(Jack Kerouac immortalized her in his novel Big Sur. A stu...)
Jack Kerouac immortalized her in his novel Big Sur. A student of Zen, she hung out with Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg and was a speaker at San Francisco’s Human Be-In. But Lenore Kandel was no muse or hanger-on; she was a brilliant lyric poet, often unabashedly erotic, and that’s where her legacy lies. Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel contains 80 examples of her art, from the “holy erotica” of her early years to later, more contemplative works. Many of the poems have never been published, others only in rare ephemeral publications. Some are explicit, celebrating carnal love as part of the divine. Others are humorous and cover more quotidian subjects. A recurring theme is the “divine animal” duality. The collection includes poems written from the early fifties up until Kandel’s death. The paradox of Lenore Kandel is that despite her prodigious talent, she was one of the least read and critically appreciated of modern poets. Kandel found her voice at a time when the Beat era was giving way to the countercultural age, and though she straddled both eras, it meant that she also fell through the cracks in terms of recognition. Now for the first time the full range of her work appears in one volume.
Lenore Kandel was an American poet, affiliated with the Beat Generation and Hippie counterculture.
Background
Lenore Kandel was born on January 14, 1932 in New York City, New York, United States. Early on, she and her brother were raised on a Pennsylvania farm by their mother while their father wrote screenplays in Hollywood. By the time Kandel reached her teens, however, the family was reunited in Los Angeles, where Kandel spent time as a "juvenile delinquent in Hollywood."
Education
Lenore has studied broadly, first educating herself in Buddhist religious texts, then studying journalism and literature at Los Angeles City College for a time before transferring to the New School for Social Research, where she studied psychology. All these disciplines - and other, less stringent studies - were distilled into Kandel's shocking, free-form poetry.
Kandel's life has always been an adventurous one; she has worked variously as a clerk, an artschool model, a cafe folk singer, a cocktail waitress, and a Turkish cabaret belly dancer.
Kandel began writing for publication in her late twenties, when she was working as a cafe hostess in Los Angeles. Grover Haynes, the editor of the Three Penny Press of Studio City, published her work from this period in three small booklets: A Passing Dragon, A Passing Dragon Seen Again, and An Exquisite Navel, all released in 1959. Her poetry was also featured in an anthology published by Haynes titled Beards and Brown Bags. The early poems were developed in cafes, where Kandel would perform her work aloud; the poems read as free-form riffs in major keys. As Donna Nance wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "The best of the poems display an attractive ingenuousness and playfulness of spirit, and the worst possess an earnestness which is somehow endearing if not actually redeeming."
The poems of these early volumes exhibit a looseness - even a redundancy - that her later poems do not.
In 1960, Kandel explained to Leonard Wolf in Voices from the Love Generation, she "came up [to San Francisco! for a weekend and stayed." The city was blooming with poets of her own shade, and Kandel soon fell in with Beats such as Lew Welch and Jack Kerouac. She even accompanied the group to Big Sur on a trip that would later be fictionalized by Kerouac in the novel Big Sur (1962). In the novel, Kandel was translated into Ramona Schwartz, "the big Rumanian monster beauty." Indeed, much of Kandel's fame has been linked to her beauty and her open sexuality. Particularly in San Francisco, this aspect of Kandel's work was dominant.
In San Francisco, Kandel continued to publish her work, though she tended to publish the poems singly in journals rather than in pamphlet form. In 1962, one of her poems was included in the collection Best Poems of 1961: Bores tone Mountain Review Poetry Awards (1962). In these San Francisco poems, Kandel switched to a more print-friendly style, using denser language, more unusual imagery, and more pressing rhythms. In the poem included in the Borestone volume, Kandel utilizes the repetition of her early works but now in a much more condensed form: "in the afternoon the children walk like ducks/like geese/like from here to there/ eyeing bird-trees puppy dogs candy windows." In this selection, the repetition functions as rhythm, creating a pounding, stumbling, aggressive beat.
Kandel's The Love Book's notoriety was likely due to its scatological language. The two poems of the volume, "God/Love Poem" and "To F* with Love," are both highly explicit and filled with lurid slang terms for sexual acts. Kandel argued that the book was also filled with a sort of worshipful reverence toward sex acts.
Indeed, the poems did raise a "furor"; the prosecutors at the book's obscenity trial proclaimed it "animalistic," "blasphemous," and "odious." The religious feeling she expresses in her poems seemed to the prosecution insufficient to raise the book above the level of pornography. Mcltzer suggested, moreover, "Its strong erotic content took an added charge of provocation because it was written by a woman celebrating her sexuality in the vernacular bluntness claimed by male writers."
Kandel's book was ultimately cleared of pornography charges. But the book's aesthetic value is still matter for debate.
Kandel produced only one volume of poetry after the trial. Word Alchemy (1967), in which her work during the early sixties is collected.
Despite great success following the seizure of The Love Book, Kandel has gradually faded from public life.
In 1970, Kandel suffered massive spinal injuries in a motorcycle crash. Despite having to cope with excruciating pain for the remainder of her life, she continued to write and maintain social ties.
She died at home on October 18, 2009, of complications from lung cancer, with which she had been diagnosed several weeks earlier.
In 2012 Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel was published. It features 80 of her poems, many of which had never before been published.