From the Canyon Outward Richly Lyrical Amos Lassen Neeli Cherkovski opens his soul and himself as he takes us on a poetic journey searching for love, reason and redemption. His poetry sings with lyricism and is rich and philosophical, almost elegiac at times as he gives us the beauty of the written word. He takes us by the hand and leads us to an exploration of the mystery of existence and you do not just read his poems, you live them. Cherkovski captures the spirit of love, of poets, of nature and myth, of people and of age. He looks back at his life and to people he has known and he juxtaposes words and narratives with coded messages that the reader can interpret in terms of his own experience. Reading these poems is almost like taking a journey with the poet and being granted hope as we travel looking for truth. Cherkovski is a child of the sixties who bridges the two centuries with timelessness. There is a four-way stop sign on the cover of the book and we see pedestrians crossing the street and cars turning and what a perfect photograph for what is inside the book. We are on the road and in crossing it we follow it until we reach the top of a hill where we see trees and openings between them are a sign that there is more on the road than we see with the naked eye just as there is more to Cherkovski's poetry than we get with a single reading. We feel the influence of both the beat poets and the poetry that comes from long ago. It is the past that influences the present and colors our world. We hear the voice of the poet and it awakens in us feelings that may be dormant and come forward with his poetry. The Thirteenth Man
Reviewed by Art Beck
I’ve known Neeli Cherkovski since the 1970s. Whenever we’ve met, it’s always been cordial, jovial, collegial, just plain fun. But despite having lived in the same city all these years, we only seem to run into each other every five years or so. We always vow to get together again soon, but... Re-reading Whitman’s Wild Children, Neeli Cherkovski’s critical memoirs of twelve beat-contemporary poets - first published in 1988 and reissued in 1998 to add Michael McClure and Jack Micheline – I realize why. Neeli and I have lived in the same city, but in parallel universes. In one sense, perhaps no one lives in the “same” San Francisco, the way the old Greeks opined that no one could step into the same river twice. But maybe that’s too philosophical. The reason I mention this is to point out that whatever perspective I have on Neeli’s poetry and poetics may be skewed by my own bend in that river. Through the seventies, eighties, nineties and much of the “aughts”, I was working in a bank and publishing poetry under a pen name. I socialized with poets, but didn’t lead “a poet’s life.” Neeli,
conversely, has been intimately involved in that milieu of poets and
post beat bohemia that’s sometimes characterized as “North Beach.” But
as much a state of mind as geography. A place in the mind where the
Los Angeles ghost of Charles Bukowski and Allen Ginsberg’s New York
shade still slip out from the stacks of City Lights for a smoke in Jack
Kerouac Alley. I. Sure, I read Bukowski, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, McClure, Micheline, etal. But Neeli knew them personally, and well. In the seventies, I’d park my car at the foot of Columbus past Washington Square, and walk the mile or so to the Financial District. More often than not, I’d cross paths - in the morning or evening - with a strange old loony looking guy in a dirty poncho. “He’s got his problems,” I’d think and keep my distance. Only years later, recognizing him from photos, did I realize this was the revered Bob Kaufman, that fey, poetic saint. These were our parallel worlds: I avoided what looked like an odd, troubled character. Neeli, around the same time, finding Bob Kaufman in need, took him in and gave him a room in his small apartment. And incidentally - in a seventeen page section of Whitman’s Wild Children,
wrote an essay that both captures the innate beauty of Kaufman’s
sparse, eccentric poems. And provides a portrait of a unique human being
cursed and blessed with an entangled almost angelic, innate
eccentricity. Little Rimbaud The first poet (other than Whitman) discussed in Whitman’s Wild Children is Charles Bukowski. Cherkovski met him when he was fifteen and Bukowski was in his forties. The relationship began on a sour note. Prompted by a mutual friend who told him about Neeli’s fascination with his work, Bukowski dropped by to visit the precocious boy - who panicked and feigned sleep. As Neeli describes it in Whitman’s Wild Children: He walked into my bedroom with my father who said “Wake up, Bukowski is here.” As I got out of bed, before me stood this large man with a ravaged face, broad shoulders and deep penetrating eyes. “Okay little Rimbaud. I heard you wanted to meet Bukowski, “ he said. Then he looked at the photos of some of the literary heroes on my wall and said, “Jesus, how come there are none of me?” We went into the living room. I handed Bukowski a handmade book of poems I had written about him. He took one look at it, reading the first few lines, and threw it into the fireplace where my father had made an inferno. I dove back after the book, managing to save it. Only the fringes were burned. Bukowski took it from me, saying, “I’ll read your little poem, but no one has ever written about me. I’m sorry, kid.” Fifteen minutes later, he was in the kitchen trying to make love to my mother. “Come on Clare”, he said. ”I’m more of a man than Sam. Let’s make it.” But from this
shaky beginning, a lifelong friendship grew. The “kid” and the old
reprobate would collaborate to produce the iconic ‘70s mimeo Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. And much later, Neeli would memorialize his compadre with the biography, Hank, later expanded in 1997 into Bukowski, a Life. (Steerforth). The Culture of Counterculture Whitman’s Wild Children provides more than just portraits of twelve poets. These are also critical essays in which Cherkovski engages each poet with the perspective of his own developing aesthetic. As such the book is valuable to two distinct sets of readers. It’s of obvious appeal to aficionados of the broad genre of beat/meat poetry. But Whitman’s Wild Children is written for a broader audience and it also provides the uninitiated with an enjoyable romp through wild territory as filtered through Cherkovski’s perceptive eyes. Since the mid 20th century, American - or at least California - poetry has been perceived as a series of rebellions. A countercultural undertaking. The beats, segueing into the anti-war movement. The “meat” poets and Bukowski-ites digging foxholes of alienation. Even the counter-current language poetry movement seemed defined more by what it opposes than what it produces. Its hermeticism as much a shield - and sometimes weapon - as a tool. And the new-formalists, for whatever reason, also seem obliged to portray themselves as “controversial” and oppressed by free-versers who’ve taken over the writing programs of the academy. With one noted new-formalist anthology even entitled Rebel Angels. One of the things that makes Whitman’s Wild Children unique in this atmosphere is that Cherkovski insists on relating his twelve counter culture poets, not so much to their times and struggles, but to the ancient art and tradition of poetry. He chooses Whitman – the pioneer not the revolutionary, as his primary touchstone. The persecutorial San Francisco vice squad seizing books and tearing down posters makes its historic appearance. But history in Wild Children doesn’t begin in the ‘60s. Cherkovski assesses and reads these poets in the context of Blake, Dante, Jeffers ... The Bob Kaufman legend all too often casts him as a persecuted genius, able to articulate only painfully under the establishment’s heel. Conversely, here’s an excerpt from Cherkovski’s sketch: Believing strongly in the reality his poems created for him, he lived comfortably with them, and that is why he became like a poem, why those who knew him were always treated to gems of language invented spontaneously or brought out of his memory bank of images. When we
first met, at a book party in 1975, he said ‘I knew your uncle, Herman
Cherry, in Woodstock... Herman Cherry painted Fruit Compote and gave it
to me at the Lincoln Monument. Herman Cherry is an airplane flying over
America, with Fruit Compote, a small painting in a gilded frame that
he gave me in Woodstock thirty years ago... I was a labor organizer...
Rimbaud is an orange blossom... Cherry is Fruit Compote painted for Bob
Kaufman, Poet.” He then began reciting Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock”, gesturing elegantly, moving his wiry body back and
forth, his fingers playing an elegant invisible instrument.
Three-quarters of the way through “Prufrock” he spliced in lines from
Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Ode to Walt Whitman” by Federico
Garcia Lorca as well as his own poetry. Through the years, I would see a
repeat of such performances in cafes, barrooms and my own apartment,
especially in those months Kaufman lived with me after the Dante Hotel
burned down. Poet #13 Neeli Cherkovski is present in all twelve essays. These are, after all, memoirs of people he personally knew. But he leaves the field pretty much to his subjects, interjecting himself sparingly. He does show glimpses: A self deprecating and funny description of a bad lsd trip that caused him to take shelter with Lawrence Ferlinghetti for a night. He has some on the edge adventures with Bukowski reminiscent of the recent movie The Hangover. He’s subtly alienated by Ginsberg’s careerism, and questions its effects. As well as experiencing the opposite side of that coin with Jack Micheline’s “downtrodden poet syndrome”. He expresses his kinship as a gay man to the gay poets in Children, beginning, of course, with Whitman. And reminisces about cruising with Harold Norse in the days before AIDS. But, it’s in the section on Michael McClure that he suddenly leaves his subject behind and reveals himself as a poet. He spends a lot of time on McClure whose poetry he first came across as a teenager working in his parents’ Los Angeles bookstore. McClure’s The New Book/A Book of Torture conjured thoughts in the young Neeli of William Blake illustrated by Jackson Pollock. Going on in the discussion, he relates McClure’s line from “FOR ARTAUD”, OH BEAUTY BEAUTY BEAUTY BEAUTY BEAUTY (BEAUTY IS HIDEOUS) , to a sentiment expressed by Bukowski and even touched on by Whitman. He’s enraptured by other McClure poems including “ODE TO THE ROSE”, again relating McClure’s lyric vision to Bukowski’s perversely cynical eye. And Cherkovski’s unlikely, but apt linkage does both of them credit. As he progresses quoting various Michael McClure lines and stanzas, I’m also struck by how much of what he’s getting from McClure: – the horror that shadows beauty, and lines like the poor cut flower/risen from the earth,/stem, bitter. nitrate, sweetness, water,/sunlight - struckby how so much of this aesthetic seems also shared by another favorite of Cherkovski’s – Rilke. Although Chekovski never mentions Rilke in what becomes a paean to McClure, he could as well be reading Rilke as McClure. Then, after a dozen or so pages on McClure, Cherkovski suddenly shifts to himself: I closed my copy of Simple Eyes and dreamed. What is a poem? I guess I’d ask, “Where is poetry?” I am a literary man, but quite literally, I wish I wasn’t. Trapped in the world of do’s and do not’s I’ve gone and done it – lived as a poet this past half century. Think of it. The deep pond is there, and I stuck my hand into it, felt the cool water and saw many pebbles on the bottom, and then I dove in and covered myself in the water. A poem is a field...something you can walk in taking your body, heart, mind, and soul... all the moveable parts, all the stationary ones. In that field you might find day and night, night or day, sunlight, moonlight, a convex mirror... He goes on in
this vein for a couple of pages and you soon realize what you’re
reading is both aesthetic criticism and a poem. An ars poetica that ends...A
poem is a terrain, mostly a field, but what about a canyon, a
hillside, a mountain of old stones, a shaft of moonlight, slices of
sun, darkness, light, sacrifice, crickets at the gate, odd doors,
silent windows? II. Cherkovski published two very different volumes of poetry in 1996. One, Elegy for Bob Kaufman
is a tribute to the Beat poet and is a sequence of poems in the Beat
tradition: accessible, expansive, a bittersweet but North
Beach-exuberant remembrance. Kaufman died ten years earlier and
there’s a 1987 magazine acknowledgment noted for one of the poems, so
I’m not sure how much of this volume was written when. There are
certain words that recur and run like elusive concepts through
Cherkovski’s poems. One is the word “sun”. And another is “animal”.
Cherkovski isn’t a religious poet, but when he throws out the concept
of “animal”, there’s the implication of an indwelling spirit. Not unlike
Yeats’ line about the soul “fastened to a dying animal.” ...find your It’s interesting that the Mc Clure section of Whitman’s Wild Children that ends with a long inner foray into Cherkovski’s own poetics was added in 1998. That aesthetic, I think, was only nascent in the pieces on the other “beat contemporary” poets published in 1988. In the mid-nineties, did something change? To me, it’s as if Cherkovski is waving a fond good bye to the Beats with the Kaufman Elegy. And with Animal,
entering the dangerous dark forest of his middle age. The forest of
Freud and Jung and Hansel and Gretel and children and ovens. Composers and Performers To help put Neeli and Animal into perspective, let me digress a bit here. But music insisted on evolving, and “serious” music became a performer’s rather than composer’s language. New music didn’t originate with composers but directly with performers and became in large part an improvised art- jazz in America and its counterparts in South America and elsewhere. The art song gave way to Billie Holiday. Sometimes, I also think there are “composer” poets and “performer” poets. The composers offer themselves to readers to perform in the reader’s own inner voice. The “performers” – perform brilliantly for us but rather than guide our stubby fingers on the keyboard, they slap our hands away. Chopin was essentially a composer, Liszt, a performer. No one could play Liszt, better than Liszt. A poetic comparison might be Yeats and Pound. When Yeats wrote: the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity, the line immediately belonged to every reader in each reader’s own individual voice. He’s capturing a common fear, a queasy inkling and showing us that it’s poetry. When Pound intones: I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman, the reader has little participation in a line that would never occur to most, if any, readers. The issue belongs only to Pound and the reader is there to applaud the poet being a great poet. With the implication that very few of us are large enough to encounter these problems of the great. And, in Pound what seems an instinct to interject archaic language – pull down thy vanity, pull down - also seems akin to an alpha wolf growling to warn off the intruding reader. This is his language, his poem, not ours. It’s only in his translations, that Pound seems to subordinate his voice to a larger human chorus. We read the “composer poets” in our own voices, the “performers” only in theirs. They resist being “covered” every bit as much as Charlie Parker, Coltrane or Monk. Howl works,
not because it taps what’s already in us, but because it gives vatic
words to something akin to that “rough beast” of Yeats, slouching
towards birth. Cherkovski the howling Psalmist. At the heart of Cherkovski’s Animal is a thirty-some page dirge for his mother written two or three years after her death, entitled “Job Suffering”. As it progresses, it becomes a visceral howl of roving pain. But unlike Gingsberg’s Howl which erupts from social pain, Neeli’s howl is metaphysical. Job, tell me (from your stone lips and high white cliffs) “Job Suffering” is a dense poem, not always easily accessible. Challenging to read from beginning to end - and perhaps best enjoyed intermittently, in segments whether in or out of sequence. Its stanzas like psalms, but written by Job in Job's hurt voice. A questioning, imprecise music. Human, not prophetic. And this, for me, is what places Cherkovski among the “composer poets”. Defines him as a Mensch rather than one of the Übermensch “performers”. The poem wanders, but returns again and again to images of Cherkovki’s mother, her last days and death. Her death echoes backwards through Cherkovski’s childhood, the family bookstore: we’ve had four sales this morning But musing on the “buried treasure” in the bookstore, the classics, Apuleius, the Illiad, her death interjects itself again: Marsyas at Fifty Despite its
rich lyricism, “Job Suffering” is definitely not what might be called
an “Apollonian” poem. It wanders through personal and human history,
philosophic, and poetic ancestors - all from the perspective of a
wound. For all this erudition it’s a wound that refuses – or is incapable of - healing. A disorderly wound, a great howl echoing through a concept of history that offers no answers. I think there are certain ages and personal life passages, different yet similar for everyone, where everything is called into question. Where death becomes personal and looming even if it’s perceived as off in the future. Where life is suddenly infused with a certain dread. Cherkovski’s “Job Suffering”, written when he was fifty, seems to mark that kind of passage. In these kind of inner circumstances, poetic discipline is useless. The poet’s job is simply to listen and echo. Job is a good model, as opposed to, say, Rilke’s Orpheus. Another is that Job-cousin figure, Marsyas. The intelligent mythical, half-animal satyr who retrieved a set of pan-pipes discarded by a goddess and reveled in his sudden, great unexpected talent. But his exuberant joy offended the divine Apollo, who tricked him into a rigged musical contest - with the winner awarded the prize of doing whatever he wanted with the loser. The god nailed Marsyas to a tree and flayed him alive. In Zbigniew Herbert’s famous poem, "Apollo and Marsyas" “the real duel of Apollo and Marsyas” takes place after Marsyas is skinned. It’s a duel, as characterized by Herbert, between “absolute ear versus immense range.” Why relate
Marsyas to Job? The essential "problem of evil" that the Book of Job
wrestles with, is after all, a problem of monotheism. But even in the
classical world, there are divinities offended by naive human
exultation, and the orderly music of the spheres can torture mortal
ears. Marsyas, like Job is the victim of his own innocent happiness.
And, in Herbert's poem, his "real" song begins with loss and disaster
In the Allisa Valles translation: bald mountains of liver
Similarly it’s the immense human range of Cherkovski’s howl in “Job Suffering” that keeps a reader reading. ... ... Still. if the
impetus for “Job Suffering” seems to come from a deep psychic wound,
the poem itself feels like an act of health. An astringent cleansing of
that wound so that it can properly heal - as best it can. Maybe never
totally - scarred, but without infection. At its end: trust in the ax sound of the woodpecker
The Rest of Animal Animal,
like a lot of things, is divided in three parts. The first consists of
five medium to short length poems. Most notably, I think, the poem
"Jew", a longish piece that travels back through Cherkovski's
ancestors, beginning with his great grandmother. It's a subject that
could easily slip into the sentimental, but Cherkovski steers clear of
that and "Jew" provides a sort of prelude to "Job Suffering": The second section consists of "Job Suffering", in itself a chapbook length poem. In the third section, things lighten up. The poems have a chattier tone. In "Race", Cherkovski introduces himself: I'm Polish Russian Jewish American and after a couple of pages expounding the uselessness of racial characterization ends: Animal ends
with a quiet, accessible poem entitled "My Fifty Years", dedicated to
Jack Foley, one of two friends who helped Cherkovski in choosing the
poems to be included. (The other is Ivan Arguelles.) "My Fifty Years"
starts out addressed to Foley: But somewhere,
around a third of the way through, in an almost sonnet-like turn, he
begins to talk directly to his dead mother. With a simple, quiet
intimacy that's rarely the case between living parents and children.
But in this case, there's the sense that Cherkovski has passed through
his valley of mourning and can chat easily with the dead in the voice
of his own mortality: I cut the crap
This is
Cherkovski's most recent volume, published in late 2009. Neeli is 64,
now and the tone of these poems is more subdued. Not particularly at
peace or particularly hopeful, but wise enough to know that certain
struggles with the nature of things aren't worth the grief. In a poem
entitled "The Rage": In another, "Meditation Nearing Sixty", he begins: And as in the poems in Animal, Cherkovski's aesthetic impulse is to get beyond himself, to speak for not to the reader: ...a new born child clutching It's interesting to notice how From the Canyon Outward revisits the poets in Whitman's Wild Children. Several poems are set in Ferlinghetti's borrowed cabin in Bixby Canyon near Big Sur. There's a long conversation with Bukowski, centered around Cherkovski's talk at the dedication of the Bukowski archives at the Huntington Library that leaves Neeli with/without his old pal, and alive and alone. There's another poem "To an Old Friend", in which the dead dedicatee is nameless, but could fit easily into the Wild Children friendships era. And Cherkovski's
easy amiability extends to the, then, still alive Harold Norse in
"Visiting the Elder". Norse, forgetful, living in a home for the aged, lies
in bed but springs up, /an old acrobat, five foot four inches tall...
he gets up and beams the beam and those big eyes of wonder...I try to
interest him/ in a stroll down the hallway/ he diverts my attention/
the outside world is strange and foreboding. / An old man with a walker
shuffles past/"that son of a bitch keeps going/ to the end of the
hall,/ doesn't he realize there is nothing there?" Nature If Animal seems to circle a wound, the poems in From the Canyon circle an impassive, quizzical sun. Many of the poems are what Cherkovski refers to as "nature poems." A nature that's both deadly and nurturing. In a short piece, "The Length", it is the "cruel" of the/ ocean, not what you see, the cruel/ solitude, the inevitable/ loss... And mixed up
with "nature" are the love poems. One set in 1967, to a school days
lover lost to time. But most to his long time partner. A good many of
these are opaque and indirect. As much about "nature" as "love". Only
in the third stanza of "In the Northern Cascades", does the reader
realize Cherkovski is talking to a companion: just to know to believe in wisdom
This sort of pantheism of "love" is addressed head on in " Being in Love" in lines like:
Growth and Heartbreak It's a truism that everyone's a poet at twenty. The trick is to keep at it as time separates us from our easy songs. In this aspect, it's impossible not to admire not only Neeli Cherkovski of the Bukowski and North Beach days, but also the mature poet who's managed to keep growing and gone on to places so many of his old pals and models haven't. Maybe he also has among his models, his uncle, the painter Herman Cherry who died in 1992 at 83. A man just 9 years older than Neeli's avuncular mentor, Bukowski. The same Herman Cherry Bob Kaufman lauded. There's a short poem, "He Pushes Toward Abstraction" in From the Canyon that could well be about that old uncle at his end. Its ending goes a long way toward framing Cherkovski's aesthetic. ...his cranium filled with rage Isn't it in that struggle to " break his own heart", that a poet whispers his humanity? I am continually being reborn as a poet. |