Overview

In his final book, poet Neeli Cherkovski paints a portrait of his life through luminous details of encounters with his illustrious comrades. ""A prolific poet and denizen of beatnik cafes who chronicled the literary ethos of bohemian culture.""New York Times To be published on what would have been his 80th finds the poet and memoirist combining these twin vocations in intimate depictions of his fellow artists and reflections on his family. The book follows Cherkovski from his early encounters in L.A. with poets like Wanda Coleman and Jack Micheline to his youthful heyday among the Beat Generation in North Beach, San Francisco, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. The passage of time is inevitably marked with the loss of beloved friends, recorded in elegies for recently deceased poets like Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, and Jack Hirschman, as well as a series of poems celebrating his close friendship with Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Join Neeli as he drinks whiskey with Bob Kaufman in Chinatown, visits his gentle and impoverished hero John Wieners, and takes a terrifying drive through San Francisco with Ferlinghetti. Also included are several portraits of key poetic forebears, like Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and especially Rimbaud, examined from Cherkovski's perspective in 1959 and 2023. The book ends with memories of close family members and a number of moving self-portraits, as the poet confronts his own mortality and impending death. A powerful final statement from a master poet.

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9780872869370

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Reviews

Praise for Neeli Cherkovski's The Portrait Gallery Called Existence: ""Neeli Cherkovski was a natural born poet. With every portal open to everything and each moment, he breathed poesy from the moment of his birth to his passing. For this last collection, as if to summarize his entire life, he curated a portraiture exhibition of his poetic, creative and biological 'family' including his own self-portrait. Here, we see his linage and the vision ever so clearly.""—Yuko Otomo, author of In Delacroix's Garden Praise for Neeli Cherkovski: ""He was everything you could hope for in a classic West Coast poet, including seemingly unconcerned with anything in life more than with the line, the rhythm, the poem.""—Joshua Bodwell, Zyzzyva ""[H]is 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.""—Garrett Caples, editor, City Lights ""[S]omeone who knew virtually all of the important West Coast Beats and learned from them firsthand . . .""—allenginsberg.org ""Age permeates these poems. It is the impetus to a compressed music that searches the heart of thought, turning feelings and impressions upside down, in order to move, or should I say, dance on.""—Paul Vangelisti, editor, LA Exile: A Guide to Los Angeles Writing 1932-1998

"""He was everything you could hope for in a classic West Coast poet, including seemingly unconcerned with anything in life more than with the line, the rhythm, the poem.""—Joshua Bodwell, Zyzzyva ""[H]is 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.""—Garrett Caples, editor, City Lights ""[S]omeone who knew virtually all of the important West Coast Beats and learned from them firsthand . . .""—allenginsberg.org ""Age permeates these poems. It is the impetus to a compressed music that searches the heart of thought, turning feelings and impressions upside down, in order to move, or should I say, dance on.""—Paul Vangelisti, editor, LA Exile: A Guide to Los Angeles Writing 1932-1998"

Author Information

Neeli CherkovskiIn 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 19592022 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.

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