NEELI CHERKOVSKI
THE ITHACA OF POETRY: INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL LIMNIOS
Neeli
Cherkovski is an applauded poet, critic, memoirist and literary biographer. He
has written twelve books of poetry, including: From the Canyon
Outward, the award winning Leaning Against
Time, Elegy for Bob Kaufman and Animal; two acclaimed biographies, Bukowski: A
Life and Ferlinghetti: A Biography; his book, Whitman's Wild Children (a
collection of critical memoirs), has
become an underground classic.
Michael Limnios: What characterize Neeli Cherkovski’s philosophy about the life… and
world?
Neeli Cherkovski: Somewhere in my poetry there
is a philosophy “about the life.” I have always listened to the
world. My first three poems, written when I was 12 in 1957 were on
Gandhi, Buddha, and Africa. I was reaching –– reaching over
frontiers. Gandhi intrigued me because of his non-violence. I had
read his autobiography and marveled at his focus on making changes, first in
South Africa and then in India. His work led me to the Bhagavad Gita, the classic Hindu text on
the law of karma, and on doing one’s duty. It has helped me keep top my
life as a poet, even in days (or years) when I didn’t write much. I came
across Some Sayings of the Buddha,
according to the Pali canon.
Actually, my father gave it to me, he was very
subversive. In this translation of early Buddhist thinking I found what
has turned into a lifetime of thinking, pausing, and thinking again. Here
is the guidebook to undertaking a journey into the whole world, into the mind
of a plant, the sound a tree makes, the light in an animal’s eyes. All of
that.
I also read Rousseau’s Confessions and the Social
Contract. He stresses, of course, individual freedom, the right to think
independently and the need for self-expression. I felt he stood by me
when I challenged some of the things I heard in school. My iconoclasm often
sent me to the Dean’s Office, which was cool. As for Africa, it is always
there as a kind of dream, the original home of the human race. Again, my father
led me there.
Well, fifty years later and what do I know about
this life, this world? Some of my best memories are about hiking and
camping, alone, in wilderness areas round Southern California. I’d go off for
days, or weeks, at a time and commune with the trees, the streams, mountain
lakes –– it was splendid. Sitting alone at a campfire, nothing like it,
watching the wood go down to coals and the coals go up in ashes. I confess, I
was a boy scout, mainly because I was in love with other kids my age.
Walt Whitman’s “Salute A Monde” seems so naive
today, even as many of us reach across borders and languages to redeem our
land, our sense of communion. My view, my idea, my philosophy of life
centers around the need to re-adjust ourselves to the planet, to leave the rain
forest alone, to keep the wild, or some of it, wild. Ah, so many people
now, a crowded planet, and crowded minds.
I go to the poets, many of the great classical
ones, like Homer (always Homer) and the poets of ancient China, so boldly
rendered into English by Ezra Pound in The
Confucian Odes. Five thousand old beatniks, from way back in time, beat on
my door. I remember reading Rimbaud back in 1961, for the first time, in a tiny
illustrated edition –– this guy, wow! He had such insight, such anger
directed art a stultifying society. Poets inform me. They expand my
mind. They are like medicinal plants for my brain. Listening to Sappho’s
paeans for love is another significant event in my life.
ML: Which
is the most interesting period in your life and why?
NC: Maybe what is happening now. I have
watched my friends (and myself) grow older, holding little bitterness, and a
lot of happiness, as if the challenges of becoming an elder is a kind of gift,
despite the dramatic physical changes that take place.
When my friend Harold Norse went into a “home”
in his late 80s, living until age 92, I would visit often. He had stopped
writing, but one day read me a poem he had written four decades earlier.
After the performance, he said, with a smile, “You know, I was a pretty good
poet.”
Well, I still write, a lot. Just a few
days ago (late May, 2012) I completed a short book of poems called The Manila Poems. I spend a month
or so each year in The Philippines. Jesse loves going back home, and I
follow. This collection is based on things I have felt there, but also
includes poems that were simply written at our condo in Bonifacio Global City.
I continue to work on Frankfurt A to Aleph, a meditation on German culture –– seen from
the eyes of a secular Jew and I’m completing a memoir. Sections have been
published hither and tither over the past few years.
My friend Dennis Dybeck, who writes as Art Beck,
is 71 and he just published a book of translations, the work of the 6th Century
Latin poet Luxorious. So, there it is. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 93 and, over
the past few years, has penned many of his best poems. One is a homage to Pablo
Neruda that weaves sea imagery, deep meditative thought, and political
commentary into a rhapsodic whole.
Then, traveling to Europe and getting to know so
many writers. Seeing my poems in Spanish, Italian, German, French, is a
delight. Last year I read at the Walt Whitman birthplace. That was important,
being connected in that way with the good gray bard. The Whitman home is
a quaint, two-story, shingled place, a family residence till the 1950s. The visitors
center is where I read. They also have a fine bookstore. Visiting Italy a year
and a half ago (2010 added so much to my better side, I mean my happy side. The
hospitality in Verona and Verona was out of sight. Getting to know the
Philippines over the last four years has been important. All this travel makes
home, deep in a San Francisco neighborhood, all the more exciting. I love to
sit and muse on a redwood deck, alongside my bamboo, a looking down on a sweet
garden.
Often I think of Hydra, an island I have
been on many times, first in 1970. I stayed two months, then came in 1999, in
2004, and 2005, the last two times with students from the law school of New
College of California. We stayed in both Athens and Hydra. The harbor
there, the rugged trails up treeless hills, the old Venetian palaces... all
good.
So, many things keep life interesting,
alive. And finally, I managed to ‘vend’ my papers to the University of
California, Berkeley –– out of the house with lots of paper. It was good,
but still my place is cluttered. Some books I cannot imagine living without,
and so the shelves are crowded. I love reading Martin Heidegger, he is so
dense, so packed-in with deep thinking. And I go back to the American
modernists often, Pound Eliot, Stevens, and the magnificent W.C. Williams.
Better mention two of my publications, From the Canyon Outward and From the Middle Woods. Both can be
seized on Amazon.
ML: What
experiences in your life make you a good writer and poet?
NC: Well, what makes one a writer, a poet?
Let me refrain from being to lyrical, but I’d say, for me, it’s like listening,
seeing, being within things. I want to fly like the birds, to soar as
they do, to look down on ridges and plains as they can. All I can do is
sit in an airplane seat, pace the aisles, and peer at clouds or land or ocean
from the porthole in an emergency door. Restlessness makes me a poet.
Curiosity makes me a thinker, I think. But I search for rhythm in things,
in ideas, in the world of shadow and light. Beyond thinking as such, more like
feeling, flowing. Something akin to being a student of the Tao or walking
a way ‘tween mythos and logos.
I read Humpty Dumpty, and one week later cracked
my head open. There it is. 62 years later, the deep scar seems to
have grown. That crack, and subsequent drive to the hospital, made me a
poet. No one could put Humpty together again, after his fall, not “all
the king’s horses or all the king’s men....”
ML: What
first attracted you to the Beat Generation & how has the Beats changed your
life?
NC: I read Ferlinghetti. Imagine? A Coney Island of the Mind was pure
magic, such a welcoming entrance into the house of poesy. Years later
we’d be going to the movies together. What a phenomenal man.
Soon after my first reading of LF’s poems I
found Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and as with many readers, that really hit
home. I was thirteen at the time. I had just gone through a huge
bout of reading a lot of novels. Allen’s rhythm caught me, and I recognized his
love for Walt Whitman, so sweet. And I loved the open gayness of
Ginsberg. It made my secret love affairs seem to okay.
As I implied earlier, Homer changed, or re-arranged
my life. All the rest seems to be commentary. Homer gives legs to
the journey, pure and simple.
ML: From
whom have you have learned the most secrets about the Beats?
NC: Probably David Meltzer who is a great
teacher. I had the honor of teaching with him from time to time.
Incidentally he is the youngest poet in that ground-breaking anthology The New American Poetry and his book When I was a Poet is Number 60 in the
City Lights Pocket Poets Series.
ML: Why
did you think that the Beat Generation continued to generate such a devoted
following?
NC: They are easy to follow. For the most
part, it is populist poetry. There is little of the grand montage as one
finds in Pound, for example, or the density of Wallace Stevens. And they
give to the young a sense of rebellion.
ML: Which
memory from Charles Bukowski makes you smile? What advice Bukowski has given to
you?
NC: Hank met my partner Jesse, and he took me
aside, whispering, “I’m so glad you met somebody. I hope you guys are
staying the night.”
I must have gotten a sardonic view of life
partially from Bukowski. He didn’t mean to be a teacher, but he
was. There’s a 25-year age split between us. I loved hearing his
stories of growing up in Depression Era Los Angeles of the 1930s –– a gone
world. He had a terrific sense of humor, and he loved to poke fun at
standard ways of thinking. There is a surface anti-intellectualism in
him, but much of that was a pose. He’s always say, “Get in the arena.
Keep the poems coming. Don’t stop.” That was solid advice from
someone who worked on his writing all the time he could. Sitting down at
a typewriter was like going to a job at a factory as far as he was concerned,
but nicer. “If you’re not enjoying yourself while writing, then something
is wrong,” he often said.
ML: How
does the jazz music come out of Bob Kaufman’s words?
NC: Hey, Kaufman’s “Second April” is a top-notch
jazz poem, consciously so, of course. We leap from Bukowski, who loved
classical music to Kaufman, devotee of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonius
Monk and many more heroic jazz folk. He was a regular at New York jazz clubs in
the late 40s, and from that music comes much of his verve.
ML: Could
you tell us a little about your friendship with Bob Kaufman?
NC: For a time he was my roommate –– that was a
challenge, but I faced it. He reveled in bohemian squalor. Luckily, we
talked poetics. One night he asked, out of the blue, that I read my poems
aloud in the cramped kitchen of my North Beach apartment. He sat there,
smoking, staring into space, wide-eyed, tapping his fingers. I believe he
enjoyed it.
ML: Are
there any memories with Allen Ginsberg, which you’d like to share with us?
NC: A cranky uncle, I suppose. He always
claimed I wanted to sleep with him. Oh, no way. My eyes were
focused on young Achilles. A few times we had some delightful
talks. He was certainly pleased whenever I had a lover, even if he did
try to sleep with a couple of them. One day I called him “Rabbi Allen”
and he squawked. But when one considers his “Kaddish,” it is not only an
ode to his mother, but homage to the Hebrew hymn of mourning.
Allen spoke to me once of Vachel Lindsay, the
Mid-Western American populist poet. Like me, he liked the rhyming chants
“The Congo” and “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight.” When Ginsie talked
of such poets, “lost” to us now, he did so with passion. His love for the
bohemian rebel the New York street outsider was real, an under-pining to his
generosity of spirit. Get him going on the Manhattan cafeteria life of
the 40s and 50s, whoa! He saw it as sweet terrain, and some of its
unknown heroes as true precursors to the Beat Era.
ML: What
was the relation between music, poetry and activism?
NC: Ask my poet pal Jack Hirschman, who
inaugurated the Revolutionary Poet’s Brigade which has a world-wide membership
devoted to social justice. His epic THE
ARCANES is a chorus of activist verse, gentle lyricism, and rapid-moving
experimentalism. I think of “Ode to the Spanish Civil Guard” be Federico
Garcia Lorca as a skillful weaving-together of the lyrical and the
political. Of course, one may only think of the incredible Bob Dylan's
song “Blowing in the Wind,” and the earlier social protest songs of Woody
Guthrie. Potent stuff.
ML: Would
you mind telling me your most vivid memory from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory
Corso and Harold Norse?
NC: Ferlinghetti at his cabin in Bixby Creek
Canyon, that place documented in Big Sur
by Jack Kerouac. LF had a well-worn copy of Leaves of Grass on the rickety table in his abode. He was a
good camping partner. He would gather wood for the fire and I’d gather
twigs. His outhouse was called “The Buddhist Anarchist Temple.
Harold led me into the gay underworld of San
Francisco. We shared a few guys together. I loved his knowledge of
such figures as Blaise Cendrars, the Syrian poet Adonis, and so many others. At
one point we had the same therapist –– driving each other crazy comparing
notes. He taught a class at his apartment in the 70s –– about seven of eight of
us attended. Harold was like a wizard with a wand, talking of WC Williams
one moment and Antonin Artaud the next. He even showed a film he had made
the burning of a pier on the beach in Los Angeles. He just happened to be
walking by with a movie camera –– it was magnificent, as if he had stepped in
to the flames.
Gregory... o Gregore! He wrote the poem
“Marriage” and “Elegiac Feelings American.” Wow!! One wondrous
evening he talked at length of Francois Villon, that outlaw poet of Medieval
Paris and shared with me his love for Edgar Allen Poe. I remember him
reciting Helen,” a work Poe wrote when he was 14. Gregory loved the
phrase, “The agate lamp within thy hand/Ah Psyche, from regions’ which are Holy
land.”
ML: What
is your dream… and what is your nightmare?
NC: My dream is to win a big literary prize.
ML: Which
of historical personalities would you like to meet?
NC: Homer, for sure, especially since we’re not
sure if Homer was Homer. I would have danced all night with Arthur
Rimbaud. Nearer to home, I’d take both Emily Dickinson and Walt
Whitman. We would make a wonderful threesome.
ML: How
you would spend a day with Walt Whitman? What would you say to Nanos
Valaoritis?
NC: Ah, Whitman, I would at least graze my hand
over his beard and take him out to dinner. To Nanos I would say, “I love
you, especially when you chant Homer as he surely must have been chanted
thousands of years ago.”
[“Neeli
Cherkovski: The Ithaca of Poetry,” interview by Michael Limnios, originally
published at “Blues Gr: Keep The Blues Alive,”
http://blues.gr/profiles/blogs/poet-neeli-cherkovski-talks-about-bukowski-whitman-kaufman.
Used by permission.]