It is with much sadness yet with countless fond memories that City Lights announces the death of one of our longstanding poet compadres, Neeli Cherkovski. Born Nelson Cherry in Santa Monica in 1945, Neeli reverted to his family’s historical name in the 1970s, no doubt inspired by the ostentatiously ethnic names of two poets with whom he was most closely associated, Charles Bukowski and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, both of whom were subjects of full-length biographies from Neeli’s pen: Ferlinghetti, A Biography (1979) and Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski (1991). Between these two books, he published perhaps his best-known volume, Whitman’s Wild Children (1988), a book of shorter portraits of Beat Generation poets, which, aside from Ferlinghetti and Bukowski, included Michael McClure, John Wieners, James Broughton, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, William Everson, Gregory Corso, Harold Norse, and Jack Micheline. I enumerate these names because they form something like the pantheon of 20th century poets in which Neeli situated the origins of his own work. Among his later close associates, we must also list Jack Hirschman, David Meltzer (his colleague at the legendary New College Poetics Program), and, perhaps least probably, Clark Coolidge, with whom he collaborated on the book Coolidge & Cherkovski: In Conversation(2020). This is not to say he was limited to his own milieu, for he was equally conversant with an astonishing array of poets from different times and places, like Li Po, Sappho, Blake, Rimbaud, Pound, and Neruda, just to name a random few.
Neeli’s own trajectory as a poet was irregular, to say the least. His earliest published work stems from 1959, when he was 14 years old. At age 24, he joined Bukowski in editing their own idiosyncratic contribution to the mimeo revolution, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns, which produced three issues between 1969 and 1971. Moving to San Francisco in the mid-’70s and coming out as gay, Neeli established himself among those North Beach poets sometimes known as the “Baby Beats,” who looked to the Beat Generation and City Lights in terms of formal influence and poetic inspiration. But Neeli was so much more than a latter-day Beat and he lived and wrote long enough to outdistance these poetic origins, even as he used his undeniable Beat cache to cultivate a reputation in Europe and beyond. If you knew Neeli, you were besieged with reference to “my Albanian translator,” “my Greek translator,” “my Turkish translator,” and so on. “There’s a guy in Kosovo translating me,” he’d say. “You need to send him 40 pages of your work!” This gets at the heart of Neeli, in a way; occasionally exasperating, needy, desperate to be read and loved, he was no less desperate for the poets he loved to be read and loved, and he loved a lot of poets. And by this I mean not his pantheon or his peers, but generations of younger poets, whom he read with a discerning eye. Perpetually curious and voracious as a reader, he kept up with new poets to his dying day. There are poets who want to lord what they have over you and poets who want to share what they have with everyone they esteem, and Neeli was firmly in the latter camp. I don’t know how he kept up with so many poets, and I’m almost 30 years younger. It takes a generosity and largeness of spirit few possess and poets like Neeli are valuable for the continuity they impart to the vast and everchanging ocean that is poetry.
Coming of age in the shadow of giants like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Bukowski, Neeli had needed time to overcome their influence. But he certainly came into his own and his reputation eventually grew commensurate with his powers and gifts as a poet. He was the real deal, a poet obsessed with his chosen art, and they don’t make poets like him anymore. One of the great aspects of his later life was that he was finally taken on by a publisher who truly understood the value of the man and his work, issuing a series of volumes with Danny Rosen’s Lithic Press, which in May will issue a 400-page Selected Poems: 1959–2022, edited by the redoubtable Kyle Harvey and introduced by Charles Bernstein. It’s a culmination of his life’s work. This will be followed by a new volume of poem portraits to be published next year by City Lights, fulfillment of a longtime desire of his. If he didn’t live to see it, he at least lived to write it and know that it was scheduled for publication. I’ve got the manuscript. An event for his Selected Poems, scheduled for May 20 at City Lights, will probably proceed as a memorial and we will announce the particulars as they come together in the ensuing weeks. For now, City Lights extends our sympathies to Jesse Cabrera, his partner since the 1980s, to his family members, and to all the poets who knew and loved him.
As I wrote this, a friend sent me a poem Neeli had emailed a few years ago called “No Going Home”; I’m not sure where or whether it was published but it seems like the right note to end on. Exacting and unsentimental, the poet carves his own epitaph:
I have no son or daughter to mourn my final moments but I will go anyway and not go home on the way
