Jim Levy Livres

It was a high time in Northern New Mexico. In the late 1960's and early 70's hippies in flowered buses and VW vans rolled into Taos, mostly city kids trying to "get back to the garden." The dismayed locals called it "the hippie invasion."This is the story of two writers who found each other in the maelstrom of the commune days. Jim Levy was breaking up with his wife Deirdre, who later became Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist nun whose books became bestsellers. Phaedra Greenwood discovered she was pregnant while living in a tool shed at forty below zero. Eventually, Jim and Phaedra settled down in an old adobe outside a small Hispanic village to raise a family. These were the golden days, but the times were a-changing. The women's movement swept in; Three Mile Island sparked No Nukes demonstrations and Watergate proved that you can't trust authority. It was time for Jim and Phaedra to test themselves in the world.A surprisingly honest and moving remembrance of the cultural upheavals in northern New Mexico in the 1970s." Bob Bishop and Bonnie Korman"In Those Were the Days, two gifted and insightful writers reveal how, against all odds, they forge a loving relationship amidst the turbulent zeitgeist of Taos counterculture." Michelle Potter .

The composer Lukas Foss said in an interview that all art, even the most original, is influenced by the art that preceded it. He compared artists to the anonymous stone masons who built the European cathedrals, all working on one vast edifice called Art. In the spirit of Foss' idea, Jim Levy has written a book of poems that are in response to some work of art, whether it be another poem, a painting, a piece of music, or a myth. After each poem, he has added some notes on the artist or art that inspired his poem. Most of his poems are original but some, following Pound and Lowell, are adaptations of poems by others. Still others are "in the manner of" such poets as Hölderlin, Vallejo, Bishop, Rilke and Mandelstam. Some use the lyrics of pop music, just as Li Po and Tu Fu used the music of the taverns of their day. To quote Vasily Zhukovsky, Russian translator of Virgil, Goethe, and Byron, "Almost everything of mine is someone else's or about someone else, and yet it is all my very own."Bacchus and the Drinker is a book of many voices, Levy's own blended with those of Monet and Fats Domino, Goya and Fellini, Linda Ronstadt and Ariadne. With recurring images of waves, winds, sea and shipwreck, it is a book that asks questions about what precedes birth, what follows death, and the meaning of what happens in between.

Of all the stars, the evening star is the brightest and most beautiful. It is of course not a star but the planet Venus, the Roman goddess of love, sex, beauty, and fertility, and thus is an appropriate title for Jim Levy’s book about first century Roman women. As he says in the author’s note, for over two thousand years the Latin poets have had their say about love and hate and sex and marriage, and he decided to give voice to the women that they wrote Catullus’ Lesbia, Propertius’ Cynthia, Ovid’s Corinna, Horace’s Lydia, and others. In all there are twenty-two, three of them historically real women (an aristocrat, an actress and a poet) and nineteen fictional; twenty human and two goddesses. Lesbia to CatullusYou mock my sparrow and what’s worse, you mock his death with phony tears,but it is you, not death, who feedson every little pretty thing. Cynthia to PropertiusAnd the lock of dark hair over your eyes, those poet eyes both dark and bright. pupils blue. I even like your gamey smell and ink-stained fingersthat gently touch my waist, and when we struggle to the sound of hissing silk, I am a slave to love and branded such. “The poet’s task is saying not what happened but the kind of thing that might have happened.” Aristotle “When to her lute Corinna sings” Adrienne Rich

Chekhov's Mistress consists of twenty-seven essays about 19th and 20th century writers. Novelists include Stendhal, Flaubert, Camus, Malcolm Lowry, D. H. Lawrence and several others. Poets include Plath, Machado, Rimbaud, Elizabeth Bishop, Pessoa, and Whitman. There are several philosophers, such as E. M. Cioran and Max Scheler, and several epics by T. E. Lawrence and the Brazilian Euclides da Cunha. Edmund Gosse and Edward Dahlberg represent autobiographies. Madame de Stael, Turgenev, and the cafes of Sartre and Beauvoir make an appearance. Some of the essays are straightforward critiques, but many use unusual framing devices. Quentin Tarantino pitches an epic film to Harvey Weinstein. Pasolini's murder is described in a series of official documents. The poetics of Sylvia Plath is a podcast by a Vassar grad. Levy is as eccentric and original as some of his subjects. For instance, he dissects the Nobel Prize lecture by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, and he describes Rimbaud's life in Africa with an interview in Rolling Stone magazine.