Cherkovski, Neeli

Notes from Syropa

San Francisco, CA: Klean Kharma Press, 1976. First Printing. Folded Single Sheet. “It’s that time of year again. The Yak Karnak School for Wayward Boys and Disembodied Women is opening its Fall Season with a star-studded cast of poets, consciousness-expanding media freaks, New York intellectuals, and pampered Buddhists from various universities. / … / Michael McFury, author of WHALE MEAT AND OTHER POEMS, will be on hand with his herd of trained mammals. He’ll bring eighteen sea lions, two sperm whales, eleven reindeer, an armadillo, three grizzles (they’re perfectly harmless) and one great Kodiak bear. Also, he’ll be introducing a giant ground sloth, editor of his last manuscript UURAAGH, a play in four acts. / … / A course in Advanced Emptiness is also featured. It involves dumping a lot of pre-conceived rhetoric onto the page, to match a special idea of hipness and being “with it,” then wrapping it up in a few choice Buddhist phrases, and calling it poetry” (Abridged qtn. from “Notes from Syropa”). Offered here is Notes from Syropa, the legendary satirical pamphlet of 1976 authored by the late, great Neeli Cherkovski (1945-2024). In addition to being a personal favorite of this author (Your Devoted “VP-of-Operations” here at TMB), it’s a consensus classic of the Second San Francisco Renaissance, — an evinces an exemplary relation to the phenomenon from which it arose. Its precise origins relate to a protest held by key “Baby Beat”/SSFR authors (including Thomas Rain Crowe [b. 1949] and Cherkovski) against a fundraiser for the newly-established Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. The Baby Beats feared institutionalization of the Beat Tradition would kill its influence slowly and quietly, and in many ways their prediction proved correct—Naropa or not. Beat readers that are fans of “roasting” in comedy — (and understand its relation to the great satirical literary tradition that preceded it) — will especially love this item, as the exaggerations it mobilizes (& the caricatures these ‘reductive essences’ work to form) bear more than a passing relation to the lives of those pinned beneath them. The result is hilarious: a pamphlet full of knee-slapping laughs that We at TMB hope to see reprinted (& shared) by Beat readers for all eternity. From the collection of Thomas Rain Crowe, the legendary American poet and co-authorial founder of the Second San Francisco Renaissance. For more information on the Thomas Rain Crowe archive (assembled & curated by Third Mind Books), see our book, Starting from San Francisco: Thomas Rain Crowe in Conversation with Third Mind Books (Item No. 3071) & the catalog for the Crowe archive (Item No. 1010), which contains several excerpts and quotations from the book as well as a full listing of the archive’s contents, which are now being offered for sale individually on the Third Mind Books site. Folded single sheet: the first-&-only printing of this incredibly rare (& ingeniously comic) SSFR collectible. In strong near fine condition with only mild-to-moderate edge-wear & mild-to-enunciated horizontal, as well as vertical creasing (really a series of low-visibility “nick-indentations” as we’ve termed them, elsewhere) variously present throughout; age-toning present but generally mild throughout—impressive given the activistic history of its authorship, and the way the text was diffused. Near Fine. [Item #7254]

Price: $50.00