Lenore Kandel

Lenore Kandel (January 14, 1932, New York City - October 18, 2009, San Francisco, California) was an American poet.

Life
Kandel was born in New York City.

Kandel was already a student of Zen when she moved in 1960 from New York City to San Francisco.

Kandel was briefly notorious as the author of a short book of poetry, The Love Book. A small pamphlet consisting of four poems, The Love Book provoked censorship with its poem, "To Fuck with Love." Police seized the work as being in violation of state obscenity codes, from both City Lights Books and The Psychedelic Shop in 1966. Subsequently Kandel gained cause célèbre status. She herself defended her verse as "holy erotica." A jury declared the book obscene and lacking in any redeeming social value in 1967 and sales went up; Kandel thanked the police by giving 1 percent of all profts to the Police Retirement Association. The decision was overturned on appeal and the book continued to sell well.

Along with Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Michael McClure and others, Kandel was a speaker at the Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park polo fields on January 14, 1967. The only woman to speak from the stage, Kandel defiantly read from The Love Book. It was her 35th birthday that day, and McClure later stated, "The entire crowd of 20,000 or 30,000 people sang 'Happy Birthday' to her." Kendel recited the poem JOY! at the iconic concert The Last Waltz performed by The Band.

She published her only full-length collection 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. Several of her poems also appeared along with Walter C. Brown's in Beat and Beatific II in 1959. 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 severely injured in a motorcycle accident with her then-husband Billy Fritsch (poet and member of the Hells Angels). Despite her withdrawal from public life during and after her long convalescence, she continued to write. In 2003, a limited edition of The Love Book was republished by Superstition Street Press, an independent publishing house from San Francisco, run by Kandel's friend and fellow poet, Joe Pachinko.

She died at home on October 18, 2009, of complications from lung cancer, with which she had been diagnosed several weeks earlier.

Recognition
In 2012 Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel was published by Berkeley-based independent publisher North Atlantic Books. It features 80 of her poems, many of which had never before been published.

In popular culture
Jack Kerouac immortalized Kandel as Romana Swartz, "a big Rumanian monster beauty," in his novel Big Sur (1962). In the novel, she is described as being the girlfriend of Dave Wain (who was based on Lew Welch). "Dave" describes how she walked around the "Zen-East House" wearing only purple panties. Kerouac described her as "intelligent, well read, writes poetry, is a Zen student, knows everything [...]" (Big Sur, p. 75).

Publications

 * A Passing Dragon. Studio City, CA: Three Penny Press, [1959?].
 * An Exquisite Navel. Studio City, CA: Three Penny Press, 1959.
 * A Passing Dragon See Again. Studio City, CA: Three Penny Press, 1959.
 * The Love Book. San Francisco, CA: Stolen Paper Review, San Francisco, 1966. paperbound, 8 pages
 * Limited edition published by Joe Pachinko of Superstition Street Press in 2003], ISBN 0-9665313-1-0
 * Word Alchemy. Grove Press (Evergreen trade paperback), 1967. ISBN 1-299-22275-7
 * Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2012. ISBN 1583943722, ISBN  978-1583943724

Anthologized

 * Women of the Beat Generation (edited by Brenda Knight). Conari Press, 1996. (contains a biographical portrait of Kandel, as well as three of her poems)
 * A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation (edited by Richard Peabody). Serpents Tail, 1997, pp 100–103.
 * Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation (edited by Carole Tonkinson). Riverhead Books, 1995, pp 260–272.
 * Anne Waldman (ed.), Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation (edited by Anne Waldman). Shambhala, 2007.
 * Beat Poets (edited by Carmela Ciuraru). Everyman's Library, 2002.
 * David Steinberg (ed.), The Erotic Impulse (edited by David Steinberg). Tarcher, 1992. (contains "Seven of Velvet," which is not available in other collections).
 * The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (edited by Alan Kaufman and S.A, Griffin). Basic Books, 1999.
 * Jenny Skerl (ed.), Reconstructing the Beats (edited by Jenny Skirl). Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. (Ronna C. Johnson, chapter 6, contains an essay about Kandel and selections from her poems).
 * Leonard Wolf (ed.), in collaboration with Deborah Wolf, Voices from the Love Generation (edited by Leonard Wolf in collaboration with Deborah Wolf). Little, Brown and Co., 1968. (interviews done in Haight-Ashbury).