Louise Landes Levi •
PD: SUMMER 2024 • ISBN: 978-1-887276-43-6
In WHERE I STAND IN ANGEL the subject is appropriation. Levi borrows from Ginsberg (the title is from Kaddish, Part V), Gysin & Burroughs have borrowed from Ma Chig, for the initiates Ma Chig Labdron, founder of Chod – to CUT, a female lineage transformed at the Beat Hotel, Paris, the 1950s, into ‘a male cult’, writes Terry Wilson, Gysin’s biographer.
This is rare poetry because it is a poetry intensely of the senses, and yet at the same time deeply spiritual in a kind of secret, Kabbalisitic way, so that at times it seems one must be initiated into the poetry as if one were learning a new or hidden religion. — Gerald Nicosia, from his introduction to Where I Stand in Angel.
What people are saying about Where I Stand in Angel
Vision and Duende in LLL’s Angel
Antonio J. Bonome, PhD
The title Where I Stand in Angel is itself a declaration. The book belongs to the same lineage as Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” where the poet stands at the grave, eye buried, voice calling into Sheol. Like Ginsberg’s cawing cries and black-clouded Eye, Levi’s visions do not console so much as demand presence. The Underworld—announced on the back cover by Yokoo’s collage title, “You Will Definitely Go to Hell” (君も必ず地獄に行く)—appears here less as threat than as passage: a descent that renders knowledge concrete rather than abstract. This is where the concept of “duende” becomes difficult to avoid. Federico García Lorca explained that duende does not descend from above like an angel; it rises from the ground permeating your being “through the soles of your feet.” Levi’s poems are saturated with that energy. Her voice refuses safe distance, remaining in a zone where song entails struggle and vision is inseparable from wound. It is worth clarifying here that documenting injury and romanticizing pain are not one and the same thing. Duende, in this context, names neither aesthetic intensity nor inspiration, but the refusal to exit that condition.
Levi’s poems insist on juxtaposition as method and exposure as insight. They also invite speculative reversals—what if the collagist were not Štyrský but Emilie herself; what if Kaddish were written from Naomi’s position rather than Allen’s; what if the Scarlet Woman, rather than Crowley, founded the Argenteum Astrum. Such gestures are not merely provocative but structural, re-centering vision within embodied, often feminized positions historically marginalized within avant-garde and esoteric traditions. Levi’s stance aligns less with Surrealist urge than with ritual endurance. Where Štyrský’s dream erotics emphasize compulsive return, Levi’s dreamwork—inflected by Chöd practice and tantric models of descent—functions as offering. Experiences of loss, humiliation, desire, and grief are neither psychologized nor transcended; they are placed into the poem as material to be confronted and symbolically consumed. The self is not purified but dismantled or at least rendered unstable as a site of authority.
It is perhaps telling that Louise Landes Levi does not appear prominently in many collections of “women Beat writers.” Whether this absence reflects critical oversight or deliberate positioning is difficult to determine. What can be stated with confidence is that Levi’s work operates in direct continuity with Beat commitments to vision, sound and lived practice. Her relative invisibility may be less a failure of recognition than a chosen condition. There is something persuasive in the suspicion that Levi occupies the role of a hidden master, a task that seems to suit both her work and its uncompromising demands. Standing “in Angel” is not elevation but a maintained position at the crossing of worlds, where insight must be earned through endurance and exposure. Few contemporary poetry books are willing to occupy this space. Fewer still can sustain it without spectacle. Where I Stand in Angel is not, finally, a book to be decoded. It is a rigorous poetic diary—ecstatic, uncompromising, and written with duende.
Antonio J. Bonome, PhD. Lecturer at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Beat Generation scholar.
ON FACEBOOK:
“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 (editor/founder, Five Year Plan https://www.5yearplan.org/).
“I can only offer my ‘experience’, & that, not very gracefully. NAMKHAI NORBU taught ‘Experience is an ornament of the state’.
This book is my ornament.”—LLL
“I love this book” – Jeffery Beam (Spectral Pegasus, The Fountain)
“Reading Where I Stand In Angel is an experiential journey, open to those who seek at the peripheries of trance. Each poem is part of a hidden tapestry, where self-reflection is amplified & redirected to the heart of human compassion, and where humor, transparency, political awareness, and the absurdity of today’s epistemic existence cuts through illusion to recuperate the feminine power that was never lost. Angel evokes the funky yet graceful power of the femme-poet who wonders, where language (cut-up, reconfigured, charged) becomes life itself.”
Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, author of The Telaraña Circuit (Tender Buttons, 2023) & editor Di SONARE. www.diSONARE.com
Louise Landes Levi’s Where I Stand in Angel (Coolgrove, 2024) announces itself, from its materiality, as a book of risk, vision, and color. Tadanori Yokoo’s front-cover collage triangulates Jindřich Štyrský’s dark eroticism in Emilie Comes to Me in a Dream with Hindu iconography and Aleister Crowley’s Seal of Babalon. I read Yokoo’s image as doing less to illustrate Louise’s poems than to map a charged field in which method, eros, and danger converge. Once positioned thanks to that map, reading comes not as interpretive but participatory: language is offered, exposed, hazarded.
Levi travels the road of the solitary, she graphically outlines uninvited sexual encounter (see Chicago Review, online, ME TOO), setting her experience of the nomadic, the exiled & the initiated – in the context of both the Western Buddhist community, as she experiences it – a remarkable departure from her previous work-also with Cool Grove, GURU PUNK & her own personal extreme.
We are now in the new millennium, Louise Landes Levi narrates her dissociation, but also her practice in these poems, mostly untitled, from journals & from formal application of what for her, she hopes, is purification through poetic expression & encounter- an emptying of mind through the perimeters of exposure.
Her pilgrimage covers the cities of Europe, for her in decline, her birth place New York City & the small towns of Tuscana, site of rebirth & in this work, re-examination.
….in the ‘vanished’
city
of
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
(dream yoga) igniting
my / A A A
*
CUT Up is the method – behind the cut up, the flow of raw sensibility & musical aspiration which in the decade which follow, actually manifest in a series of highly regarded recorded materials.
Front & rear cover by Tadanori Yakoo, whose brilliant collage work in the 1960’s defined the sensibility of the era, for both East & West.
