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 on March 19 in San Francisco. He was 78.
The cause of his death, in a hospital, was a heart attack, his partner, Jesus Guinto Cabrera, said.
Mr. Cherkovski arrived on the literary scene in 1969, when he and Mr. 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.”
Typically dressed in a rumpled suit coat over an untucked shirt, with a string of amber beads hanging around his neck, Mr. Cherkovski 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,” Raymond Foye, a writer who also hung out at Caffe Trieste, said in an interview. “He was the quintessential bohemian flâneur, just this extraordinary figure who you couldn’t miss walking up and down the streets.”
At the cafe, and at his nearby apartment, Mr. Cherkovski hung out with Mr. Ferlinghetti, a poet and the owner of City Lights, and with other Beat writers, among them Harold Norse, Bob Kaufman and Gregory Corso — “vagabond souls,” as he once called them.
Mr. Cherkovski chronicled these writers, their works and beatnik culture in “Ferlinghetti: A Biography” (1979), “Whitman’s Wild Children: Portraits of Twelve Poets” (1988) and “Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski” (1991). The reviews were mixed.
“Neeli Cherkovski, a fellow poet, friend and fan, has authored an affectionate — and, at times, feverishly reverent — biography,” Steven Rea of Knight-Ridder newspapers wrote in reviewing his biography of Mr. Bukowski.
Other critics were less kind. In The New York Times, the writer Doris Grumbach panned Mr. Cherkovski’s biography of Mr. Ferlinghetti.
“This slight, almost skimpy work demonstrates that a biography should never be written out of absolute admiration for the subject,” Ms. Grumbach wrote. “Even Homer nods, I was reminded as I made my way through Neeli Cherkovski’s adulation.”
Mr. Cherkovski’s biographies overshadowed his work as a poet.
In a 2012 conversation with the blog The Rusty Truck, the second question he was asked concerned his relationship with Mr. Bukowski. As the conversation wrapped up, the interviewer asked, “You have been interviewed several times; what question do you wish you would have been asked and never were?”
Mr. Cherkovski replied, “I would love an interview where Bukowski is not mentioned, or at least not mentioned until question 16 or 17.”
Kyle Harvey, a poet and editor at Lithic Press, an independent publisher that has issued several collections of Mr. 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.”
Mr. Harvey said he was hoping to rectify that literary quandary later this spring with the publication of Mr. Cherkovski’s “Selected Poems: 1959-2022.” In the introduction to that book, the poet Charles Bernstein wrote that the poems are “tinged with a wistful surrealism/symbolism in the deflationary key of everyday life.”
Writing in the tradition of Walt Whitman, one of his literary heroes, Mr. Cherkovski created meandering poems about nature, rebellion, friendship, other poets, family, Judaism, sexuality, fellow dwellers of North Beach cafes and the inevitability of aging.
In the poem “Portrait at 76,” he wrote:
five years ago I was
eight pages longer than
the Hebrew Bible
and prone to bad
behavior, my face
was dirty, my teeth
were bad, I never
liked grammar
school, never learned
long division, but
I swore allegiance
to a flag of autumn
leaves, that alone
makes old age
sweet as mythic honey
from the hive
Neeli Cherkovski was born Nelson Innis Cherry on July 1, 1945, in Santa Monica, Calif., near Los Angeles, and grew up in San Bernardino, about 75 miles away. His paternal grandfather, like many Jews who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe, had changed his surname to one that didn’t sound Jewish. Mr. Cherkovski began using the family name in the 1970s in homage to his Jewish heritage.
His parents, Sam and Clare (Weitzman) Cherry, owned a bookstore and art gallery in San Bernardino.
“Inside of our house there were paintings, ceramic bowls, shelves of books, and standard department-store furniture,” Mr. Cherkovski wrote in an essay for the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series.
He wrote on a manual typewriter. His bedroom walls were lined with books. At night, he stayed up late reading.
“This room,” he wrote, “offered near perfect solitude once I was inside of it, often with the door locked.”
As a teenager, he read and reread Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”
“Whitman’s ability to sweep the reader into his rhythms held me,” he wrote. “No matter how much I read him, I’d invariably come upon a new direction, a flow of language with surprising twists and turns.”
When he was in high school, Mr. Cherkovski met a writer who was friends with Mr. Bukowski, who lived in Los Angeles. Mr. Cherkovski asked the writer to arrange a meeting.
The two men hit it off, talking for hours. A few weeks later, Mr. Bukowski sent Mr. Cherkovski a book of his poetry inscribed, “For Neeli Cherry, I hope that I have awakened some of your young sleep.”
Mr. Cherkovski graduated from California State University, Los Angeles, in 1967 with a bachelor’s degree in American studies. He attended rabbinical school at Hebrew Union College for two years but didn’t finish.
“During this time in the late ’60s I saw a lot of Bukowski, spending long nights disposing of cases of beer in his East Hollywood apartment,” Mr. Cherkovski wrote.
They started Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns during those drinking endeavors.
At the time, Mr. Cherkovski was also working as a political consultant in San Bernardino. In 1975, he moved to San Francisco to work for George Moscone, a state senator who later became the city’s mayor and was assassinated in 1978.
Political life wasn’t for him, so he quit and moved to North Beach, where his beatnik life as a poet commenced.
“I collected ninety dollars a week unemployment benefits for a year and a half … not bad for those days when a cappuccino cost ninety cents and a Chinatown meal could be had for under three dollars,” he wrote.
In addition to his partner, Mr. Cabrera, he is survived by a sister, Tanya Tull.
Mr. Cherkovski wrote at least one poem every day. He was constantly writing, almost compulsively. In recent years, he would email new poems to friends as he finished them — a kind of mimeograph publishing for the digital age.
After his death, City Lights shared one of them in a blog post celebrating his work. It is titled “No Going Home” and reads:
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
