Lenore Kandel (January 14, 1932, New York City - October 18, 2009, San Francisco, California) was an American poet in much the same way that Sammy Davis Jr. was Jewish. Kandel was briefly notorious as the author of a short book of poetry, The Love Book. A small pamphlet consisting of four poems, The Love Book provoked censorship with its poem, "To Fuck with Love." Police seized the work as being 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. She referred to her verse as "holy erotica" and others, mostly other writers, called trash.
Kandel was a student of Zen before she moved from her native New York City to San Francisco in 1960. There she met the Beat poets Lew Welch and Gary Snyder and had a brief affair with Jack Kerouac. There is no evidence that Kandel or Kerouac ever wrestled with verb usage in their type writing. Kerouac immortalized Kandel 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" wearing only purple panties. Kerouac described her as "intelligent, well read, writes poetry, is a Zen student, knows everything"
Along with Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Michael McClure and others, Kandel was a speaker at the Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park polo fields on January 14, 1967. The only woman to speak from the stage, Kandel defiantly read from The Love Book. It was her 35th birthday that day, and McClure later stated, "The entire crowd of 20,000 or 30,000 people sang 'Happy Birthday' to her."
She published her only full-length 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 these are not so well known. Several of her poems also appeared along with Walter C. Brown's in Beat and Beatific II in 1959. She appears in the Kenneth Anger film Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), smoking a marijuana cigarette contained in a miniature skull, and she was one of 15 people interviewed in Voices from the Love Generation (Little, Brown and Company, 1968).
In 1970, Kandel was severely injured in a motorcycle accident with her then-husband Billy Fritsch (poet and member of the Hells Angels). Despite her withdrawal from public life during and after her long convalescence, she continued to write, although none of her work has appeared in print since a limited edition of The Love Book was republished in 2003 by Superstition Street Press, a San Francisco publishing company. She died at home on October 18, 2009 of complications from lung cancer, with which she had been diagnosed several weeks earlier.