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Description
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.
About the Author
Lenore Kandel (born 1932) is an American poet who was briefly notorious as the author of a short book of poetry,The Love Book. A small pamphlet compiled of 4 poems, The Love Book provoked censorship with its poem "To Fuck with Love". As a result the book was seized by the police as hard core pornography in violation of state obscenity codes, from both City Lights Books and The Psychedelic Shop in 1966. Consequently Kandel gained cause célèbre in San Francisco during the hippie movement in Haight-Ashbury.A student of Zen before she moved from her native New York City to San Francisco in the early 1960s; once in San Francisco she met the Beat poets Lew Welch and Gary Snyder and had a brief affair with Jack Kerouac, who immortalized Kandel as Ramona Schwartz in his novelBig Sur. She has been described as a second generation Beat writer who developed psychedelicized aesthetics in the style of Allen Ginsberg. She herself referred to her verse as holy erotica. Volume 1, No. 1 of the internet literary and erotic magazine, The Divine Animal, features Lenore Kandel and her work .A speaker at the Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park polo fields, January 14, 1967, and the only female to ever speak from the stage, Kandel defiantly read from The Love Book. She published one other book of poems,Word Alchemyin 1967. Other works includeAn Exquisite Navel, A Passing DragonandA Passing Dragon Seen Again, published by Three Penny Press in 1959, although not so well known. She appears in the Kenneth Anger filmInvocation of My Demon Brother, smoking a marijuana cigarette contained in a miniature skull, and she was one of 15 people interviewed inVoices from the Love Generation.In 1970, Kandel was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident with her then-husband Billy Fritz (poet and member of the Hell’s Angels). But despite her withdrawal from public literary activism during her long recovery, she is known to have continued to write throughout her life. Although no new work has been published since; a limited edition of The Love Book was republished in 2003 by Superstition Street Press, a San Francisco publishing company.
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