Recently received from the author: An exquisite three-color foldout accordion booklet stuffed with twenty poems, forthcoming from Bob Arnold's Longhouse.
Not only is Levy's poetry a sheer delight to read, the booklet itself is a work of art. Highly recommended.
To avoid unforeseen complications
Ushered in by unwarranted light
After filling jar with fireflies,
Seal off all access
To further night.
Recently received: My contributor's copy of this hand-sewn, tastefully designed magazine edited by Philip Rowland. Number 7 includes poetry (in order of appearance) by John Levy, Victoria Bean, Vassilis Zambaras, Jonathan Greene, Chris McCabe, Daniel Zimmerman, Philip Lansdell, Jim Cacian, Philip Terry, Alan Botsford, James Sanders, Jeff Harrison, Bob Heman, Lee Gurga, Ed Markowski, John Vieira, Peggy Willis Lyles, Sam Ward, Carol Watts, David Giannini, Mark Terrill, Alex Jorgensen, Boyer Rickel, Gary Hotham, Travis Cebula, Scott Metz, J. J. Steinfeld, Emily Carr, Carrie Etter, Ruth Danon, Peter Hughes, Rufo Quintavalle, Marcia LeBeau, Jane Joritz Nakagawa, Sheila E. Murphy, Geraldine Monk and Gloria Frym--72 pages of excellent short poems.
To order this issue or check the availability of back issues, you can contact Philip at noonpress@mac.com or at Minami Motomachi 4-49-506, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-0012, Japan.
A bilingual edition, translated from the French, with an introduction by Kenneth Rexroth, Jonathan Cape, 1973. I have long since forgotten how long this exquisite little book has been with me; nor do I remember where I bought it, if ever I did, because there is no price listed anywhere. However, I do remember the excitement I felt upon opening the book and finding gems such as this one--priceless.
From the Introduction: "As the years have passed and cette belle epoque recedes into perspective, for us today, Pierre Reverdy stands out from his fellows as the most profound and most controlled artist....In verse such as Reverdy's....the elements, the primary data of the poetic construction [they] are simple, sensory, emotional or primary informative objects capable of little or no further reduction....Reverdy works with dismembered propositions from which subject, operator and object have been wrenched free and restructured into an invisible or subliminal discourse which owes its cogency to its own strict, complex and secret logic."
"Poetry such as this attempts not just a new syntax of the word. Its revolution is aimed at the syntax of the mind itself. Its restructuring of experience is purposive, not dreamlike, and hence it possesses an uncanniness fundamentally different in kind from the most haunted utterances of the Surrealist or Symbolist unconscious."
"When the ordinary materials of poetry are broken up, recombined in structures radically different from those we assume to be the result of causal, or of what we have come to accept as logical, sequence, and then an abnormally focused attention is invited to their comprehension, they are given an intense significance, closed within the structure of the work of art, and are not negotiable in ordinary contexts of occasion. So isolated and illuminated, they seem to assume an unanalysable transcendental claim. Accompanying, as it were garbing, this insistent transcendence are sometimes certain projected physical responses induced or transmitted in the person undergoing the poetic experience, whether poet or reader. Vertigo, rapture, transport, crystalline and plangent sounds, shattered and refracted light, indefinite depths, weightlessness, piercing odours and tastes, and synthesizing these sensations and effects, an all-consuming clarity."
Hey, Frank
Buck, why don't you
just get up-
wind of that
specimen
blue and white pied spring
meadow riddled with red
bursts of poppy
anemones and bright
bleeding
tawny tiger lilies
yellow dandy
lions
coming back to life?
--for Eleni
Rain has been falling
All night, love,
So softly
I wanted to tell you,
I wanted to tell you
Forgive me,
You were sleeping so
Peacefully.
