Word Alchemy

by Lenore Kandel

There are poems that confront the national malaise,poems of bitterness and fear ,and poems of powerful imagination dealing with familar themes in a wholly new, highly fantastic manner , like the five part "Circus".

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

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 novel Big 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 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 not so well known. She appears in the Kenneth Anger film Invocation of My Demon Brother, smoking a marijuana cigarette contained in a miniature skull, and she was one of 15 people interviewed in Voices 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.

Reviews

[Paul Deaton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not an elixir in which I would imbibe again. The verse is rooted in a certain San Francisco culture. That is its strength and value. Worth reading for that.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was the first book I read in 2015 when I stumbled upon it while renting a house with friends over NYE. It was an interesting read with a few nuggets but not enough to warrant a great rating from me. Some of the poems seem to be trying really hard to be different or unique. Overall, not a book of poetry I would recommend to friends.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

juvenile & strained; of its time - omphaloskeptic 60s