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.
“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
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.
