Two books by Neeli Cherkovski:
Ways in the Wood (Creeker Press, 1993)
Elegy for Bob Kaufman (Sun Dog Press, 1996)

Jack Foley

Biographer of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Bukowski, Neeli Cherkovski is more than a poet "in his own right." If you haven't read him, get ahold of one of these books and find out what a powerhouse he is. The title, Ways in the Wood, invokes Heidegger's Holzewege with its exalted image of the poet- -large, mythic, enormously solitary. More like Neruda or Whitman than like the ordinary guy of Ferlinghetti or Bukowski, Cherkovski's hero identifies himself with the landscape but at the same time admits that "perhaps / i am inventing this, the memory is lost / in ruins, my helplessness is nearly / complete." It's a Romantic vision, but, as Robert Creeley suggested recently, it becomes clearer and clearer that "Romanticism" is simply the American version of "reality": "whatsoever [is] 'Rome' [is] home" (Echoes). Powerful, driven, uncertain, visionary, memorable, the poems in Ways in the Wood exemplify the position of poetry, as Heidegger puts it, "in a destitute time": "this way / seems best, down to the easy roll / of waves where i find a starfish and / a map of America."

"I'm Black, Jewish, white, green, and yellow with a blue man inside me struggling to come out," a mischievous Bob Kaufman once remarked to Neeli Cherkovski. Cherkovski wrote a prose memoir of his old friend and roommate in Whitman's Wild Children. Here, in these gorgeous, tender, lyrical poems, Cherkovski gives us Kaufman as "Orpheus sitting at the bar." Elegy for Bob Kaufman is an exploration of an imaginary, real time—"that San Francisco rapture" in which one heard "bohemian melodies," in which Bob Kaufman was "the last real / beatnik." In his version of Whitman's "I was the man, I suffered, I was there," Cherkovski tells us, "I was there. I heard": "Bob Kaufman / wore perpetual / rivers in his / head." Cherkovski's book conjures up the author's youthful experience of a great poet and an enormously problematical man, but, beyond that, it is the imagination of a bohemian world which somehow worked while Kaufman was in it. The words "died" and "dive" echo one another: : "when he died North Beach / took a dive / and didn't recover." This is a book about beatniks, about "the last real / beatnik," about "a forest of people / seeking to resist the muder / of imagination." In its power, it strives for—and achieves—"self-knowledge without loathing." Elegy for Bob Kaufman is a book of elegance and feeling, a beautiful tribute to a "gone world":

all these things
of the street
remain like pine trees
cut by bladed wind.

Jack Foley