http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/22/BAN61A8O9A.DTL
Julian Guthrie, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Lenore Kandel hung out with Beat poets and was immortalized by Jack
Kerouac, wrote a book of love poetry banned as obscene and seized by
police, and believed in communal living, anarchic street theater,
belly dancing, and all things beautiful.
Ms. Kandel, a lyric poet and one of the shining lights of San
Francisco's famous counterculture of the '60s, died on Oct. 18 in San
Francisco. She was 77 and had been diagnosed with lung cancer two
weeks earlier.
"I met Lenore in 1965 at a citywide meeting of artists opposed to the
war in Vietnam," said actor Peter Coyote. "Lenore was physically
beautiful and physically commanding. She had this voluptuous
plumpness about her and an absolute serenity."
Coyote, Ms. Kandel and her then-boyfriend Bill Fritsch - a poet and
Hell's Angel - became fast friends.
"She was working as a belly dancer and would sew these beaded
curtains to make money on the side," said Coyote, a founder of the
Diggers, an anarchistic group supplying free food, housing and
medical aid to the needy in San Francisco. "We would sit around and
smoke dope and talk about philosophy and art. She was an enlightened
person, a great being."
Born in New York City on Jan. 14, 1932, to Russian and Mongol
parents, Ms. Kandel was educated in a one-room schoolhouse in Bucks
County, Pa., where she lived with her grandmother. She began writing
poetry as a child, attended college in New York and moved to San
Francisco around 1960, toward the end of the Beat era. Once here, she
became the girlfriend of poet Lew Welch and friends with the
movement's seminal figures, including Gary Snyder, Neal Cassady and
Allen Ginsberg.
In "Big Sur," Kerouac's 1962 novel, Ms. Kandel is portrayed as Romana
Swartz, a "big Rumanian monster beauty" and Welch as Dave Wain.
By the mid-1960s, Ms. Kandel was a key figure in the burgeoning
hippie scene in the Haight-Ashbury. Her book of poetry "The Love
Book," published in 1966, was deemed pornographic and the famed
Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street where it was sold was raided by the
police. Copies were confiscated on the grounds that their display and
sale "excited lewd thoughts" and the store's owners were arrested.
" 'The Love Book' was extremely graphic sexually," said Gerald
Nicosia, a Kerouac biographer and Beat generation chronicler. "She
showed this openness to sexuality, this freedom of lifestyle. With
'The Love Book,' she became a cause celebre. But Lenore was a true
lyric poet. Her language was as beautiful as anything being written."
Ms. Kandel wrote another book of poetry, "Word Alchemy," published in
1967. The same year, she was the only woman to speak onstage at the
Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park.
"She went from the Beat community to the Diggers, to being a major
player at the Human Be-In," said the poet and Beat documentarian who
goes by the name of Kush. "She was a very deep poet, and she was
committed to radical values and transforming culture."
Longtime friend Vicki Pollack, also a member of the Diggers, met
Kandel in 1968.
"I saw her read from 'Word Alchemy,' which is her most beautiful
work," Pollack said. "It changed the way I saw poetry. She became for
me a rock star."
In recent years, Ms. Kandel - who had suffered grievous spinal
injuries in a motorcycle crash aboard Fritsch's Harley - was confined
to her small apartment on Folsom Street. She continued to write, her
friends say, and to find joy in everyday encounters.
"She was in a lot of pain because of her back," said Pollack. "But
she got enjoyment out of anything and everything. Lenore had what I
call the gift of happiness."
A private memorial service is being planned.
--
E-mail Julian Guthrie at jguthrie@sfchronicle.com.
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