Louise Landes Levi

LLL was the recipient of the ACKER (Kathy Acker) AWARD NYC for POETRY. 2020.

The formal presentation was held at the Theater of the New City, NYC, 2021.

Also,

The Philip Whalen Memorial Award
(Poets In Need) 2004 & 2012

Italian Premio Poesia, Saliola Award, 2006

About Louise Landes Levi (LLL)

Louise Landes Levi is a poet, translator, musician, and performer whose travels have charted an elaborate constellation of mystic and cosmic pathways.

Louise Landes Levi is a poet, translator, musician, and performer whose travels have charted an elaborate constellation of mystic and cosmic pathways. A founding member of Daniel (Abdul Hayye) Moore’s Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, she participated—from 1967 to 1969, alongside Terry Riley and Angus Maclise—in multidisciplinary drama inspired by Artaud’s research with the Tarahumara, the Balinese Gamelan, Tibetan monastic ritual, and Indian dance. Following studies at Mills College with sarangi master Pandit Ram Narayan, Levi traveled alone from Paris through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to reach northern India for research into its musical and poetic tradition. There, she studied with Sri Annapurna Devi and Ustad Abdul Majid Khan, later becoming Ali Ak Bar Khan’s pupil at the Basel Conservatory of Music and in California. Completing her journey in her birthplace of New York, Levi studied with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, monitoring their Dream House into the 21st century. Levi has translated the work of Henri Michaux and Indian mystic Mira Bai (whose Sweet On My Lips La Monte Young wrote the introduction for) and is responsible for the first English translation of Rene Daumal’s Rasa, or, Knowledge of the Self: Essays on Indian Aesthetics (New Directions, 1982). She has published over a dozen books of her own poetry, most recently Crazy Louise (or la Conversazione Sacra), a series of poems examining sexual trauma from the perspective of an initiate, delineating an oriental interpretation of lunacy to reclaim the notion of the feminine hysterical from its subordinate and abusive occidental role. Levi’s introverted lifestyle and reverence for musical tradition and attainment have left comparatively little space for musical dissemination, but the last decade has seen the reappearance of works from the ‘80s in addition to several contemporary releases featuring contributions from her friends, the late Ira Cohen and Catherine Christer Hennix. Whether alone or with accompaniment, Levi’s elegiac sarangi, bells, and flute exude the feeling of otherworldly, indeed forgotten ritual. Her invocation & interpretive sense of raga, in these recordings, overlaid with spoken and sung poetry, invoke threshold experience, railing against mono culture with a sincerity & presence as sardonic or mournful as it is devotional.

—ADRIAN REV, for Blank Forms

LLL’s works have been translated into
Dutch, German, Italian, Serbo-Croatian.
Japanese, Polish (unpublished)
&
Spanish (forthcoming) GURU PUNK

Enlightened Aesthetics: LOUISE LANDES LEVI with Raymond Foye

Brooklyn Rail, May 2020

Sweet on my Lips: the love poems of Mirabai

“The relationship between Louise and Mirabai seems divinely ordained. It is hard to imagine a more perfect vehicle for the English language realization of this ecstatic work. At first, I was unable to finish reading even one poem because, each time I began, I received such an overwhelming transmission of spiritual love that my eyes blurred with tears and I could go no further. It was more than enough. Louise’s translations had retained the power of beauty that can far transcend the words that express it. They reminded us that even the words of our greatest poets are sometimes but fleeting reflections of the brilliance that informs them.” — La Monte Young

“Sweet on My Lips: the Love Poems of Mirabai, by Louise Landes-Levi, is as much a process as it is a book, asking us to peel back layers until we arrive at the center. In this case, the center is 25 of Mirabai’s love poems translated from the Braja bhasa dialect, the literary language of Medieval North India. Represented in this intricate assemblage is the 30-year commitment Landes-Levi has given to Mirabai’s work. It is an evolution that took her to India as a young woman, led her intuitively in the steps of Mirabai to a study of Sanskrit and a fuller understanding of the bhakti tradition in which Mirabai writes.
So, this book, like a single Mira bhajan, has a power and form all its own. But it also has a delicacy in the reader’s hands. “Some lose him/ sleeping,/ I lost him/ awake.” It needs to be approached carefully so that none of its aspects are lost in our haste or possible misunderstanding. Radiating from the center of the book, where the poems act as its heart, is a series of prefaces, introductions, and appendixes not following a linear progression.
The first set, like two parentheses around the body of poems, are two essays, both from 1977: one immediately precedes the poems, the other immediately follows. They are the most ambitious in literary and historical breadth. The second round of commentary is dated 1987, a set of essays surrounding the first like additional parentheses. In these essays, “a return to a bygone period,” there is a distancing from the initial work, but Landes-Levi is still “hoping to obtain in myself the fruit which her [Mirabai’s] poetry conceals.” She often refers to her Tibetan teacher, Namkhai Norbu, from whom she receives many insights, and she asks her readers to “excuse any errors of transcription or translation and profit, as I have, from the passionate love of Mira.”
“Preface,” 1995, opens the book, and “Appendix II,” 1992-4, followed by an undated “Appendix III, The Music of Mirabai,” and a glossary of terms, ends the book. By arranging the essays in this manner, Landes-Levi avoids the circumference, leading us straight through the center: “In the instance of texts which deal with transmission and lineage, the act of translation is a direct path into these essences and the energies they convey. ” As the reader, you must dissect. In some cases your questions won’t be answered. Each ring represents a decade of thought. As Landes-Levi says in the last paragraph of her final commentary, “If I now offer the Mira work, it is a simple gesture, a mudra of experience.”
Landes-Levi wants us to know “the precise music of the Braja poem.” She has shown us their shape (three poems are included in their untransliterated form), their sound, through a transliterated poem and a discussion of the rasa, or mode for the poems, which is “sringara,” that of erotic expression and spiritual intoxication. She has spoken extensively about the bhakti tradition, which takes Krishna as its supreme deity, and the love play in which Mirabai assumes the role of Krishna’s lover. “O Girdhara, I serve/ your/ Lotus-feet.” Isn’t this more than most translators would do for their readers?
She also expects more from us. The extensive notes that accompany the translated poems prove this. Landes-Levi prefers to leave certain place names, objects and epithets in their original. The choice magnifies that aspect of Mirabai’s poems which makes them seem both close and strange at once. Readers can either refer to the footnotes or simply bathe in the sound of the original. Either way, you manage to hear the voice of Mirabai as she sung in the Northern India of the 16th Century; you hear the voices of her teachers before her, and all of the later poets in the School of Krishna Bhakti continuing to the present day. “Yogi, I’m your slave/ don’t leave, / show me/ Love’s path.”
After giving us the poems, a description of the old house in Bombay by the sea where the translations began to take shape is particularly compelling. The last commentary goes back to the conditions that led Landes-Levi to India in 1968, then back to her childhood, where a certain predilection for India had already begun to show. In a gesture of pure generosity, Landes-Levi holds back nothing now. Earlier cryptic statements open in full disclosure. “Kind-one, hear my complaint,/ I’m floating on a cosmic sea,/ I’ve gone the whole way.”
Reader, allow yourself to be led through this poet’s life, with photographs and maps of India to aid you until you arrive at the other’s life, the ancient poet, whose body is said to have disappeared at death, leaving only a sari behind. “O Love, you live in a foreign land,/but my love for you/ is unchanging.” Because Landes-Levi adopted the tradition of Mirabai, through her we see Mirabai embodied. Landes-Levi ends up in all the places close to Mirabai, from the palace at Udaipur, where she began her life as a bride and Queen`, to the forests of Brindaban, land of Krishna, to the jungle village of Kanchipuran, where Mirabai’s lineage began. Landes-Levi’s life has become inextricably and uniquely bound to that of Mirabai. “Mira says,/ I’m yours,/ Don’t forget.”
The power of the book is in its multiple levels of expression: personal, literary, mystical, interwoven in a manner difficult to describe. Go back to the poems after you have finished the book. Are you not a better reader of Mirabai’s poetry now? “With tears I planted the vine of love,” sings Mira. “Now that vine is full with its fruit, Bliss.”
Sweet on My Lips is such a vine.” — Review by INDIA REFAR originally in Bigbridge.org. Issue 9.

Guru Punk

“Louise Landes Levi’s poems are the union of street smarts and great wisdom. Her poems sing in the mind, and dance through the heart and throat, and arms and legs, with great Clarity and bliss. Louise is Saraswati, goddess of poetry.” — John Giorno

“louise landes levi’s guru punk is sex in the city light years delivered from tv usa’s yuppie mortification. the fast breath of punk and the end- less flow of buddha. like passing beauty in the sub- way. it’s there, it’s gone, it’s there again.” —Thurston Moore

“Guru Punk, original oxymoron cuts to the essence of Louise Landes Levi’s work. Guru, as devotion combined with Punk– total defiance of conventional mind, together defines the centuries old tradition of practitioners writing their path to realization to find bliss midst the bricolage of samsara’s discarded moments.” —Jacqueline Gens, The Mirror

The Book L

At last, a full-scale collection of LLL’s under-the-radar poetry. An essential gathering of her work. Visionary, musician, translator, L’s work is sui generis, true to her keen & keening mind & deep soul flashes. No recent American poet has so consistently been in the light & shadows, so restless yet so centered. Resistant & resilient in her certainties & questions. Diamond flashes of light in the world & beyond it. I’ve been reading her small books & fascicles & translations for – at last some sense of her work’s range is now available.—David Meltzer

Where I Stand in Angel

“Where I Stand In Angel ~ by Louise Landes Levi is a terrific, lyrical and fierce dispatch from the far margins of society, at turns deeply romantic and
compassionate, especially in the face of brutalities, clear-eyed of the often sanctimonious spiritual while never ever abandoning the star she
navigates her course by. She is the real deal, not often will you encounter such a person so generous in appraisal of this existence. A
true poet of the bardo.” —Aaron Sinift

Interview with Louise Landes Levi for Brooklyn Rail 05/2020

Some audio recordings by Louise Landes Levi and Friends

“With a practice dating back to the 1960s, over the last decade the poet, musician, and performer, Louise Landes Levi has slowly come into focus as one of the most fascinating and engaging figures in the contemporary landscape….., she stands among the great links between high psychedelia, the countercultural explorations of Artaud and Michaux, Eastern mysticism, Hindustani music, and the sonic avant-garde.” — SOUNDOLM

City of Delirium (on Youtube)

LLL/Sacred Remains In The Transformation Station