"Nexus" poet Neeli Cherkovski walks the past into the future

  Neeli Cherkovski photo by Jannie M. Dresser, June 2010

Poetry Flash presents Neeli Cherkovski and David Meltzer at Moe’s Books, on Thursday, July 8, in Berkeley, 2476 Telegraph Ave., 7:30 pm.    
 

“Being older, you think about all the history you contain,” says San Francisco poet Neeli Cherkovski. In his Bernal Heights home which he shares with Jesse Cabrera--his domestic partner for more than 20 years--and Cosmo (pictured below), their Catalonian sheep dog, Cherkovski is surrounded by papers, books, and art that comprise a personal history stretching back five decades.
     Just a few days before his 65th birthday, a delivery of attractively printed broadsides featuring his poem “Grotesque Empire“ was delivered. After a publishing dry spell between 1997 and 2004, Cherkovski is consciously making the effort to usher his work into print. This year, he brought out his 12th book of poetry, From the Canyon Outward, and he is also working and publishing excerpts from a memoir.
     As he proceeds to write and publish, he is also guiding an archivist in the organizing and cataloguing of his documents to prepare them for a permanent and public home. These are not ordinary papers: to literary historians, Cherkovski is considered a nexus person. He was a longtime friend and co-publisher with the late Charles “Hank” Bukowski (1920-1994), and spent many of his North-Beach years with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia, and other seminal figures of northern and southern California’s literary legacy. In his 1989 book of essays, Whitman’s Wild Children, Cherkovski wrote about many of the writers he knew, including a few who have passed away. Beyond that, Cherkovski helped organize the San Francisco Poetry Festival, was an instructor at New College, and has written biographies of both Ferlinghetti and Bukowski.
     Perhaps it was the impending birthday, but Cherkovski recently waxed philosophical about the past, present and future. He shared a new poem that began with his observation of a deli-owner who is making him a sandwich, precisely setting out the ingredients in the way she had done it many times before. The poem goes on to relate a conversation Cherkovski had with Philip Lamantia about English poet Thomas Chatterton who died young and has been mostly forgotten (the English poet succumbed to arsenic poisoning in 1770, a possible suicide). In Cherkovski’s narrative lyric, language, memory, natural imagery, and a keen awareness of the past and present put me in mind of Robinson Jeffers, Walt Whitman, and Denise Levertov. When I mentioned this, Cherkovski seemed pleased, adding Robert Duncan, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Federico Garcia Lorca to my short list of his literary influences.  

     Born in 1945 to Russian-Jewish parents who had strong Bohemian and socialist leanings, Cherkovski grew up mostly in San Bernardino. His father was a photographer, his mother and uncle were both artists. “My father was proud I was a poet,” Neeli says, showing off a photograph of his parents gathered with fellow artists and writers. (Here is another side of the American dream: a place where recent immigrants can find like-minded friends and share happy hours in intellectual freedom while discussing art and literature--even though they might all be bed-bug poor.)
    Neeli’s father owned a small bookstore where he stocked poetry and books about art, history, and politics, including the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. Cherkovski worked in the store and soaked up the poetry and politics. As a young man, he became involved in several Southern California political campaigns which eventually brought him to the Bay Area as a staffer for George Moscone who was a state senator at the time. Cherkovski’s life intersected with history again when mayor Moscone was shot: Cherkovski recalls trying to get back across town to City Hall in the wake of the news.
     As far back as he can remember, Cherkovski has felt himself to be a poet. Bukowski (pictured below), known as “Hank“ to his close friends, had told him he was a poet because he had “been thinking about death since picking up a pen.“ But Cherkovski seems hardly the melancholic or morbid epitome of a struggling writer; instead, he claims nature and “curiosity about everything” as the birthrights that inspire him. “There’s nothing I am not interested in,” he says, “everything’s interconnected and death is just another interest.” The words often used to describe his poetry are ‘lyrical,’ ‘philosophical,’ and ‘elegiac.’
      Instead of being revolutionary or radical, Cherkovski considers himself a ‘revolutionary of the word’ calling himself a “middle-class guy with middle-class values.” In political engagements, he usually worked “within the system.” While that may be, he is also someone who much preferred a North Beach poet crowd to other social milieus (he describes a humorous attempt to mix with devotees of the San Francisco Zen Center in a recently published excerpt from his memoir where he found one of his poetry heroes, Philip Whalen giving a dharma talk that referenced several contemporary poets. Briefly, it looked as if the two worlds might have relevance to one another!)
    Cherkovski jumped into the open-mic scene in North Beach and felt warmly received by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Hoping the bookstore owner and publisher would eventually publish his work, Cherkovski instead wrote a biography of Ferlinghetti, as well as Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski. For over five years, Cherkovski was writer-in-residence at New College of California, where he taught literature and philosophy, but his pedagogical approach was to encourage students to go to poetry for “experience“ rather than for learning in-and-for itself.  
    Until he was about 55, Cherkovski characterized his relationship to the past as being more influenced by nostalgia than it is now. He is keenly aware of how the past brings us into the future, explaining that “the past walks us into the future,” with the emotions providing us with the instructions we need for tomorrow. The past is one field of experience that moves us forward carrying both the pain of loss and the “shock of losing a contemporary or your parents.” He is currently allowing influences to free him to explore new ways of writing. He has been reading Adriano Spatola, a modern Italian poet published in a wonderful series of books by Green Integer, who did not use punctuation, as well as Greek poet George Seferis whose poems often brush up “the dust of the past.” When he visited Greece a few years ago, Cherkovski recalls he was impressed by how knowledgeable average citizens were of their own history. “You could ask a waiter, ‘talk to us of Parmenides,’ or a cook, ‘tell us about the battle of Salamis.’ They all know their past.”
     As a younger man in Los Angeles, Cherkovski recalls befriending a 92-year-old Russian poet who lived in the Sunset Boulevard neighborhood where they both attended poetry events. Cherkovski is intrigued by the fact that his life dovetailed with that of a man who lived through the October Revolution of 1917, had been sent to Siberia, and finally made his way to California where he became a dentist and writer. The intersection between history and personal experience inspires him. “It’s good to know, for instance,” he says energetically, “that the Ohlone and Miwok tribes of California were walking in the very places we are today, that there were 80 different Indian languages spoken along the Pacific coasts.” The fact that their cultures are mostly absent is a wound, however, and he says we need to understand how we are all partly responsible for that wound and ask “How are we going to change this and not further wound the planet?”
     “I go to bed at night fascinated by the Paleolithic, thinking about this time period called ‘pre-history,’ which is a prejudiced way of putting it, in a way.” The creators of fabulous cave art at Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc make him think whoever created these paintings were “no less advanced than we are.” The images are, to him, a kind of writing: “If you close your eyes and look at the images behind your eyes, and think about what these people were like, and how they might have been like you and me. . . you’ll realize they wanted the same things: shelter, clothing, food, finding a meaningful way to care for the frail and elderly and to dispose of the dead.” His exploration of ancient history has led him to consider how poetry is like painting. (As a side note, Cherkovski and Cabrera both paint and draw and decorate their home with original art-work). Cherkovski uses the language of vision when he talks about poetry writing, including the need he feels to put his understanding of the world into a vision of how the world could be.
     However, his most intense concerns, especially thoughts about the role of the human species in history and our relationship to nature and the environment, are reflected in his writing. “This is a historical time for us to survive and maintain a sense of reverence.” A technological SNAFU like the BP oil spill into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico “shows how fragile the crystal is.”
***
POEMS BY NEELI CHERKOVSKI, copyright 2010

Love is a Gift

love is a gift from the imagination
sweeping long
over the tones of Beethoven

I find you every morning
on the beach
like encountering
a blue agate

and have stepped over stones
to the slaughter house
before we even met
I was a child
you were an island
in another ocean
where monsoons
are symphonic

love is a gift
from the imagination
we savor
leaning back in a chair

Assyrian armies
cross the ridges
and take to the Pass
we may imagine

you know
I come downstairs
silently with music
racing through me
into a stillness
born in deep roots

the planet is thirsty
the hills hungry
no one will rise
from the plain to save
anything

knowledge is a muse
we may hold
alone in our libraries
floating over doubt
and superstition

the fields are dying
in our reverie
blind minds of the light
forged on mica
and limestone

love is a gift from the imagination
and we feel the flow
over pits in the dawn
on this first day of creation

***
Big Sur . . .

where
the coast is wildly at peace
and far beyond time

the trees and shrubs
are profuse, a creek runs there
and meets the ocean

the body finds its way
to the mind, when the body
goes, so goes the coast

so goes the canyon, yet
the gulls still fly, the language
of salt and sand and tidal pond

still twine, I hold every question
like a candle and hike
deep down the path

in my mind, here the grass
rustles in the breeze, all
possibilities drift

and we are free

***
The Writer

he smoked three packs a day
he sat morosely on the bus
thinking of writing
a great American novel, but
managed, in reality, to compose
a book on criminal genius, a
potboiler western and
a vast notebook of random
observations on life
in the city, a sad man
with a broken face

he had no alibi when he died
and stood before the gates

***