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Category: Louise Landes Levi

  • Louise Landes Levi


    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 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.

  • RASA or knowledge of the self: Essays on Indian Aesthetics and Selected Sanskrit Studies

    by René Daumal, Translated by Louise Landes Levi

    Daumal’s most important work”
    —Claudio Rugafiori, in conversation.


    About the author René Daumal:
    René Daumal, best known for his novel Mt. Analogue, unfinished at his death, in 1944 (other works in English A Night of Serious Drinking, The Power of the Word, You’ve Always Been Wrong et.al.) was an auto-didact, ie. a non academic Sanskritist. Following youthful experiments, with poet Robert Gilbert Le-Comte (Black Mirror) & initial instruction in Sanskrit with Rene Guernon, he embarked on a solitary study surpassing his teacher & finally formulating his own Sanskrit dictionary. Daumal translated essential texts on Sanskrit composition & the Bharata Natya Sastra, the world’s first treatise on the Dramatic Arts, ca 4th century. He wrote numerous essays on Sanskrit poetics & their relation to spiritual process, the first to recognize the value of these texts for the artists & the cultural milieu of the 20th century.
    As secretary to Uday Shankar, he wrote the first reviews of Indian music and dance in the West (Paris, circa 1935) and accompanied Uday Shankar’s troupe, which included Ravi Shankar as a 12 year old dancer to NYC. During the 2nd. World War, exiled in the South of France, with his wife Vera who was Jewish, he furthered his literary work, completing essays, translations, reviews while maintaining, with others so exiled. a profound epistolary exchange (see Letters 1930-1944), until his death from tuberculosis, shortly before the alien landing.
    RASA, a ‘cult classic’ edited by Claudio Rugafori, secretary of the Daumal archives and translated by American poet and musician, Louise Landes Levi, has earned its reputation.This is its 3rd. edition, prior editions being New Directions, 1982 and Shivastan 2003 and 2006. [Reprinted fr. Blank Forms Journal, No. 7.]

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  • Where I Stand in Angel

    by Louise Landes Levi

    In her latest poetry book, Louise Landes Levi is ‘on the road’. Nomadic & hermetic, exiled and initiated, she reveals uninvited encounter and encounter w. the marvelous through the poetics of collage, the cut-up of perceptual process. Mostly untitled, the poems narrate dissociation but also pleasure, poetry as practice, as purification, itself a vehicle for the re-emergent feminine.Her pilgrimage leads to the European city, for her in decline, to her birthplace New York City and to the villages surrounding Mt. Amiata, site of rebirth & in this work reexamination, a marked departure from her earlier Guru Punk (coolgrove press, 1999). “Louise Landes-Levi joins the unclaimed territory of visionary writers and artists like Simone Weil, Mirabai and Hilma af Klimt. Desire and transcendence are both expressed with astonishing beauty. Her sharp eye trained on the human condition in samsara her quest takes the reader through the pain of love affairs, fulfilled and broken, and the elevation and strength endowed by moments of union with the

    divine. In this collection the reader finds herself Dante to Landes Levi’s Virgil. Instead of the circles of hell, she guides us through her chakras, invites us so intimately into her solitary heart and vastly expansive consciousness, that we too are embraced.”- Bonny Finberg (Kali’s Day)

    “Unclear if seeker LLL works for the CIA or Yahweh, however drinking from this ecstase of yearning and soaring on the astral plane will transfer a certain wisdom if not at least a delicious relief, something to strive for amidst the madness of the eros. if we wld. just learn / how to die, we cld. really / enjoy the adventure of being / ALIVE. writes L and damn does she show us one truth of rebirth. Thank Goddess these poems exist, to remind us there is yet fruit in this wasteland: at last, / I appeased my / ancestors … & you wonder why / I memorize the names / of / plants, / Plotting the return, while you plot / w/o knowing it the last / note in the / eternal, / lament. Brava Louise!”- Katy Bohinc (Trinity Star Trinity)

    Buy your copy of Where I Stand In Angel on:

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  • Sweet on My Lips: the love poems of Mirabai

    by Louise Landes Levi

    A contemporary American poet on pilgrimage in India experiences a chain of extraordinary accidents that trip her into a linguistic revelation—she quickly learns to read and write Middle Hindi or Braj. Her special insight into the love poems of legendary 16th century Indian woman poet-saint Mirabai culminating in the present work. This illuminated second edition of Sweet on My Lips offers the reader a peek into an insider’s experience of the path of devotion (bhakti).The first edition sold out establishing a loyal and growing audience for this book. (A Google search on Louise Landes Levi brings up numerous references to Sweet On My Lips, the first edition from Cool Grove Press)

    Praise for Sweet on my Lips”The beautiful poems of Mirabai have been beautifully translated from the Middle Hindi by Louise Landes Levi, and they should serve as a fine key to this tantric poet’s consciouness.” — Lawrence Ferlinghetti”Mirabai’s spiritual vision and poetic genius shine through these pages. Verses of wounded pathos and soaring ecstasy are rendered here as vividly as if they had been spoken yesterday, yet with the incantatory power of sacred text. Levi’s translations, brilliant in their lucidity, usher the reader directly into the heart of Mira’s rare, impassioned devotion.”— Miranda Shaw”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.” —La Monte Young

    Buy your copy of Sweet On My Lips on:

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  • Guru Punk

    by Louise Landes Levi

    Poetry. Tracing a road that runs from Milarepa to Michaux, from Isabelle Eberhardt to Jack Kerouac, Louise Landes Levi offers a compilation of spiritual experimentation and ‘ordinary’ road adventure. Here, musical genre, iconoclasm and itineracy mix as we observe the author’s devotional impulse. She is the author of a dozen books of poetry and her work has been translated into several languages. Louise Landes Levi’s poems are the union of street smart 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 Sarasvati, goddess of poetry — John Giorno.

    Buy your copy of Guru Punk on:

    Amazon