Neeli Cherkovski, born Neeli Cherry in San Bernardino California in 1945. was an integral part of the mid-1960s Los Angeles poetry scene, edited a literary magazine there with Charles Bukowski called “Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns” and came up to San Francisco in the early 1970s. Throughout those years and ever since, he has consorted with Surrealist, Beat, post-Beat and Baby Beat icons and poets to whom no categories apply, including Diane di Prima, Phillip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, ruth weiss, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, John Wieners, Harold Norse, Allen Ginsburg and many, many others from Steve Richmond and Sharon Doubiago in his L.A. days to countless younger poets today.

Neeli is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections over a fifty-year career from his first, Don’t Make a Move (Tecumseh Press, 1974) to Animal (Pantograph Press, 1996) to From the Canyon Outward (R. L. Crow, 2009) and a few since, as well as for his seminal critical memoir Whitman’s Wild Children. and biographies of Bukowski and Ferlinghetti.

His new collection of poems, Elegy for My Beat Generation (Lithic Press, 2018) brings together personal reflections borne of his five decades in poetry.