Poetry. ELEGY FOR BOB KAUFMAN is poetry of elegance and feeling, a beautiful tribute to a "gone world." It speaks to the author's youthful memories of a great poet, Bob Kaufman—an enormously complex and difficult man. Cherkovski brings to life San Francisco's bohemian community in the late fifties and early sixties. "Neeli Cherkovski has written a magnificent tribute to the memory of Bob Kaufman. Neeli and Bob were close friends and true colleagues in the art of poetry. This gathering of poems is an expression of an era in San Francisco's North Beach literary community. I recommend it to all readers"—Eileen Kaufman.

Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA

Neeli Cherkovski is a longtime contributor to the West Coast literary scene. Emerging from the Los Angeles underground of the Sixties, Cherkovski is an applauded poet, critic and literary biographer. He has written eleven books of poetry, including FROM THE MIDDLE WOODS, 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. In the late 1960s Cherkovski co-edited the poetry anthology Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns with Charles Bukowski. Since 1975, Neeli has lived and worked in San Francisco. For ten years he was Writer-in-Residence at New College of California, where he taught literature and philosophy.

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