The Brooklyn Rail

In memory of Neeli Cherkovski, July 1st, 1945–March 19th, 2024

Though Neeli and I spoke on the phone regularly, the last time we spent together in person was December of 2022 while working on his Selected Poems: 1959–2022. When Neeli passed, I revisited the notebook I’d kept during that week. Among the editorial notes, lines and poems, I read one of my thoughts on the occasion:

The waters of the last great American river flow around the legs of his chair, his feet grounded in the ancient mud of origin. The shape of time gathers at his mouth, leaving history where it might belong. Li Po stumbles wine drunk among the cattails of his mind, howling at the moon. A sharpened reed, split point dipped in lampblack, Homer sits at his desk beseeching the muse.

This memory will always remain vivid: Neeli—Homer in this scene—sitting at his desk, writing on his computer, in the dark, early hours of the morning. During the many trips I made to stay with Neeli while filming the documentary, It’s Nice To Be With You Always, I catalogued hours upon hours of this footage. This is how his day began, how it carried on throughout, and how his day would come to close. Neeli writing on the computer at his desk, in a notebook at his dining room table, at his small kitchen table and on the back porch. Neeli writing, talk to text, on his phone while on the couch, in the living room chair, or while riding in the car. More than any poet I’ve known, Neeli gave himself over completely to the work.

Despite his self-sacrificial initiation into this lifelong poetic, his poetry was far too often overshadowed by his relationships to other literary figures: Bukowski, Ferlinghetti, Corso, Ginsberg, and so on. I’ve always felt that this is a great disservice, as his work deserves to be read more widely and to stand alongside the great works of American poetry.

In my own attempt to read and archive as much of his work as I can, I’ve continuously found Neeli to be a wonderfully wholehearted literary citizen. He generously wrote and spoke of other people’s work in ways that he deserved to have written about his own poems. One such sentiment he shared with me was the idea that a contemporary poet friend, one of many he championed, was himself a beautiful living poem.

As I sit here struggling over what I might possibly write, succinctly, about Neeli, a poet, and friend, whom I loved and admired—a poet who described his own mythology as no less than eight pages longer than a Hebrew Bible—a couple of lines by Li Po come to mind:

“No one will understand now. Those who could hear the song this deeply vanished long ago.”

Neeli Cherkovski was a great poet of the world and he, himself, was a beautiful living poem.