Alive Beyond Life

Paul Vangelisti reviews Neeli Cherkovski’s “Selected Poems: 1959–2022.”

By Paul VangelistiAugust 8, 2024

• Poetry

OF THE MANY poets I’ve known, Neeli Cherkovski was one of the most enjoyable to talk with about poetry. Since I first met Cherkovski at Charles Bukowski’s apartment in East Hollywood in 1971, there have been few writers with whom I was able to share a life in poetry to the extent I did with him, swapping the trials and often comic vicissitudes of practicing poetry in a country as relentlessly puritanical as ours. On March 19, days before advanced copies of his Selected Poems: 1959–2022 appeared, Cherkovski died.

This life lived in poetry is no more compelling than in the Selected Poems just out from Lithic Press. One ought to single out the certainly broad and representative selection made, with Cherkovski’s help, by poet Kyle Harvey, as it must be noted that publisher Danny Rosen was more than generous in giving free rein to Harvey in determining the scope of the volume. As Cherkovski recently confided, “It’s all there, work I didn’t think about for years.” The happy confluence of interest and taste clearly shows in this long-overdue volume by an important if sometimes overlooked California poet. Six decades of work, between Los Angeles and San Francisco, form a testament to an unbounded and restless poetic spirit.

Harvey’s decision to start, under the rubric “Early Poems,” with what might be considered juvenilia is central to this undertaking. As Charles Bernstein notes in his very astute and helpful foreword, Cherkovski essentially grew up in his father’s bookstore: “Poetry was a first language and he developed fluency in his teenage years.” I had firsthand experience of the fluency Bernstein speaks of. Two of the five poems that Bukowski and I chose for the Anthology of L.A. Poets (Laugh Literary/Red Hill Press, 1972)—“Joshua” and “The Woman at the Palace of the Legion of Honor”—were written by Cherkovski (then Cherry) before he turned 20. In fact, “Joshua” is dated in this edition from 1959, when the poet was only 14. This precocious talent, whom Bukowski would call his “renegade rabbi,” is demonstrated early on:

       joshua i said why don’t you
       pull them down
       like a house full of chicken bones
       and he laughed at me
       and i sat with my thin book and i read to him
       about birds and armadillos and roaches and […]

       i said let’s burn down the walls
       and poison the water and desecrate their temple
            and he winked at me
       and he gave me another drink of wine

The first selection, from Cherkovski’s mature books, begins with several poems from The Waters Reborn, which the Red Hill Press (John McBride and I) had the pleasure of publishing in 1975. Most notable from this heady, political time was Cherkovski’s “For Neruda, for Chile,” the final lines of which are arresting in their visionary conviction: “we see and know and / are assured / all deaths shall / have an answer.”

Then follow many starts and stops, courageous and sometimes extravagant experimentation, perhaps nowhere bolder than in his 1996 book Animal. As his friend, the poet Art Beck, underlines in a 2010 retrospective review in Big Bridge, it marked a turning point for Cherkovski, “entering the dangerous dark forest of his middle age. The forest of Freud and Jung and Hansel and Gretel and children and ovens.” In the longest selection from the published volumes, editor Harvey includes not only the complete 1,000-plus lines of “Job, Suffering” (the remarkable threnody on his mother Clare Cherry’s death) but also other revelatory compositions like the title poem itself, “Animal,” with its disarming conclusion:

       I will think ocean thoughts like the blue whale.
       I will soar like a condor over California hills
       and dart in dust of Ohio brushland like a red fox.

       I am only a track in the sand,
       I am merely a clump of fur on the rose bush.
       I am practically invisible.

Even in early selections, the tone is often elegiac. Cherkovski’s verse embodies a uniquely measured sense of time, pushing forward, plunging, soaring, and ultimately disappearing into itself and its own past. Some of the best examples of this trajectory are found in his first book with Lithic Press, 2018’s Elegy for My Beat Generation. Cherkovski underscores his affection for the many and varied poets included. As T. S. Eliot declared, the end for the poet is also his beginning. As selected here, the Elegy section concludes with the poem “Gregory Corso” and begins with “What Did It Mean? (In memory of Gregory Corso),” all the while situating each friend and poet in a time he shared with them—an intimately vivid and impersonal time—where only poetry matters:

       it means you feel alright
       on a sling of rain
                when the view from the coffee house
                depends on telephone lines

       and lonely men in Chevrolets passing
         on their way to the Korean Peninsula

A remarkable thing about Cherkovski’s temporal preoccupation is how, over many years, it sustains its origins in friendship and camaraderie. The poets celebrated here are exactly that, friends and poets, behaving in these verses as only a poet might toward a close friend who also happens to be a poet. Disparate as they may be—Aaron Shurin, Kaye McDonough, Diane di Prima, David Meltzer, Jack Mueller, and myself—the poet reveals them in timeless, ideal poses that distill their attitudes toward their work and themselves. This applies to the poet’s characterization of his father in “No Going Home”:

       I will tumble through the hole
       but never to caress frail stalk
       of the fig tree my father
       watered diligently until it drowned

       rotting peaches
       we could never save every year

       I will not go home

And to the exemplary life of Diane di Prima in “Be One”:

       oh paradise stumble and rumble
       in the workings of a clock, little
       tithe of clock I wonder
       if a star would tick away

       be a bell ringer and sleep
       where bodies lay

Cherkovski discovers in all of us what in the poem “Muse” he proclaims as “nature’s most imperfect pose.” In the first line, the poet names Kaye McDonough, “deposed muse,” only to follow with the entreaty “please return / to this all night store,” abandoned like all else on the road. And like all else, “as night closes in,” the poetic imperative is to stay on the road, in good faith to his muse, and “hear the engine purr, drive / into darkness unfolding.” As with most figures in Cherkovski’s generation, domesticity is eschewed, and the “most imperfect” reveals the most prized.

In 2020, Cherkovski published two more books with Lithic, Coolidge & Cherkovski: In Conversation and Hang on to the Yangtze River, the latter of which I reviewed for the Los Angeles Review of Books. It’s worth noting that the term “collection” of poetry is misleading for Cherkovski’s poetics, as well as for many of his colleagues. From many conversations over the years, I know that Cherkovski envisioned a book as a dynamic whole, a singular adventure focused on a poetic notion or problem. Following Jack Spicer’s paradigmatic lead (recall Spicer’s Collected Books), few of us would consider a book of poetry to be an occasional grouping of poems, written at a given point in one’s career. This may work for some mainstream or academic publishers, writing programs or award-bestowing organizations, but resembles little of what the innovative traditions of California and West Coast poets have had in mind during mine or Cherkovski’s lifetime.

In the LARB review, I singled out the clarity and humor of Hang on to the Yangtze River, calling the work “sins […] of his old age,” alluding to Gioachino Rossini’s wondrous piano compositions, Sins of My Old Age, written long after his operatic career. Like Rossini’s, the poet’s work is transgressive in its formal humor and clarity. Age permeates—the old poet puts words in the mouth of the young—the same questions about poetry Cherkovski was, in fact, asking when we first met in 1971. The music and the dance become all the more spellbinding through the layers of time and sentiment. The ease and fluency with which the aging poet takes on seemingly daunting subjects, as he begins “Destroy the Animal Before You Go”—“death & destruction, destruction / & sensation, irony and a belt buckle”—make it hard to tell the dancer from the dance, as it is to distinguish the music from memory. In “Hyper Me,” we return to the all-night Southern California diner of half a century ago, enduring in a joyful act of remembrance:

       I fill pages in my notebook
       leaving mayonnaise stains:
        “A snowflake drowns in a pool of
       shit, but don’t tell anyone”

The poem masterfully returns to the core of the poetic act:

       engine continues purring
       as I pull off the highway
       a light drizzle
       somewhere in my heart

       mother would be proud
       Grandmother Fannie would say
        “Oh what a good boy you are
       so quiet and well-mannered”

Then there is the lovely pastime of “Andover Street,” named for a road in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights, where Cherkovski spent much of the last quarter century:

              here on my street the trees
       drop their tears onto automobile hoods
             and coat the window glass
              it just happens all the time

The delight and wonder in his mature vision carry the reader through to the poem’s resolution, coming full circle, intensifying the poetic attitude of his “Joshua” poem from some 60 years before:

              it began on my street
       a long time ago
                when lost tribes congregated
           and put up a street sign

Cherkovski possessed one of the most unfailing temporal acumens among my contemporaries. Perhaps his intimacy with time and the poem is no better exemplified than in “I Want to Be a Dead Poet,” which appears at the end of Hang on to the Yangtze River, its opening as articulate as any ars poetica that I’ve read in some time:

       I want to be a dead poet
       alive beyond life
       sitting at a corner table
       in our neighborhood café
       Verlaine sipping absinthe on a warm
       summer’s day.

We remain with the poem, and in so doing we remain, likewise, with Neeli.