The paradox of Lenore Kandel is that she is one of the very best and most significant poets of the modern era, and also one of the least read and critically appreciated. Kandel came of age during the 1950’s and 1960’s and (excepting a few small chapbooks with minimal distribution) published only two books of poetry: The Love Book and Word Alchemy. Those two books alone should have established her as one of America’s foremost poets. Certainly no other poet has exceeded her in depth, breadth or daring of poetic vision. Her work exhibits clarity, technical excellence, style, passion and courage in venturing into the terra incognita of the human heart. Yet, the literary establishment has relegated her to a footnote in the history of the Beats and Hippies, and gives more weight to The Love Book’s prosecution for obscenity than to the book itself. Some critics and literary historians barely mention her work, but instead write of her as a lover of more famous male poets, the model for a minor character (Ramona Swartz) in Jack Kerouac’s novel, Big Sur, or a gadabout at Hippie gatherings, rock concerts, Digger happenings and celebrity events during San Francisco’s counterculture heyday. Mostly she is ignored, and her name is conspicuously absent from or placed far down the list of Beat poets.

It almost seems as if her literary fate is sealed. Her books are out of print, her style and honesty are considered to be unfashionably retro, and she simply does not exist in the rarefied atmosphere of literary academia. It is fair to ask why this has happened. Perhaps the answer lies in sheer accident: Kandel came into her own voice at a time of several transitions in American culture, and simply fell between the cracks. She was a serious writer at a time when few women writers were taken seriously. Sexism still reigned in the world of poetry. Many of her poems were unabashedly erotic during an era when women simply did not write about anything that transpired below their belts. She came of age when there were good girls and bad girls, and good girls didn’t write about “Fucking with Love,” which is the title of one of her poems. Women in that era were allowed to play the role of muse to a man, or at least to politely confine themselves to the literary kitchen, but it was inconceivable for a woman to speak boldly and in her own voice about sexuality. Then the culture changed. Eroticism became porn, and America was buried under an avalanche of predatory and exploitive sexual imagery that at first shocked, then dulled and finally nauseated most readers of serious literature. Kandel’s writing was very different, celebrating the sacredness and beauty of the human animal, but the onslaught of porn blurred boundaries and reinforced the completely inaccurate (but by then concretized) stereotype as Kandel a bad girl writing about being bad. Even among “nice” people, sexuality was reduced to a purely physical phenomenon within the cultural ethos. Perhaps the final nail in Kandel’s literary coffin came with the rise of feminism, which began by celebrating women (as does Kandel) but soon took a markedly asexual or even anti-sexual turn. It became almost impossible for a woman writer to be accepted by other women if she celebrated her sexuality, and especially if she celebrated loving men. Kandel’s innocence (yes, there is no other word to accurately describe her sexuality) was seen as exposing women to further sexual exploitation and catering to male erotic expectations about women. No one seemed to notice that Kandel is a woman who wrote as a woman, and about a woman’s experience of sexuality. Her work was a celebration of being a woman - physically, emotionally and spiritually. Kandel found herself isolated by a cultural framework that limits sexuality to physical pleasure, but denies any spiritual dimension to eros. By the 1970’s, feminism had, in effect, allied itself with the Catholic Church and Fundamentalist Protestants to condemn overt eroticism as exploitation of women, and any potential for a connection between eros and spirituality seemed to be severed forever. Further cultural changes almost seemed to glorify sexual exploitation, as what had been a relatively small cult of bondage, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism moved into the mainstream and is now considered the norm. Kandel’s poems about sexuality as beauty, innocence and spirituality are not likely to be embraced by this cultural change, and her poem about bondage, Poem for Perverts, flies in the face of the contemporary view that sexuality is psychodrama to act out dark fantasies. In contrast, Kandel’s poems are beams of pure white light cast upon a medieval world of darkness. In the present cultural context, the poetry of Kandel often seems like a painting by Michelangelo surrounded by row upon row of apocalyptic gargoyles.

It is time to resurrect Kandel’s work from obscurity and give it the critical attention it deserves. Last month, Superstition Street Press, a small San Francisco publisher, republished a limited edition of The Love Book. Only 500 copies were printed, but this could be an important first step toward igniting renewed interest in Kandel’s work. Superstition Street Press also tentatively plans to publish Kandel’s collected works in the spring of 2004. This volume would include both the full texts of The Love Book and Word Alchemy, and a large selection of previously unpublished work. It would seem that the time is right to begin taking a long, hard look at Kandel’s poetry and placing it in its proper literary perspective. An intriguing aspect of her work is that a large body of unpublished poems exists, and some of it soon may be available to the public. Some of these poems represent her early work, but also Kandel – who now is 72 – has never stopped writing over the nearly 40 years since her last book was published. One wonders if she has continued to grow and evolve artistically, and if her best work has never been unveiled. That possibility is intriguing indeed!

For the present, it is more than enough to look at her existing body of published work and to attempt to place it into a proper critical context.

Kandel’s Aesthetics

The introduction to Word Alchemy is perhaps the most eloquent statement of poetics that I have ever seen. It should be required reading for anyone who cares about modern literature. Certainly it can be seen as a framework within which to read Kandel’s poetry, but I also see it as a clear and powerful statement of the essence of all good poetry.

“Poetry is never compromise,” she wrote. “It is the manifestation/translation of a vision, an illumination, an experience…The aim is toward the increase of awareness. It may be awareness of the way a bird shatters the sky with his flight or awareness of the difficulty and necessity of trust or awareness of the desire for awareness or the fear of awareness…This seems to me to imply one primary responsibility on the part of the poet – that he tell the truth as he sees it. That he tell it as beautifully, as amazingly, as he can; that he ignite his own sense of wonder; that he works alchemy within the language – these are the form and existence of poetry itself.”

In those passages, Kandel accurately describes the impact of her own work upon the reader. She calls upon the poet to be absolutely and unflinchingly honest in her or his writing.

“Those who read modern poetry do so for pleasure, for insight, sometimes for counsel. The least they can expect is that the poet who shares his visions and experiences with them do so with no hypocrisy. To compromise poetry through fear is to atrophy the psyche. To compromise poetry through expediency is the soft, small murder of the soul.”

She speaks resoundingly and convincingly against censorship, be it externally imposed or within the poet’s own consciousness.

Any form of censorship, whether mental, moral, emotional or physical, whether from the inside out, or the outside in, is a barrier against self-awareness,” she wrote.

Poetry is alive because it is a medium of vision and experience.

It is not necessarily comfortable.

It is not necessarily safe.

…When a poet censors his vision he no longer tells the truth as he sees it…(This) results in an artificial limitation imposed on an art whose direction is beyond the limits of the conceivable. There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier breakers, bursts of perception, lines into infinity…

When a society is afraid of its poets, it is afraid of itself. A society afraid of itself stands as another definition of hell….

Those words were written almost four decades ago, but they could be describing the literary climate today. We live in an era when the threat of both external and self-censorship never has been greater, and the voices of our poets seemingly have been silenced to a mere whisper. Our era follows more than 30 years of deeply entrenched political correctness, when writers have lived in fear of breaking unwritten rules, or violating any one of an endless series of taboos. Although this era began with enshrining liberal biases that were barriers to free expression, it has entered a time when the burgeoning influence of the Christian Right in America is creating conservative walls to surround literature and censor uncomfortable thoughts. Honest writing about sexuality has been a casualty of both swings of the pendulum, as has been any possibility of looking at avenues explored by Kandel as diverse as non-traditional spirituality and altered states of consciousness as vehicles for human enlightenment and increased awareness.

At the time Kandel’s books were published and gaining new readers, it was almost inconceivable to think that America would once again become a militaristic nation and that peace would be made into a dirty word. Yet, in the years following the September 11 terrorist attack on America, dissent and opposition to endless war is seen as treason. We cover up a reproduction of Picasso’s anti-war painting, Guernica, at the United Nations to allow generals to address the TV cameras about the reasons they want to go to war, and anti-war poetry is almost unpublishable in the mainstream press. Today, a poet like Kandel would be censored, ignored or – failing that – destroyed for speaking honestly. Even mainstream novelist Barbara Kingsolver has been placed on the defensive and subjected to vicious attacks for writing a polite essay questioning the validity of war as a solution. Some poets know better, and the torch lit by Kandel and others of her generation is being passed on. Poet Sam Hamill, for example, has resurrected a concept from the Vietnam era known as Poets Against the War, and has assembled an online collection of more than 14,000 poems of resistance and published an abridged print version. These efforts, while heroic, seemingly have had little impact on a nation intent on snuffing out any voice that departs from the cultural norm.

I don’t claim to know what Kandel might have written, or may write, about the world today. But I do think that whatever she might write would speak honestly and touch us deeply. It would be dramatically different than the sort of inoffensive, castrated poetry that is prevalent in our age, which seems to do everything possible to avoid having meaning or impact. One can read through highly regarded contemporary literary journals and, a week later, not remember a single poem. Poetry has not lost its power to touch people deeply, but we seem to have forgotten that this is its purpose. We no longer demand this of our poets, and perhaps we no longer are willing to accept it. One of the most significant things about reading Kandel’s poetry is that we are reminded of the power poetry can and should have in our lives. Virtually every one of her poems grabs its readers by the shoulders, shakes them hard and won’t let go. Hers are not poems that any intelligent and perceptive reader will be able to forget. They have the power and impact to haunt the mind and heart for decades.

That is exactly what poetry should do, and Kandel’s statement of poetics demands nothing less.

The introduction to Word Alchemy describes the same literary phenomena in an earlier era, and spells out her own definition of the balance between meaning and aesthetics in poetry: “There is no point today in that poetry which exists mainly as an exercise in dexterity. Craft is valuable insofar as it serves as a brilliant midwife for clarity, beauty, vision; when it becomes enamored of itself it produces word masturbation.” Kandel looks toward academia (perhaps this should be expanded to include the entire literary establishment in any era) as inculcating a fear of offending those who follow well-worn trails, with the result that “visions and language” become “dwarfed and muted” and that poems become mere “vehicle(s) for literary gymnastics.” While street poetry avoids this pitfall, she wrote, it “too often loses its visions through a lack of clarity, through sloppiness, through a lack of the art of the craft.” She defines good poetry as a necessary combination of substance, fearlessness and art.

Kandel writes that the proper language for poetry is the actual language used in life and, if the required language does not exist in life, it is up to the poet to discover it. She resists censorship of language in any form, adding that only the poet can judge what language is required by the poem. “Euphemisms chosen by fear are a covenant with hypocrisy and will immediately destroy the poem and will eventually destroy the poet,” she wrote.

Her message always is for poetry to be genuine and for the poet to be true to her-himself. “Accept the being that you are and illuminate yourself by your own clear light,” she wrote of the relationship between poet and poem.

In Word Alchemy, Kandel shows tremendous breadth and depth of subject matter, and her poems encompass a vast expanse of what it means to be human. Yet the fact remains that Kandel is seen by many to be primarily an erotic poet, and we will turn next to this aspect of her work. While this definition is limiting in light of the full range of her work, it also is true that some of her most beautiful and powerful poems celebrate the spirit of eros.

Eros and Ecstasy

“I stand witness for the divine animal and the possibility of the ecstatic access of enlightenment,” Kandel wrote as a description of herself. “My favorite word is YES!”

In those few words, Kandel eloquently summarizes her view of eros and its relationship to spirituality, and also casts the die that separates her from predominate cultural views about the nature of human sexuality. Our culture is willing to look at sexuality as a physical phenomenon, and makes exceptions to it’s moral codes to allow for erotic writing to sexually arouse or even to sexually exploit, as long as certain rules are followed and certain proprieties are observed. However, it does not seem willing to grant sexuality a greater power or purpose, or to acknowledge a link between eros, ecstasy and enlightenment. To make this link is, to many people, tantamount to blasphemy. For many others (perhaps most others), it simply is inconceivable. To the critics, this link was the reason why Kandel could be dismissed as naively idealistic. Kandel’s writing quickly became ensnared in the web of limitations and sicknesses enshrined by our culture under the guise of morality and propriety, and then it was forgotten.

Kandel made the link between eros, ecstasy and transcendence dramatically in The Love Book, and this is the main reason the censors singled it out for prosecution. This book was not really prosecuted for obscenity (although obscenity was the official allegation), as there was much more graphic pornography available on the market in 1966 that was not seized or censored. In truth, The Love Book was prosecuted for blasphemy. It was prosecuted for celebrating the human animal, and for daring to suggest that humans were created in the image of God and that we are inherently divine. It was prosecuted for making a prayerful sacrament out of sexuality, which was regarded by our culture as – at best – a weakness, if not a sin or a Satanic temptation. It was prosecuted for viewing ecstasy as a path toward enlightenment, instead of a path toward damnation. Her poetry stripped away the cultural bias toward asceticism, self-denial and self-flagellation. Kandel’s poetry is about loving and honoring the self, humanity and life itself. It is about joy, and she does not repent.

I regard Kandel as the Twentieth Century’s most striking and gifted spiritual and artistic descendant of poet Walt Whitman. Whitman’s work has been persecuted and his artistic merit has been only grudgingly acknowledged for exactly the same reason as Kandel’s. Whitman, too, celebrated the human animal and called it divine.

The cover of The Love Book is a reproduction of a Tibetan scroll symbolizing the union of male and female principles in the universe, and much of Kandel’s writing inside the book takes on the feeling of a chanted prayer. She described holding her lover’s penis in her hand and feeling it swell, and she wrote:

you are beautiful/you are beautiful

you are a hundred times beautiful

Taking his penis in her mouth, she wrote, “my tongue makes worship on you,” and, watching her lover move over her, she described his face as

                    …the face of all the gods

                    and beautiful demons

The centerpiece of The Love Book is a three-part poem entitled “To Fuck With Love.” It is one of her most dramatic statements of the link between ecstasy and enlightenment.

…the tongue between my legs spreading my thighs to screams

and I burst I burst I burst

…my god the worship that it is to fuck!

            Kandel came of age during a time when writing began to emulate the sound and feel of music. Kerouac, in particular, used jazz riffs, rhythms and phrasing in his writing, and many of his long passages take on the quality of horn solos. Kandel may or may not have been influenced directly by this style of writing, but much of her poetry has the feel of jazz. The human body is her instrument, and the acts of sex are her solos and harmonies. Her phrasing builds in intensity, breathlessly reaching for crescendo and moving beyond it to different dimensions.

I am the god-animal, the mindless cuntdeity, the he-god animal

is over me, through me           we are become one total angel

united in fire     united in semen and sweat     united in lovescream

                       sacred are our acts and our actions

                       sacred are our parts and our persons

            The wild is not separate from the divine, and both are utterly human, she wrote:

to fuck with love

to love with all the heat and wild of fuck

…leaving me pure       burned into oblivion

…SCREAMING DELIGHT over the entire universe

                                                                            and beyond

…the energy

indescribable

almost unbearable

Kandel’s eroticism reaches its highest level of poetic expression in Word Alchemy. “Love-Lust Poem,” in particular, stands out as perhaps the best example I know of the marriage between eros, ecstasy and the divine. The entire poem is a celebratory song of love that is expressed ecstatically. It is a song of innocence and incandescent desire that reaches toward the divine.

I want to fuck you

I want to fuck you all the parts and places

I want you all of me

…I am not sure where I leave off, where you begin

is there a difference, here in the soft permeable membranes

…and the taste of your mouth is of me

and the taste of my mouth is of you

and moaning mouth to mouth

…I want you to explode that hot spurt of pleasure inside me

and I want to lie there with you

smelling the good smell of fuck that’s all over us

and you kiss me with that aching sweetness

and there is no end to love

For Kandel, there is no end to love. There are no limits to the power and potential of eros, joy and ecstasy. It would be difficult to find a more eloquent expression of the beauty of healthy, open and loving sexuality than “Love-Lust Poem.” For that perspective alone, Kandel’s work stands apart from any other Twentieth Century poet I have read.

In “Joy Song,” Kandel uses imagery reminiscent of the best of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of flowers.

my beloved wields his sex

          like a hummingbird

poised on the delicate brink

What pleasure to be a honey plant

                  and

             open wide

Photo by Karyn Childress

“Eros/Poem” shows clearly that Kandel sees beauty and transcendence in sexuality, and that love cannot be fettered by conventions and chains:

Praise be to Eros who loves only beauty

and finds it everywhere

…sharing his own soft wanton grace

with all who let his presence enter in

faithless as flowers, fickle as the wind-borne butterfly

            In “Hard Core Love,” Kandel paints a radiant portrait of the relationship between the animal and the divine in humans:

the divine is not separate from the beast; it is the total creature that

transcends itself

the messiah that has been invoked is already here

Kandel is not a Tantric poet, although the influences of this spiritual tradition are clear in her writing. Tantra ultimately is ascetic – using sexuality as a method to transcend sexuality in order to transcend the samsara of human desires. Kandel, in contrast, does not want to transcend her humanity. She wants to embrace it and launch it outward into a universe of unimagined possibilities. Tantra ultimately rejects the animal. Kandel celebrates this aspect of being human. She is not searching for an ethereal version of Nirvana, but wants to enter Paradise with her feet firmly planted on the Earth.

Buddhism is at the center of her worldview, but her poetry defines it on her own terms.