CRAZY LOUISE ~

LOUISE LANDES LEVI

Louise Landes Levi is a poet/performer-translator/traveler and a founding member of Daniel Moore’s Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, America’s first fusion orchestra. After receiving a BA, with Honors, from UC-Berkeley, and studying at Mills College with the sarangi-master Pandit Ram Narayan, she traveled alone overland to Afghanistan in the late 1960s and to India, via Istanbul, Tabriz, Mashed, Herat, Khandahar, Kabul, Peshawar, Rawalpundi and Lahore, to research North Indian sangeet (classical music) and its poetic tradition. Several translationfollowed: Rene Daumal’s classic study of Indian Aesthetics, RASA (New Directions, 1982); from the Middle Hindi of Mira Bai, an archetypal singer-saint of the 16th century,Sweet On My Lips: The Love Poems of Mira Bai (Cool Grove Press, 1997, 2003 & 2016); and Henri Michaux’s Toward Totality: Selected Poems (Shivastan, 2006). She has published more than a dozen books of poetry and autobiographical prose, including most recently: Love Cantos, 1-5 (Jack In Your Box, 2011); The Book L (Cool Grove Press, 2010); Tower 2/Tara or dc-x (Il Bagatto, 2009); Banana Baby, with facing Italian translations by Alessandro Tuoni (Super Nova, 2006); and Avenue A & Ninth Street (Shivastan, 2004). Her electronic chapbooks may be found at the website Big Bridge. Her recordings include most recently: From the Ming Oracle (Sloowax, 2014), an instrumental and spoken word compilation of her works from the late sixties to the near present; City of Delirium (Sloow Tapes, 2011); and the forthcoming LP Colloidal Love Poem (AudioMER.). John Giorno writes: “Her poems sing in the mind and dance through the heart and throat, and arms & legs, w. great clarity and bliss. Louise is Saranswati, goddess of poetry.” Levi has studied with such masters as Annapurna Devi, Ali Akbar Khan & La Monte Young. When not performing, she lives in a stone tower in Bagnore, Italy, with winter quarters in New York, her birthplace, and elsewhere.

M O R E

O Ancestors,

Be in my embrace,

We

don't know

who's us & who's here &

who are you, awake in my dream

I dream whose Vaster Continent,

in my bed, in my bed

of  

             dreams.

LLL

APPROVAL ~

Approval

We hiked into the woodlot first snow

Brought home a tree for the holidays

Misshapen hemlock few would look twice at

And because you were sick we held the

Tree outside the kitchen window for

You to see, smile, nod an approval

Point quickly to a chickadee

Off on a high branch

Seasons

All my life

Lived under the stars

Walked with them night after

Night, and I’m still

Learning how they move

Through the seasons

And you help — point your

Gloved hand this winter

Evening almost over our heads

To Cassiopeia and then arc

To the North Star in the

Little of the dippers  —  it’s

Easy once you know, once you

Are shown, once you have

Someone to see with

My Love. . .

wonders every winter-to-spring about a garden that grows on the way to town. This year she is worried about the man who plants and tends that garden every year. She hasn’t seen him at all out there working. Ground unplowed. She remembers him in the fall looking frail. There is a small pickup truck in the driveway. The gardener has no idea about my love’s thoughts. The space between the road and the house is maybe one hundred feet and within that space is a possible eden.

Lovers Of The Earth

Today in a supermarket in town, coming back from a job of land clearing, we stopped at a local grocers’ and found a few things, plus a sack of sunflower seeds since Sweetheart just can’t stop feeding the birds she feeds all winter long

It is springtime now

The bears may come for this seed if she isn’t careful

At the checkout an old-timer watched her buy the seed and before I packed it he asked her (and ignored me) “Are you going to eat those, or plant them?”

A gentle question

Sweetheart smiled and said, “Feed the birds”

His eyes grew in size  

————————————

BOB ARNOLD

I'm In Love With You

Who Is In Love With Me

Longhouse 2012

REMEMBERING ~

John and Bonnie Raines with grandchildren at their home outside Philadelphia in 2014.

CreditMark Makela for The New York Times

R E M E M B E R I N G

LORRAINE GELLER AT THE PIANO ~

REMEMBERING  LORRAINE  GELLER

CLIFFORD BURKE ~

Just in from the master letterpress printer & poet —

ever thanks, Clifford!

The Academy of Accidental Art

2017

FLEUR JAEGGY ~

M O R E

Simply, if you are already reading Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Paul Celan,
Robert Calasso, and even Franz Kafka (the grand papa of this group)
you will want to read Fleur Jaeggy, born in Zurich in 1940, Swiss
native long ago moved into the Italian pantheon and
translated by the likes of Tim Parks and now
Gini Alhadeff —
New Directions Books is Jaeggy's American home.




I am the Brother of XX (New Directions 2017)


Joseph Brodsky said, 
“Reading time … four hours. 
Remembering time ... the rest of one’s life.”

PEE WEE CRAYTON ~

ROBERT FRANK ~

M O R E

Da Capo Press 

2017

THE BUGHOUSE ~

Ezra Pound on the seafront in Rapallo, Italy, in 1958, shortly after being released from an American asylum

KIRKUS REVIEW

A sensitive investigation into the enigmatic, prodigious mind of poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972).

From 1945 to 1958, Pound was incarcerated at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a federal asylum in Washington, D.C. Although sequestered from the outside world, he was hardly isolated: among his many visitors were “tourists, young activists, ambassadors and academics,” and prominent and aspiring poets: among them, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Allen Tate, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Archibald MacLeish. Except for T.S. Eliot, who had won the Nobel Prize in literature, many of his visitors were at the early stages of their careers, and they sought Pound’s encouragement or advice. “Visiting Pound became a social event and a literary moment,” writes Swift (English/New Coll. of the Humanities, London; Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age, 2012, etc.), who draws on memoirs of these visits as well as interviews, a close reading of Pound’s writings, and medical records to create a multidimensional portrait of a celebrated, controversial literary figure. Pound was declared insane after being charged with treason for fascist, racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-American radio broadcasts that he made in Mussolini’s Italy during World War II. The insanity defense exempted him from the death penalty, but it has confounded biographers and literary critics, who have struggled to reconcile his creative works with his politics and purported mental state. During his incarceration, Pound produced much new work, leading the U.S. attorney, in 1954, to ask Pound’s physician why a man “who seemingly is mentally capable of translating and publishing poetry…allegedly is not mentally capable of being brought to justice.” Was he insane, many wondered, or was he “a coward and a cheat” who contrived the defense to save himself? Rather than trying to resolve those questions, Swift takes a prismatic view, allowing “rival tellings to sing their discord.” The treason indictment was dismissed in 1958 after “a chorus of pleas from cultural celebrities,” and Pound left the U.S. for Italy.

A shrewd, circumspect literary biography.

ALICE NOTLEY ~

M O R E !

Penguin Poets 2016

after withstanding (I hung in there)
 reading an irritating new book

by a poet (and her dog)

it was a relief to fall into the arms

of this excellent poet who seems

to become grander

as she goes

from  IF THE REAL IS SO REAL WHY ISN'T IT

Do you know what it's like to be transparent?

I'm not particularly interested in anything

but say the first thing that comes to mind.

You of course aren't here, you're where you are.

I sound like something I've heard before.

But where would the words come from? We

believe so touchingly in language acquisition,

enculturation, inculcation, and imitation;

I remember trying to be myself. Now I feel

I was inserted into life exactly not to do that.

For I have been robbed of everything that made

me social: lovers, certain close family — and I

have been ill, too; I think it's desired that I have

not much but words. What good would that do?

The new language is that of explaining these facts.

So far. The human condition is not what any-

one has said. There are forces in charge of us

that have never been named. And will I

name them? I will name something; and it

will then be real. Effable and known to you.

—————————

INTO ENGLISH ~

R E A D       M E

      Graywolf Press

      2017

INTO ENGLISH is the great book so many of us have waited for:
an anthology that actually teaches one about craft. For what
is the discussion of literary translation if not a patient, detail-
oriented, step-by-step education for a poet on the masteries
of word choice, precision, tone? To say that I love this very
special collection is an understatement.

ILYA KAMINSKY

SHOW ME ~

December

She’s supposed to be land clearing

Heaping brush to burn in first snow

But the pale yellow ghost of tall

Summer grasses she sweeps down

Is instead caught in her hand

And placed that way in a kitchen vase

Showing a warmth to last us through winter

Show Me

I don’t walk this

Early morning, frost

On the mowing, but you do —

And when you return

I’m sitting by the

Cookstove warm as you bend

To shiver my neck a kiss —

Show me what I missed

Leaving For Work

I could hold you

All morning like this —

Loose summer dress

In my hands, brush of

Sunburn on your shoulders

The feel of your waist

And a game of tip-toeing

Who is taller, as we kiss

And won’t let go

The Pleasures Of Love

The last of my noon hour

Black tin lunch pail

Sitting on a sap soaked maple stump

Woodchips nettled on my woolen socks

Finding a fruit cup she made for me

Clear cold glass in my oiled hand

Neat slices of strawberry and pear

————————————

BOB ARNOLD

I'm In Love With You

Who Is In Love With Me

Longhouse 2012

MOACIR SANTOS ~

MOACIR   SANTOS

AMAZING GRACE ~

SACRED ~

In the late Sixties I was hitchhiking home from someplace and stopped in a small town

where there was no bookstore but they had a newsstand, a bottom shelf of thick daily newspapers

and a rack of books, mainly bestsellers, and somehow, and someway, someone either made a mistake or knew precisely what they were doing because in that newsstand is where I picked up a copy of Rothenberg's masterpiece of assemblage Technicians of the Sacred. It was an Anchor/Doubleday huge softcover with a mysterious earthly and heaven cover and I spent all my money and walked out of the newsstand floating with my book, my backpack and an exhilarating feeling others had come before me and others would come after me and on every page there was a song.

I have purchased all later editions, continuing the travel, as each book gets itself refurbished and fluffed up, and now we are up to the third edition and Rothenberg is still at work like all good cobblers. And I sift my way through the new rooms of the longhouse but it's that original book that has my heart. I see silly boyhood ink marks where parts were very favorites in that book and I have no idea what that boy must have been thinking. All sacred.

[BA]

GROWN-UP ANGER ~

      R E A D      M E

WALDEN THEN & NOW ~

——————————————

I've yet to see, read or own a Michael McCurdy book, or a book

illustrated by McCurdy, that wasn't greatly enhanced by having McCurdy's

wood engravings — none more finer than in his own reading of Walden —

an A-to-Z showcase with McCurdy referring to Henry's world

and updating it to McCurdy's own, also a Massachusetts boy.

Balance is beauty.

Charlesbridge Books

Watertown, MA.

WEST ~

New Year 2013




windows be damned!

I want the whole-hearted panorama of sky

fire of morning

                                        ice blue moon

the hovering bulk of

the live oak

                            the hulking barn-studio

                             red looking black in the half-light

the streetlights

twinkling  

                                            the buttery yellow light of

                                            neighbor's porchlight

                                            a rectangle breath house dark

                                            and morning red-orange blaze

I want

the full 360 of self and world and wonderment




———————————

Jim La Villa-Havelin
WEST
Poems of a Place
Wings Press 2017