The Portrait Gallery Called Existence
Format:Paperback
Publisher:City Lights Books
Publishing:14th Aug '25
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 14th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
In his final book, poet Neeli Cherkovski paints a portrait of his life through luminous details of encounters with his illustrious comrades.
"A prolific poet and denizen of beatnik cafes who chronicled the literary ethos of bohemian culture."—New York Times
To be published on what would have been his 80th birthday, The Portrait Gallery Called Existence finds the poet and memoirist combining these twin vocations in intimate depictions of his fellow artists and reflections on his family. The book follows Cherkovski from his early encounters in L.A. with poets like Wanda Coleman and Jack Micheline to his youthful heyday among the Beat Generation in North Beach, San Francisco, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. The passage of time is inevitably marked with the loss of beloved friends, recorded in elegies for recently deceased poets like Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, and Jack Hirschman, as well as a series of poems celebrating his close friendship with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Join Neeli as he drinks whiskey with Bob Kaufman in Chinatown, visits his gentle and impoverished hero John Wieners, and takes a terrifying drive through San Francisco with Ferlinghetti. Also included are several portraits of key poetic forebears, like Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and especially Rimbaud, examined from Cherkovski's perspective in 1959 and 2023. The book ends with memories of close family members and a number of moving self-portraits, as the poet confronts his own mortality and impending death. A powerful final statement from a master poet.
Praise for Neeli Cherkovski's The Portrait Gallery Called Existence:
"The Portrait Gallery of Existence is a catalog of reading experiences as much as it is a masterfully rendered set of addresses — Neeli Cherkovski's lifelong apprenticeship to poetry culminating in a wry, searching, reclaiming set of poems that adjust form subtly in relation to the poet's experience of the work and person he's circling back around through each pass. These poems are edged by hand and ear with a care categories such as biography and autobiography can't catch, and their beauty—of which there is a great well—is bound up with a moving sharpness of utterance that stands profoundly against harm."—Anselm Berrigan, author of Don't Forget to Love Me
"During an era when poets were dangerous to know and destroyed their bodies pursuing their art, Neeli Cherkovski stayed observant. From first encounters to final conversations, The Portrait Gallery Called Existence revives voices of American literary consciousness: Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, di Prima, Coleman, Kaufman. I was one of countless crazy teenagers who learned something foundational from these poets, and I'm glad to revisit them by way of Cherkovski's insight. Existence offers a syllabus for autodidacts and misfit readers, traces the poet's literary and family lineages, and redistricts America according to its artistic brilliance. Cherkovski reveals the life that poetry shapes for us—a life that's not so evident these days. By simply holding this book you keep San Francisco from disappearing."—Evan Kennedy, author of Metamorphoses: City Lights Spotlight Series No. 22
"Neeli Cherkovski was a natural born poet. With every portal open to everything and each moment, he breathed poesy from the moment of his birth to his passing. For this last collection, as if to summarize his entire life, he curated a portraiture exhibition of his poetic, creative and biological 'family' including his own self-portrait. Here, we see his lineage and the vision ever so clearly."—Yuko Otomo, author of In Delacroix's Garden
Praise for Neeli Cherkovski:
"He was everything you could hope for in a classic West Coast poet, including seemingly unconcerned with anything in life more than with the line, the rhythm, the poem."—Joshua Bodwell, Zyzzyva
"[S]omeone who knew virtually all of the important West Coast Beats and learned from them firsthand . . ."—allenginsberg.org
"Age permeates these poems. It is the impetus to a compressed music that searches the heart of thought, turning feelings and impressions upside down, in order to move, or should I say, dance on."—Paul Vangelisti, editor, LA Exile: A Guide to Los Angeles Writing 1932-1998
ISBN: 9780872869370
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
128 pages