Kandel, Lenore, 1932-2009

<p>Lenore Kandel (January 14, 1932 in New York City – October 18, 2009 in San Francisco, California) was an American poet, affiliated with the Beat Generation and Hippie counterculture.</p>

<p>Her first works of poetry were the chapbooks An Exquisite Navel, A Passing Dragon, and A Passing Dragon Seen Again, published in 1959. Several of her poems also appeared in Beat and Beatific II in 1959.</p>

<p>Although Kandel was born in New York, her family lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania during her childhood. Afterward, she moved to Los Angeles to live with her father, screenwriter Aben Kandel. She returned to New York to attend The New School for Social Research on scholarship for three and a half years before she dropped out. She moved to San Francisco in 1960. She began living in the East-West House co-op where she met Jack Kerouac, who later immortalized her 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" (East-West House) wearing only purple panties. Kerouac described her as "intelligent, well read, writes poetry, is a Zen student, knows everything [...]" (Big Sur, p. 75). </p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>"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."</p>

<p>Coyote, Ms. Kandel and her then-boyfriend Bill Fritsch - a poet and Hell's Angel - became fast friends.</p>

<p>"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."</p>

<p>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.</p>