven years, Jesse Cabrera, a psychiatrist, now retired, and a prolific painter. The house was festooned with books and art, including Jesse’s paintings.

Neeli’s taste in poetry was eclectic. Beyond the North Beach bohemians to whom he paid homage in Whitman’s Wild Children, he was a constant reader of nineteenth-century transcendentalists Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson, and American modernists Pound, Eliot, Stein, H.D., Williams, and Stevens, as well as world literature, especially from Spain, Greece, and Japan. He told me he kept these books above his writing desk for quick reference whenever he got stuck for the next line. Toward the end of his life, as his eyesight failed, he composed his poems aloud using dictation software to format the work into lines and stanzas.

When Neeli died, I kept company with him through his Selected Poems:1959–2022, edited by Kyle Harvey and just out from Lithic Press. Neeli was eager to see this book in print, and it is tragic that it arrived from the printer just days before he passed away. From early on, Neeli developed his own brand of spontaneous prosody whereby elements from disparate semantic fields are thrown together willy-nilly through the rhythmic force of human speech. His deep immersion in the classics may account for the high rhetoric in his poetry, which is mixed with ample shots of low-down street talk and comedic high jinks. Throughout there is an elegiac feel as the poet honors the impermanence of life forms, including his own.

the mind is what revels
in Autumn windows, you crack
the solemn walls open and find
uninterrupted time, perception
flows into a cupped hand,
friends disappear, ideas
go underground, emotions
run for cover, every death
rubs against the brain, you
hear tongues tremble and
walls fall into dust

COIT TOWER (Elegy for Bob Kaufman, 1996)

Cherkovski’s crystalline, epigrammatic sentences are often populated by mythical, heroic figures. In his brilliant prose poem Naming the Nameless (2004) we meet Quixote, God, Job, Socrates, Apollo, Hamlet, Shakespeare, Lorca, Odysseus, Bach, Raphael, Goya, and “our mother who lives in the underworld.” Along the way we are treated to a philosophical investigation of astonishing imponderables.

You may paint the truth, but will it ever dry?

What is this poem? It seems to gather strength on its own accord, as if I, as the poet, did not need to be present for the creation.

Socrates, unable to name the nameless, gave us cause to question the meaning of things to which we already have names.

If you take the gods out of the equation, where do they go?

Nobody knows the question, yet it lingers.

In a late poem, Neeli discards the mask of the bard and steps out front to deliver his own eulogy.