Sunday, August 11, 2024
Lately I’ve been thinking of how much the process of becoming a poet involves a close rereading of poets you believe you’re familiar with, and the extent to which that close reading is inspired by other poets’ knowledge of poems that deserve more of your attention. When I think of the late Neeli Cherkovski, for instance, I recollect a conversation we had about Bukowski’s poetry in the early 1970s, and in particular, the poems by Bukowski that appeared in early issues of INVISIBLE CITY, the magazine co-founded and co-edited by Paul Vangelisti. While both Neeli and I agreed that those poems were among Bukowski’s best in that period, what surprised me was Neeli’s admiration for the title poems of Bukowski’s second book from Loujon Press, “Crucifix in a Deathhand.” One might think it is one of Bukowski’s best-known poems, especially since it is as much focused on Los Angeles itself as an urban cyclorama as Blake’s “London” is on that environs. I remember digging up Bukowski’s poem after that conversation and wondering why Laurence Goldstein had not included it in his survey of Los Angeles-themed poems, “POETRY LOS ANGELES.”
Among Neeli’s prose projects, his WHITMAN’S WILD CHILDREN: Portraits of 12 Poets stands out as the best possible context for reading what turned out to be a posthumous collection of poems, which has just been reviewed by Paul Vangelisti in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It’s a shame that Neeli wasn’t able to go on a reading tour to promote this volume. I can only hope that individual readers let his visions come into focus as they read his poems for the mind’s ear. “I want to be a dead poet,” is a line Paul quotes at the end of his review. As readers find Cherkovski’s SELECTED POEMS, he will indeed become not only the dead poet of his aspirations, but also an old dead poet, the exalted fulfillment of his lifelong quest.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/alive-beyond-life/
Alive Beyond Life
Paul Vangelisti reviews Neeli Cherkovski’s “Selected Poems: 1959–2022.”
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