Lenore Kandel
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Lenore Kandel (January 14, 1932, New York City - October 18, 2009, San Francisco, California) was 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.[citation needed]
Kandel was a student of Zen before she moved from her native New York City to San Francisco in 1960. 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 Romana Schwarz, "a big Rumanian monster beauty" in his novel Big Sur (1962).
She has been described as a second generation Beat writer who developed psychedelicized aesthetics in the style of Allen Ginsberg.[citation needed] 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.[1]
A speaker at the Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park polo fields on 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 Alchemy in 1967. Other works include An Exquisite Navel, A Passing Dragon, and A Passing Dragon Seen Again, published by Three Penny Press in 1959, although these are not so well known. She appears in the Kenneth Anger film Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), smoking a marijuana cigarette contained in a miniature skull, and she was one of 15 people interviewed in Voices from the Love Generation (Little, Brown and Company, 1968).
In 1970, Kandel was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident with her then-husband Billy Fritsch (poet and member of the Hells Angels). But despite her withdrawal from public literary activism during her long recovery, she is known to have continued to write throughout her life. 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.[citation needed]
Contents |
[edit] Death
She died in her home on October 18, 2009 from complications of lung cancer, with which she was diagnosed several weeks earlier.[2]
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Table of Contents, Volume 1, No. 1 The Divine Animal
- Introduction to Lenore Kandel
- Lenore Kandel: A Critical Appreciation
- Three poems
- Works by or about Lenore Kandel in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
[edit] Further reading
- Lenore Kandel, The Love Book, Stolen Paper Review, San Francisco, 1966, paperbound, 8 pages (available on ABE)
- Limited edition of The Love Book published in 2003 ISBN 0-9665313-1-0
- Lenore Kandel, Word Alchemy, Grove Press, Evergreen trade paperback ISBN 1-299-22275-7
- Leonard Wolf (ed.), in collaboration with Deborah Wolf, Voices from the Love Generation (Little, Brown and Company, 1968) hardcover, 283 pages, interviews done in Haight-Ashbury
- Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation (Conari Press, 1996) contains a good biographical portrait of Kandel, as well as excerpts from her poetry
- Jenny Skerl (ed.), Reconstructing the Beats (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Ronna C. Johnson, chapter 6
- Richard Peabody (ed.), A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation (Serpents Tail, 1997), pp 100-103
