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We work through delirium and hold
onto the word. We sing past all reason in order to discover
a center and to make it our own. We leap over the whirling
dervish and discover our silence.
-Neeli Cherkovski, introduction to New Poetry from California:
Dead / Requiem
The oranges of an artist sit on the canvas, bleeding.
-Neeli Cherkovski, Naming the Nameless
A new book by Neeli Cherkovski is always
good news, and Leaning Against Time is no exception.
Though prolific -and very much a “literary man”-
Cherkovski has been underpublished throughout his career.
His books, some of them classics, have fallen in and
out of print, and though he has been praised, his work
has rarely been assessed in its entirety. The poetry
books in particular have been difficult to find.
Born in 1945, a “Polish Russian Jewish American,”
Neeli Cherkovski discovered himself to be a poet at
the age of fourteen. He attended California State University,
Los Angeles, and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute
of Religion; during that time he was active in the anti-Vietnam
War Movement. In the late 1960s he co-edited Laugh Literary
and Man the Humping Guns with his friend and drinking
companion, Charles Bukowski. His first book, Don’t
Make a Move, was published in 1973. The Waters Reborn
followed in 1975 and then Public Notice (1976), Love
Proof (1983), and Clear Wind (1984). His most recent
books are Ways in the Wood (1993), Animal (1996) and
Elegy for Bob Kaufman (1996), another famous poet who
was a close friend. He wrote the first biography of
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1979) and Hank: The Life of Charles
Bukowski, the first biography of that writer, in 1991.
Hank was later revised as Bukowski: A Life and republished
in 1997. He wrote the wonderful critical / autobiographical
study, Whitman’s Wild Children in 1988; a revised
edition of that book was published in 1999.
For the past several years, he has been teaching at
New College of California, and he has recently begun
to paint. “I am continually being reborn as a
poet,” he writes: “There is a reality beyond
the ordinary, a poetic, as opposed to a prosaic, view
of the world, an unpremeditated outlook relying on spontaneous
revelation.”
Throughout these various books, a feeling for nature
and a feeling of kinship to others are strong elements.
More recently, Cherkovski has also developed a strong
interest in philosophy, particularly in the work of
the German, Martin Heidegger. 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’s
or Bukowski’s work, 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.”
Though Neeli Cherkovski was born in Santa Monica and
now lives in Bernal Heights, he has been associated
with North Beach since coming to San Francisco in 1975.
The lyrical Elegy for Bob Kaufman is an exploration
of “that San Francisco rapture” in which
one heard “bohemian melodies” and in which
Bob Kaufman was “Orpheus sitting at the bar,”
“the last real / beatnik.”
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; “when he died North Beach / took a
dive / and didn’t recover.” Elegy for Bob
Kaufman is a tribute to a “gone world.”
It is a book about a community, “a forest of people
/ seeking to resist the murder / of imagination.”
It strives for - and here the personal element enters
- “self-knowledge without loathing.”
Animal, published in the same year as Elegy for Bob
Kaufman, is the poet’s most daring and experimental
work to date. It is full of long, deep meditations on
his extremely problematical existence:
nothing but
an unreal
existence,
zen-like
really, a man
without money, an
animal
of lust
needing only
love, a lover
seeking
solace
with a friend
and that’s
the end
of it as
fifty
wings of chance
change me
into a survivor,
I’m alone
in this
world, forever
nailed
to a stone,
just like you….
Three of the poems collected in Leaning Against Time
- “AIDS,” “County Hospital,”
and “Animal”-were originally published in
Animal.
Like Bukowski’s, Cherkovski’s poetry tends
towards the plainspoken, the “accessible.”
But there is an important difference between the two
writers. Bukowski’s strength is essentially stylistic:
a tough talk he can at times elevate into poetry. Cherkovski’s
strength is a depth of selfhood - often a surreal depth
of selfhood - that erupts into the plainspoken surface,
as here in “Guadalupe”:
is there life after death? do the
animals inspire us? what force destroys
us? why? I fear pain
when it creeps up
the wall. I push flowers
away from eyelids of flowers….
The pieces collected in Leaning Against Time are enjoyable,
accessible, and often touching, but they tend to be
the poet looking outward at other people. Of the fifty-three
poems collected in the book, ten begin with the pronoun
“he,” and there are many which begin with
an equivalent to “he”: “Freddie Blassie
in white trunks,” “Mike the Fence drove
his cancer,” “the old man was never quite
old enough,” “I got old honey, she said.”
The book is full of character sketches - often excellent
ones. (“Roy,” for example, is a particularly
successful poem in this manner.) The point isn’t
that Cherkovski writes bad character sketches: it’s
just that they aren’t his strongest suit.
The powerful selfhood present in other Cherkovski poems
is present in Leaning Against Time, but it is present
in a less problematical manner than it is elsewhere.
One can sense it in these fine, disturbing lines from
“Dividing Darkness:
lust moves me
out of my room, onto streets
South of Market
where transient voices
perform for an imaginary queen
it divides darkness
and solitude, it descends
without looking up, wild
or serene, it covers love
and our cruel desires until
the beginning pulls us
towards the end
But compare what I have just quoted with this brilliant,
daring passage from “Queer Careers,” the
opening poem of Animal, and you immediately see the
difference:
Feel your way to the door, your body laced in velvet,
those
purple arms, his way of letting you know, his
way of describing you as an ugly man, a pushy man, a
man he can wrap around his fingers,
unburnt, unhurt, he lies on top of you before
pushing you away, world-wide, sacred,
he’s going to build a career, don’t step
on it,
he’s going to bust up your house
and appraise the ashes, he’s a monster of arousal,
he deliberately arches his back
in such a manner, he lies over the phone…but John
I love you…you know
I love you…he grabs the man’s
stereo
and pushes it between his legs
Kissing his feet, vessel of a body,
4 a.m. behind bushes, invisible, needing his scent,
his eyes
asking, did you come for love or holocaust?
I came for my brother
The Cherkovski presented in Leaning Against Time is
much more a “regular guy,” much more the
smiling presence of the photograph on the cover. In
Leaning Against Time the out-of-control areas of the
poet’s psyche are muted, rarely in evidence. Nor
is the poet’s “philosophical” side
present-though that is represented in the just-released,
fascinating booklet, Naming the Nameless (Sore Dove
Press, 2004):
A butterfly swallowed the sun.
Quixote sniffs the wind.
God cursed Job and died.
Quixote drops his lance in my path.
I sleep in the Blue Mosque.
The philosopher invited the poet to dinner. The poet
ate the philosopher. *
There are even moments in Leaning Against Time - though
they are not many - when the plainspoken language goes
a bit flat. These lines from “Sea Walk”
offer an admirable but perhaps too conventionally-expressed
sentiment:
I think peace will come running
over the waves
amid the clutter that lies on the sand
and that we will pull ourselves
out of the madness
one more time
The Cherkovski of Animal condemns “the madness”
but, ever ambivalent, simultaneously understands himself
to be a part of it: “did you come for love or
holocaust?”
As the title indicates, the poems collected in Leaning
Against Time range over a considerable period and include
early efforts such as “The Woman at the Palace
of the Legion of Honor.” Themes of time passing
and of “the dread night that encroaches”
are prominent. Among the dead are not only “the
gods” but God Himself:
Jesus died, Buddha
died next, followed by Moses
and God, we were
surrounded by mourning
[“The Bakery Truck (1953”]
There are many figures, most of them male, who must
deal not only with mortality and old age but with a
persistent sense of failure:
the old man was never quite old enough
to forget his early plans, nor could he forgive
the failures he felt
(“The Old Man”)
*
he sits in the fog
of the morning thinking
only of Havana in 1957
and of what his life had
been like fucking Americano boys
seven days a week, siempre
as they say, when he was
never old
(“Cuban Émigré”)
I got old
I had a hard life
nobody helped me
(“Grandmother”)
The self-pity and despair in these lines are a major
theme of the book: the words pain, loss (including “unredeemable
loss”), lost and memory echo throughout; darkness
and shadows are everywhere. Cavafy’s “brilliant
mind” is “a rage of / memory, he yearns
for the phantom / of yesterday”; the poet is “alone
in a dull room.” Such feelings are countered only
by moments of vision and creativity-moments which allow
Cherkovski “to dream / of something better than
the teeter-totter / of joy and sorrow that abides”
and to visualize himself as a bard, a creator, someone
able to inhabit through imagination the very beginning
of life, the quintessential moment of origin:
I watch the sparrow on my balcony
mocking with his beak, he is so small
yet immense, every nervous movement
makes the world move, he tries
not to die, his dinosaur mind
is like mine, far back in time
we neither flew nor walked
but awoke to the quasar dance
and heard micro melodies
float like streams of light
across the newborn planet
(“The Sparrow”) **
One remembers that Charles Bukowski-afflicted with
intense self-loathing- referred to himself as “the
suicide kid”; there are moments in Leaning Against
Time in which Cherkovski approaches that sentiment.
(There are references to Ernest Hemingway and Richard
Cory - both suicides.) Indeed, Bukowski is actively
present in Leaning Against Time as Cherkovski thinks
back to days in “East Hollywood” when the
two of them would
race to the liquor store
for cigars, we’d stumble
onto the streets at four a.m.
singing songs we knew
from childhood, his from
the Depression, mine from
the Fifties, they coaxed us
forward like pioneers
There is a kind of equality between Bukowski and Cherkovski
in “East Hollywood”: each is eager for the
“call” of fame. One feels that by the time
he writes the poems collected in the present volume,
Cherkovski can’t help but measure his own accomplishments
against those of his superstar friend, Hank. (In “Animal”
he remarks ironically that his dog “probably thinks
I am a very successful writer.”) Cherkovski may
well be a greater poet than Bukowski, but he is not
a greater American success story. In “The Night
Library” Neeli struggles against his quasi-erotic
tendency to idealize others “as if they were minor
gods” and wonders about Borges and Hemingway,
did they flee into
the same darkness?
one died in old age, blind
yet able to see clearly
while the other saw his body
slip away
until he put a bullet
in the roof of his mouth
Leaning Against Time is, I believe, a book shaped as
much by the priorities of the publisher as by those
of the author. The result is certainly a good book,
but it does not represent the full capacities of a poet
as complex, intelligent, and wide-ranging as Neeli Cherkovski.
One feels that the searching, restless, self-haunted,
obsessive poet who writes so brilliantly has momentarily
been somewhat quieted in this production. One can, nevertheless,
find him bursting through if one looks carefully enough:
ANIMAL
First I talk to the receptionist
Then to a social worker
Next, I’ll confer with a medical student
And a supervisor
After four intake sessions
I will be assigned a therapist
I am an animal with no rain forest
And no wild river
I have no hunting grounds
Or mountain range
I am trapped
Cornered
And anticipating the worst
I called the state [sic] Employment Agency
But they are only hiring armadillos
And leopards this week
Next week they are interviewing geese
With more than four years experience
I am lost
And I have no way of telling this to my dog
Comet jumps into my lap
He probably thinks I am a very successful writer
Or maybe he doesn’t even know that I write
I am not the one who buys his dog food
But I am the one who opens the can
Comet may not be able to understand the difference
The social worker at the Psychiatric Clinic
Asked: What is the matter?
I told her how confused I felt
There are strange animals everywhere
The other animals seem well fitted to survival
I am surviving all right
But not on my own terms
I used to be able to stalk my pray [sic] and pounce
Now I don’t even join the hunt
I want to be put on the endangered species list
I need to be protected
I want a reservation
I will move through water like a dolphin
I will think ocean thoughts like the blue whale
I will soar like a condor over California hills
And dart in dust of Ohio brush land 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
* Cherkovski remarks that Naming the Nameless arose
out of his reading in the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Poet Harold Norse - present though unnamed in Leaning
Against Time - has called Naming the Nameless a “masterpiece”:
“Neeli Cherkovski,” writes Norse, “has
reached an objectivity that is both simple and complex…It
is as good as anything any great poet has done.”
** Cf. the reference in “25 Years Later…”
to “the first full flowering / in which good and
evil / grew from the same stalk” and these lines
in “The Clown”: “those rhapsodic trees
/ of the Edenic fantasy / that was our original home.”
Leaning Against Time also includes references to the
Paleolithic and Neolithic periods and to early cave
art. All these passages may metaphorically suggest the
poet’s childhood. The theme of nostalgia for origins
in Cherkovski’s work is somewhat reminiscent of
the same theme in Dylan Thomas’s work-in “Fern
Hill,” for example.
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