Louise Landes Levi w/ Kawabata Makoto
Eternity poem
Read by the artist with musical accompaniment. 2023
Iconic poet, musician, and translator, Louise Landes Levi’s “invocation & interpretive sense of raga, overlaid with spoken and sung poetry, invoke threshold experience… with a sincerity & presence as sardonic or mournful as it is devotional.”
Having collaborated with Terry Riley, Angus Maclisean, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela amongst many others, 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 including Guru Punk, Behind the Buddha’s Maskand most recently Crazy Louise (or la Conversazione Sacra), a series of poems examining sexual trauma from the perspective of an initiate.
In her contribution to GODMODADOGGEREL Levi reads her short “Eternity Poem” accompanying herself with the sarangi alongside her frequent collaborator legendary guitarist Kawabata Makoto founding member of the band Acid Mothers Temple.
Installed in the supply bodega at the back of a former theater at 520 N Western in Hollywood, the poem is on a motion sensor so it only turns on when approached by a listener, the first lines are “I have been waiting for you to come to me/ I have been waiting for an eternity.”
Excerpted text copied from @blankforms
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