The definitive collection of poems from an American original, Neeli Cherkovski.
Neeli Cherkovski’s SELECTED POEMS: 1959-2022 is the definitive collection from an American original. With his earliest poem in this volume beginning at age fourteen, Cherkovski reveals a youthful wisdom which grows throughout his career. For more than sixty years, Neeli has lived his life for the poem, chewing on the reality and wonder of being here, and the endless question of, what shall we do? His answer is clear: we must rejoice in the endless dilemma!
In his foreword to SELECTED POEMS: 1959-2022, Charles Bernstein writes, “In Neeli Cherkovski’s poetry, beat rhetoric melts into wild riffs then returns to metaphor; bunts, dodges, bows head in respect to disrespect: onward, impulse as image, becomes phrases, becomes sublime moment of stutter, stagger, implosion; till waves of loss get tossed in a walk down a lazy street, as memory of a friend, the darkening night of the soiled–soaring–souring–soul, the benediction of artfulness and refusal of refusal.”
“In Neeli Cherkovski’s poetry, beat rhetoric melts into wild riffs then returns to metaphor; bunts, dodges, bows head in respect to disrespect: onward, impulse as image, becomes phrases, becomes sublime moment of stutter, stagger, implosion; till waves of loss get tossed in a walk down a lazy street, as memory of a friend, the darkening night of the soiled–soaring–souring–soul, the benediction of artfulness and refusal of refusal.”–Charles Bernstein
Poetry.
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Hi, I'm Neeli Cherkovski
Neeli Cherkovski (July 1, 1945–March 19, 2024) was an American poet and memoirist. Born Nelson Cherry, he grew up in Los Angeles, where as a teen he began publishing poems and was befriended by Charles Bukowski, with whom he edited the poetry zine Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. In the 1970s, he was a political consultant in the Riverside area, moving to San Francisco in 1974 to work for then-State Senator George Moscone. In San Francisco, he came out as gay, reclaimed his family's historical name, and became a major figure in the North Beach literary community. In the 1990s, he became a writer-in-residence at the New College of California, teaching literature and philosophy there until it closed in 2008.
The author of numerous collections of poetry, Cherkovski also wrote the first biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1979) and Charles Bukowski (1991), as well as Whitman's Wild Children (1988), a collection of his memoirs of 12 Beat Generation poets. He co-edited books, including Anthology of L.A. Poets (1972) and The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman (2019). His collection Leaning Against Time won the 15th Annual PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2005. In 2017, he was awarded the Jack Mueller Poetry Prize by Lithic Press, which published his 400-page, career-spanning Selected Poems 1959–2022 in 2024. Cherkovski is also the subject of the documentary film, It's Nice to Be with You Always (2020). He lived in San Francisco with Jesse Cabrera, his partner of 40 years.
photo by Kyle Harvey
