Neeli Cherkovski, "a prolific poet and denizen of beatnik cafes who chronicled the literary ethos of bohemian culture in biographies of Beat Generation writers, including his friends Charles Bukowski and Lawrence Ferlinghetti," died March 19, the New York Times reported. He was 78.
In 1969, Cherkovski and Bukowski started Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns, a magazine printed on a mimeograph machine that lasted three issues, had one subscriber, and rejected poems with terse notes that began, "These won't do." The Times wrote that Cherkovski, "typically dressed in a rumpled suit coat over an untucked shirt, with a string of amber beads hanging around his neck... was a fixture at Caffe Trieste and, around the corner, the City Lights bookstore, in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco."
"You could not mistake him for anything other than a poet," said writer Raymond Foye. "He was the quintessential bohemian flâneur, just this extraordinary figure who you couldn't miss walking up and down the streets."
Cherkovski hung out with many Beat writers, whom he called "vagabond souls," and chronicled their lives, works, and culture in books like Ferlinghetti: A Biography (1979), Whitman's Wild Children: Portraits of Twelve Poets (1988), and Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski (1991).
The biographies overshadowed Cherkovski's work as a poet. Kyle Harvey, a poet and editor at Lithic Press, an independent publisher that has issued several collections of Cherkovski's poems, said, "It's a really weird paradox because those relationships have led him to being interviewed, which is sometimes hard for a poet, but it's difficult to find interviews where the questions are actually about his work."
Harvey added that he was hoping to rectify this with the publication of Cherkovski's Selected Poems: 1959-2022 this spring. In the introduction to that book, poet Charles Bernstein wrote that the poems are "tinged with a wistful surrealism/symbolism in the deflationary key of everyday life."
Cherkovski wrote at least one poem every day, the Times noted, adding that he "was constantly writing, almost compulsively. In recent years, he would e-mail new poems to friends as he finished them--a kind of mimeograph publishing for the digital age."
In a tribute to Cherkovski, City Lights editor Garrett Caples wrote: "He was the real deal, a poet obsessed with his chosen art, and they don’t make poets like him anymore." Observing that City Lights will publish a new volume of his poem portraits next year, fulfilling "a longtime desire of his," Caples added: "If he didn't live to see it, he at least lived to write it and know that it was scheduled for publication....
"As I wrote this, a friend sent me a poem Neeli had e-mailed a few years ago called 'No Going Home'; I'm not sure where or whether it was published but it seems like the right note to end on. Exacting and unsentimental, the poet carves his own epitaph":
I have no son or daughter
to mourn my final moments
but I will go anyway
and not go home
on the way
no one will go with me
to the darkness
I will not go home