Lenore Kandel, shining light of the San Francisco poetry scene, author of the notorious, The Love Book has died aged 77. The Love Book, a small pamphlett made up of four poems, was seized by police in 1966 as hard-core pornography and book sellers were arrested for its sale. It was often said, Kandel saw the world with ‘peyote-visioned eyes’ and her work sought to translate these visions. A student of Zen, immortalised as Romana Schwarz in Kerouac’s Big Sur, her words continue to light up the minds of all who read them.
Here’s an excerpt from God/Love Poem:
GOD/LOVE POEM
there are no ways of love but / beautiful /
I love you all of them
I love you / your cock in my hands
stirs like a bird
in my fingers
as you swell and grow hard in my hand
forcing my fingers open
with your rigid strength
you are beautiful / you are beautiful
you are a hundred times beautiful
I stroke you with my loving hands
pink-nailed long fingers
I caress you
I adore you
my finger-tips… my palms…
your cock rises and throbs in my hands
a revelation / as Aphrodite knew it
(read the complete poem and other poems by Lenore Kandel)
