Neeli Cherkovski, poet who chronicled the Beat Generation, dies at 78
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Sunday, November 24, 2024


Neeli Cherkovski, poet who chronicled the Beat Generation, dies at 78
A photo by Ria Burman of the poet Neeli Cherkovski during a reading at the Beat Museum in San Francisco in 2022. The prolific poet and denizen of beatnik cafes who chronicled the literary ethos of bohemian culture in biographies of Beat Generation writers, including his friends Charles Bukowski and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, died on March 19, 2024, in San Francisco. He was 78. (Ria Burman via The New York Times)

by Michael S. Rosenwald



NEW YORK, NY.- Neeli Cherkovski, a prolific poet and denizen of beatnik cafes who chronicled the literary ethos of bohemian culture in biographies of Beat Generation writers, including his friends Charles Bukowski and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, died on March 19 in San Francisco. He was 78.

The cause of his death, in a hospital, was a heart attack, his partner, Jesus Guinto Cabrera, said.

Cherkovski arrived on the literary scene in 1969, when he and Bukowski started Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns, a magazine printed on a mimeograph machine that lasted three issues, had one subscriber, and rejected poems with terse notes that began, “These won’t do.”

Typically dressed in a rumpled suit coat over an untucked shirt, with a string of amber beads hanging around his neck, Cherkovski was a fixture at Caffe Trieste and, around the corner, the City Lights bookstore, in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco.

“You could not mistake him for anything other than a poet,” Raymond Foye, a writer who also hung out at Caffe Trieste, said in an interview. “He was the quintessential bohemian flâneur, just this extraordinary figure who you couldn’t miss walking up and down the streets.”

At the cafe, and at his nearby apartment, Cherkovski hung out with Ferlinghetti, a poet and the owner of City Lights, and with other Beat writers, among them Harold Norse, Bob Kaufman and Gregory Corso — “vagabond souls,” as he once called them.

Cherkovski chronicled these writers, their works and beatnik culture in “Ferlinghetti: A Biography” (1979), “Whitman’s Wild Children: Portraits of Twelve Poets” (1988) and “Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski” (1991). The reviews were mixed.

“Neeli Cherkovski, a fellow poet, friend and fan, has authored an affectionate — and, at times, feverishly reverent — biography,” Steven Rea of Knight-Ridder newspapers wrote in reviewing his biography of Bukowski.

Other critics were less kind. In The New York Times, the writer Doris Grumbach panned Cherkovski’s biography of Ferlinghetti.

“This slight, almost skimpy work demonstrates that a biography should never be written out of absolute admiration for the subject,” Grumbach wrote. “Even Homer nods, I was reminded as I made my way through Neeli Cherkovski’s adulation.”

Cherkovski’s biographies overshadowed his work as a poet.

In a 2012 conversation with the blog The Rusty Truck, the second question he was asked concerned his relationship with Bukowski. As the conversation wrapped up, the interviewer asked, “You have been interviewed several times; what question do you wish you would have been asked and never were?”

Cherkovski replied, “I would love an interview where Bukowski is not mentioned, or at least not mentioned until question 16 or 17.”

Kyle Harvey, a poet and editor at Lithic Press, an independent publisher that has issued several collections of Cherkovski’s poems, said, “It’s a really weird paradox because those relationships have led him to being interviewed, which is sometimes hard for a poet, but it’s difficult to find interviews where the questions are actually about his work.”

Harvey said he was hoping to rectify that literary quandary later this spring with the publication of Cherkovski’s “Selected Poems: 1959-2022.” In the introduction to that book, the poet Charles Bernstein wrote that the poems are “tinged with a wistful surrealism/symbolism in the deflationary key of everyday life.”

Writing in the tradition of Walt Whitman, one of his literary heroes, Cherkovski created meandering poems about nature, rebellion, friendship, other poets, family, Judaism, sexuality, fellow dwellers of North Beach cafes and the inevitability of aging.

In the poem “Portrait at 76,” he wrote:

five years ago I waseight pages longer thanthe Hebrew Bibleand prone to badbehavior, my facewas dirty, my teethwere bad, I neverliked grammarschool, never learnedlong division, butI swore allegianceto a flag of autumnleaves, that alonemakes old agesweet as mythic honeyfrom the hive

Neeli Cherkovski was born Nelson Innis Cherry on July 1, 1945, in Santa Monica, California, near Los Angeles, and grew up in San Bernardino, about 75 miles away. His paternal grandfather, like many Jews who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe, had changed his surname to one that didn’t sound Jewish. Cherkovski began using the family name in the 1970s in homage to his Jewish heritage.

His parents, Sam and Clare (Weitzman) Cherry, owned a bookstore and art gallery in San Bernardino.

“Inside of our house there were paintings, ceramic bowls, shelves of books, and standard department-store furniture,” Cherkovski wrote in an essay for the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series.

He wrote on a manual typewriter. His bedroom walls were lined with books. At night, he stayed up late reading.

“This room,” he wrote, “offered near perfect solitude once I was inside of it, often with the door locked.”

As a teenager, he read and reread Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”

“Whitman’s ability to sweep the reader into his rhythms held me,” he wrote. “No matter how much I read him, I’d invariably come upon a new direction, a flow of language with surprising twists and turns.”

When he was in high school, Cherkovski met a writer who was friends with Bukowski, who lived in Los Angeles. Cherkovski asked the writer to arrange a meeting.

The two men hit it off, talking for hours. A few weeks later, Bukowski sent Cherkovski a book of his poetry inscribed, “For Neeli Cherry, I hope that I have awakened some of your young sleep.”

Cherkovski graduated from California State University, Los Angeles, in 1967 with a bachelor’s degree in American studies. He attended rabbinical school at Hebrew Union College for two years but didn’t finish.

“During this time in the late ’60s I saw a lot of Bukowski, spending long nights disposing of cases of beer in his East Hollywood apartment,” Cherkovski wrote.

They started Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns during those drinking endeavors.

At the time, Cherkovski was also working as a political consultant in San Bernardino. In 1975, he moved to San Francisco to work for George Moscone, a state senator who later became the city’s mayor and was assassinated in 1978.

Political life wasn’t for him, so he quit and moved to North Beach, where his beatnik life as a poet commenced.

“I collected ninety dollars a week unemployment benefits for a year and a half … not bad for those days when a cappuccino cost ninety cents and a Chinatown meal could be had for under three dollars,” he wrote.

In addition to his partner, Cabrera, he is survived by a sister, Tanya Tull.

Cherkovski wrote at least one poem every day. He was constantly writing, almost compulsively. In recent years, he would email new poems to friends as he finished them — a kind of mimeograph publishing for the digital age.

After his death, City Lights shared one of them in a blog post celebrating his work. It is titled “No Going Home” and reads:

I have no son or daughterto mourn my final momentsbut I will go anywayand not go homeon the wayno one will go with meto the darknessI will not go home

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.










Today's News

March 31, 2024

The rent was too high, so they threw a party

Cindy Sherman exhibits a new body of work at Photo Elysée

With this ring, I unwed

Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 closes to significant sales and a bristling local scene

Louis Gossett Jr., 87, dies; 'An Officer and a Gentleman' and 'Roots' actor

How many Easters remain for this century-old boys' choir school?

Does the Peace sign stand a chance?

"Shirin Towfiq" and "Cups to Connections" open at Mingei International Museum

Palm Springs Art Museum announces appointment of Christine Vendredi as Chief Curator

Cummer Museum announces its newest exhibition: "Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800 to 1960"

Hosfelt Gallery opens two solo exhibitions with works by Tim Hawkinson and Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe

Eli Klein Gallery presents Liu Bolin's recent photographs

Praz Delavallade opens an exhibition of new paintings, works on paper and sculptures by Gregory Siff

Ho Tzu Nyen announced winner of the CHANEL Next Prize 2024

'On the Adamant' review: A psychiatric facility on the Seine

Exhibition at the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire features monstrous and atypical sculptures and fantastic creatures

'Future Now' opens at the Portland Art Museum

Neeli Cherkovski, poet who chronicled the Beat Generation, dies at 78

An age-old riddle ginned up for postapocalyptic times

A Georgia town basks in bountiful filming. The state pays.

A British scandal intrigued J.T. Rogers. Then he went down the rabbit hole.

Eleanor Collins, Canada's 'First Lady of Jazz,' dies at 104

Play Smarter, Not Harder: Techniques for Enhancing Income through Online Slots

How Can Online Gaming Sites Bring a Life Balance?

Revolutionising HR: Exploring the Latest Trends in HR Software Solutions

Artistic Harmony: The Cultural Mosaic of Intersect Palm Springs




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys
Houston Dentist
Abogado de accidentes
สล็อต
สล็อตเว็บตรง
Motorcycle Accident Lawyer

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful