Louise Landes Levi •
PD: SUMMER 2023 • 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.
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.