Lenore Kandel's first, and most famous book of poetry was "The Love Book," (1966) which caused much controversy upon its publication due to its sexual topics and language. Her second book, "Word Alchemy," was published in 1967. In the 1970s she stopped publishing.
Her works may be hard to find- good luck on your project!
Here's more info. I couldn't put it all on here as her poems are very sexually expilicit, but hope this helps .
Lenore Kandel:
A Critical Appreciation
by JOHN YATES
The paradox of Lenore Kandel is that she is one of the very best and most significant poets of the modern era, and also one of the least read and critically appreciated. Kandel came of age during the 1950’s and 1960’s and (excepting a few small chapbooks with minimal distribution) published only two books of poetry: The Love Book and Word Alchemy. Those two books alone should have established her as one of America’s foremost poets. Certainly no other poet has exceeded her in depth, breadth or daring of poetic vision. Her work exhibits clarity, technical excellence, style, passion and courage in venturing into the terra incognita of the human heart. Yet, the literary establishment has relegated her to a footnote in the history of the Beats and Hippies, and gives more weight to The Love Book’s prosecution for obscenity than to the book itself. Some critics and literary historians barely mention her work, but instead write of her as a lover of more famous male poets, the model for a minor character (Ramona Swartz) in Jack Kerouac’s novel, Big Sur, or a gadabout at Hippie gatherings, rock concerts, Digger happenings and celebrity events during San Francisco’s counterculture heyday. Mostly she is ignored, and her name is conspicuously absent from or placed far down the list of Beat poets.
The poetry of Kandel often seems like a painting by Michelangelo surrounded by row upon row of apocalyptic gargoyles.
It almost seems as if her literary fate is sealed. Her books are out of print, her style and honesty are considered to be unfashionably retro, and she simply does not exist in the rarefied atmosphere of literary academia. It is fair to ask why this has happened. Perhaps the answer lies in sheer accident: Kandel came into her own voice at a time of several transitions in American culture, and simply fell between the cracks. She was a serious writer at a time when few women writers were taken seriously. Sexism still reigned in the world of poetry. Many of her poems were unabashedly erotic during an era when women simply did not write about anything that transpired below their belts. She came of age when there were good girls and bad girls, and good girls didn’t write about “+++ing with Love,” which is the title of one of her poems. Women in that era were allowed to play the role of muse to a man, or at least to politely confine themselves to the literary kitchen, but it was inconceivable for a woman to speak boldly and in her own voice about sexuality. Then the culture changed. Eroticism became porn, and America was buried under an avalanche of predatory and exploitive sexual imagery that at first shocked, then dulled and finally nauseated most readers of serious literature. Kandel’s writing was very different, celebrating the sacredness and beauty of the human animal, but the onslaught of porn blurred boundaries and reinforced the completely inaccurate (but by then concretized) stereotype as Kandel a bad girl writing about being bad. Even among “nice” people, sexuality was reduced to a purely physical phenomenon within the cultural ethos. Perhaps the final nail in Kandel’s literary coffin came with the rise of feminism, which began by celebrating women (as does Kandel) but soon took a markedly asexual or even anti-sexual turn. It became almost impossible for a woman writer to be accepted by other women if she celebrated her sexuality, and especially if she celebrated loving men. Kandel’s innocence (yes, there is no other word to accurately describe her sexuality) was seen as exposing women to further sexual exploitation and catering to male erotic expectations about women. No one seemed to notice that Kandel is a woman who wrote as a woman, and about a woman’s experience of sexuality. Her work was a celebration of being a woman - physically, emotionally and spiritually. Kandel found herself isolated by a cultural framework that limits sexuality to physical pleasure, but denies any spiritual dimension to eros. By the 1970’s, feminism had, in effect, allied itself with the Catholic Church and Fundamentalist Protestants to condemn overt eroticism as exploitation of women, and any potential for a connection between eros and spirituality seemed to be severed forever. Further cultural changes almost seemed to glorify sexual exploitation, as what had been a relatively small cult of bondage, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism moved into the mainstream and is now considered the norm. Kandel’s poems about sexuality as beauty, innocence and spirituality are not likely to be embraced by this cultural change, and her poem about bondage, Poem for Perverts, flies in the face of the contemporary view that sexuality is psychodrama to act out dark fantasies. In contrast, Kandel’s poems are beams of pure white light cast upon a medieval world of darkness. In the present cultural context, the poetry of Kandel often seems like a painting by Michelangelo surrounded by row upon row of apocalyptic gargoyles.
It is time to resurrect Kandel’s work from obscurity and give it the critical attention it deserves. Last month, Superstition Street Press, a small San Francisco publisher, republished a limited edition of The Love Book. Only 500 copies were printed, but this could be an important first step toward igniting renewed interest in Kandel’s work. Superstition Street Press also tentatively plans to publish Kandel’s collected works in the spring of 2004. This volume would include both the full texts of The Love Book and Word Alchemy, and a large selection of previously unpublished work. It would seem that the time is right to begin taking a long, hard look at Kandel’s poetry and placing it in its proper literary perspective. An intriguing aspect of her work is that a large body of unpublished poems exists, and some of it soon may be available to the public. Some of these poems represent her early work, but also Kandel – who now is 72 – has never stopped writing over the nearly 40 years since her last book was published. One wonders if she has continued to grow and evolve artistically, and if her best work has never been unveiled. That possibility is intriguing indeed!
For the present, it is more than enough to look at her existing body of published work and to attempt to place it into a proper critical context.
Kandel’s Aesthetics
The introduction to Word Alchemy is perhaps the most eloquent statement of poetics that I have ever seen. It should be required reading for anyone who cares about modern literature. Certainly it can be seen as a framework within which to read Kandel’s poetry, but I also see it as a clear and powerful statement of the essence of all good poetry.
“Poetry is never compromise,” she wrote. “It is the manifestation/translation of a vision, an illumination, an experience…The aim is toward the increase of awareness. It may be awareness of the way a bird shatters the sky with his flight or awareness of the difficulty and necessity of trust or awareness of the desire for awareness or the fear of awareness…This seems to me to imply one primary responsibility on the part of the poet – that he tell the truth as he sees it. That he tell it as beautifully, as amazingly, as he can; that he ignite his own sense of wonder; that he works alchemy within the language – these are the form and existence of poetry itself.”
In those passages, Kandel accurately describes the impact of her own work upon the reader. She calls upon the poet to be absolutely and unflinchingly honest in her or his writing.
“Those who read modern poetry do so for pleasure, for insight, sometimes for counsel. The least they can expect is that the poet who shares his visions and experiences with them do so with no hypocrisy. To compromise poetry through fear is to atrophy the psyche. To compromise poetry through expediency is the soft, small murder of the soul.”
She speaks resoundingly and convincingly against censorship, be it externally imposed or within the poet’s own consciousness.
Any form of censorship, whether mental, moral, emotional or physical, whether from the inside out, or the outside in, is a barrier against self-awareness,” she wrote.
Poetry is alive because it is a medium of vision and experience.
It is not necessarily comfortable.
It is not necessarily safe.
…When a poet censors his vision he no longer tells the truth as he sees it…(This) results in an artificial limitation imposed on an art whose direction is beyond the limits of the conceivable. There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier breakers, bursts of perception, lines into infinity…
When a society is afraid of its poets, it is afraid of itself. A society afraid of itself stands as another definition of hell….
When a society is afraid of its poets, it is afraid of itself. A society afraid of itself stands as another definition of hell…. -Lenore Kandel
Those words were written almost four decades ago, but they could be describing the literary climate today. We live in an era when the threat of both external and self-censorship never has been greater, and the voices of our poets seemingly have been silenced to a mere whisper. Our era follows more than 30 years of deeply entrenched political correctness, when writers have lived in fear of breaking unwritten rules