(Full Moon eclipse/ B'way & 106th Street, NYC)
Louise says she always had
Trouble finding a true companion
But she loves her bicycle,
Ira says he always had
Trouble lowering his blood sugar
But he loves the lower depths,
Louise's hair floats in the sky above
The city, a nest for birds who
Don't walk on the earth,
Sometimes these birds
Sing to me, altho' others cannot
Hear the music, I listen & at times
join
in,
My bicycle carries
Me beyond the cliffs, there
The birds sre gathered,
POEMS are not made to order
They appear out of thin air
Creeley greeted me in the
Land of the dead
Gregory kissed my hand
WAS THIS A DREAM?
No, IT WAS NO DREAM,
though like dreams, poems
disappeared
left behind in lost notebooks
unsent in mail boxes of
no
return,
The best poems are lost
forever
or
never written
They can never be seen
We walk down Broadway
A sudden line appears
to break my heart
&
again
the bird has parted
w.
my
song,
alas.
***
'she has an alien horoscope'
because she was born
on a lunar eclipse
&
feels the heavenly influence
outside the normal
ZONE
Ira Cohen Louise Landes Levi 28.8.2007
Louise Landes Levi lives in a stone tower in a miniscule village—Bagnore, one of the many villages which encircle Mt Amiata, the highest peak in Toscana. When not in the tower she can be found on either of two islands—Manhattan or Isla Margarita.
Her translations include Sweet On My Lips: The Love Poems of Mira Bai, Toward Totality: selected poems of Henri Michaux, and RASA By Rene Daumal. Her recent books: Avenue A & Ninth Street (Shivastan, 2004), Uvasi & Mohammed (Il Bagatto, 2005), Banana Baby (with facing Italian translations by Alessandro Tuoni, Super Nova, 2006), Tower 2 Tower or dc X (Il Bagatto, 2008), The Book L (Cool Grove Press, 2010), and Love Cantos, 1-5 (Jack In Your Box, 2011). Her electronic chapbooks The Highway Queen, Banana Baby and HO are available on Big Bridge. Photo by Ira Cohen.
Ira Cohen (1935-2011) was an innovative and original poet, photographer, filmmaker, publisher, and editor. A self-described "Electronic Multimedia Shaman", he was an active humanist from the 1960s to the present. Mr. Cohen was educated at Horace Mann, Cornell and Columbia. He spent the early 1960s in Tangier, Morocco, where he lived and worked with William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Paul Bowles.
In the late 1960s, along with Bill Devore he developed and perfected a photography process in his "Mylar Chamber", producing distorted, iconic photographic portraits of Jimi Hendrix, Jack Smith, Robert LaVigne, Angus MacLise, Pharaoh Sanders, and William S. Burroughs, among others. Ira was a participating artist in the Whitney Biennial 2006, Day for Night, which included his photographs of Jack Smith.
His films include The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, Paradise Now in Amerika, and Kings With Straw Mats. His primary work since the early 1990s was as a poet and editor; he edited numerous books (Jack Smith's Historical Treasures, Gustav Meyrink's Petroleum Petroleum, and poetry anthologies Shamanic Warriors and Celestial Graffiti) and periodicals (Ins & Outs, Third Rail, Nexus, and 15 Minutes). Photo by Jonathan Penton.
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