Selections from Seep by Heller Levinson

Image © Maria Mavropoulou

in the poise of seepage

incredulity

incipient bloat

perpetuity’s foreskin

pared to an a-meristic anachronic opalescent

undulance, in the shingled extravagance of

momentary let, a cache of resplendent accretion pearls an

inebriate puncture,

rouses this

am-

bulation

seep in brood bedlam

broadside                    bowdlerize

         apostrophic rampage            helter welter

  collar holler yelp yeller giddy gallop gap song yup-a’long

yo-fiddlediddle            hard alee get a ped-i-gree

         wing wring wiggle wrack wattle

         wiggle wing wattle wring wrack

                     weed wrest

sap persuasion            shag a’long slur parade

count yrself in     groove to the

din                     slip-sully →

                       slide

                 go deep

            in-side

belly roundabout

scout

rout

seep liquesces

dehisces             dilutes

             dribbles

       de  Com  po  Z es

     rudiments of esteem

       – estimables –

flossed to an inebriate

meander

salience teems

Heller Levinson, the originator of Hinge Theory, lives in New York where he studies animal behavior.  These pieces will be featured in the forthcoming collection, Seep, which will be published by  Black Widow Press (Spring, 2020).

Three Pieces by Heller Levinson

nostril ladder spittoon bathe lozenge silk

the leather

of

space

potentialities pucker for purchase

irregularity suds

mixed company

the fruit of

compliance

shadow stravage

unsealed                     unsubstantiated

         peeled from surface

gone askew            chortling

unstrung

a shadow unfolding     re-

composing as

non-affiliate

a lurk

in consummate

consideration

smoke lavender

jodhpur joust              rubs

          pleat periwinkle

skin-scented joineries,   , flush

with intimacy,  with

keyed murmuration . . . . .

. . . . . . . .

parcels congregate

embellish rotation . . .

. . .

wind as

suffix

Heller Levinson, the originator of Hinge Theory, lives in New York where he studies animal behavior.  His latest book, Un--, was published this Spring (Black Widow Press, 2019).

The Dialogics of Will Alexander & Heller Levinson, Part 2

This installment of Dialogics segues from Part 1, which can be found here.

Heller Levinson’s book, Un--, forthcoming from Black Widow Press this March, will feature further trackings of the Dialogics. For pre-orders and more information, please visit Black Widow Press.

Dialogics:  The Dialogics are ongoing conversations between Will Alexander & Heller Levinson.  They began in 2001 in Los Angeles over beer & burgers at “The Saloon” on Pico Boulevard.  Below is a sampling of recent exchanges.

H:  Division, Discard, Disrespect, -- three D’s knotted to a planetary Distemper.  Discard in the large sense, . . . the garbage we pollute with, the discard of the Other (Alterity) twins with disrespect for the other.  This is nothing less than a Trans-Egoistic Dysfunction, the inability to get beyond ourselves, i.e., the Anthropocene.

A major reason why I rail against banal first person narrative poetry, which is so rampant these days, is that it is not what is called for.  Spilling one’s ‘issues’ out is simply another form of contamination, a linguistic pollution, as injurious to our planet as plastic.

I’ve spoken in the X-Peri interviews how I blame Commerce as a major cause of this myopic compartmentalizing.  But also our educational institutions – which are commercial ventures -- share responsibility.  Departments, refutations & counter refutations, itemization, grading, -- all are intent upon visionary stiflement rather than enlightenment.

At this precarious point in world history, the human animal needs to be pointed there, outside oneself, concerned with the eyes of the ostrich, the cantaloupe, the sea, the eel, snake, kangaroo, cloud, & Ice.

Is it not time, as the Italian poet Bigali beseeched, to chiudo le scuole! (close the schools!).

W:  True, the modern temper is analogous with ruin, with perpetual disregard of its true capacity. It is given a-priori compartments to fulfill. It is compelled to fuel auto-regulated animosity towards itself. The glance is thus dissolved by stagnation. The standard view becomes lionized contagion prone repetition and scientific cul de sac. Thus, the lowest properties are cultivated through general access. This being not unlike the barbarity of the Roman circus, it's crowds gorged on suffering and discomfort. This being  mind as a dark regressive ant hill plagiarizing it's own self- deception to such a degree, that all spiraling remains stillness, and it's habitats of official genius becomes a corridor where corpses con-gratulate themselves concerning perfection of the in-ambulatory. These are the lawyers, the doctors of learning providing us with gerunds to memorize and falsely confabulate as if they were psychic oxygen. 

Meanwhile, the lists of exo-planents lengthens with at least 40 billion of them known to populate the Milky Way as only one galactic example. Add to this a conservative number of a quarter billion galaxies with another 40 billion across this conservative quarter billion figure and our present neural circuitry should snap and leap and begin to writhe in another habitation of itself. This needs be our current possibility. Yet we graduate Magda cum laude in order to compose texts about failed love affairs and utensils to gather stuffing from slain animals. The whole example of intelligence has become a hideous affair designed to self-falsify itself via  a dismal array of accumulation. 

In the meantime we hunt for life through dismally failed aperture looking for a random field of guano on an obscure moon.

Will Alexander- Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist, who has authored over 30 books and chapbooks. He has read at venues stretching from Rotterdam to Los Angeles and is currently poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in Venice California. In addition to this he is a Whiting Fellow, a California Arts Council Fellow, a Pen Oakland winner, an American Book Award winner, as well being both a recipient of the Jackson Prize for poetry in 2016, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in 2018. He resides in Los Angeles.

Heller Levinson, the originator of Hinge Theory, lives in New York where he studies animal behavior.  His book, Un--, is planned for Spring publication (Black Widow Press, 2019).

The Dialogics of Will Alexander & Heller Levinson, Part 1

Heller Levinson’s book, Un--, forthcoming from Black Widow Press this Spring, will feature further trackings of the Dialogics. For pre-orders and more information, please visit Black Widow Press.

Dialogics:  The Dialogics are ongoing conversations between Will Alexander & Heller Levinson.  They began in 2001 in Los Angeles over beer & burgers at “The Saloon” on Pico Boulevard.  Below is a sampling of recent exchanges.

H = Heller Levinson.  What is the Essential difference between the Athlete & the Artist? Is there a difference?

W = Will Alexander.  Many many similarities. Having done both I would say the artist rows further into eternity. 

H:  Is Infinity more than that which precedes & concludes us?

W: It would have to be in excess of matter itself, given that matter prevails as a subsequent realia. By absorbing it's originatory condition it betrays it's own resistance to this condition thereby invoking a curious maturation via osmosis. 

H:  Could we not simply say that Infinity is the Non-Containable.

H:  The problem I’m having with the phenomenologists, i.e., Husserl, Levinas, Sartre, & Co., is their identification of transcendence, exteriority, otherliness, specifically & exclusively with the alter-ego, with personhood.  This annihilation of the natural world – the tadpole, the lizard, the tree, leaf, rock, earth – is both troubling & incomprehensible.  Incomprehensible in that how can ‘thinking’ persons possibly overlook such vitalistic abundance.  Is this what separates the poets from the philosophers (another schism), from a Whitman, say, who could talk of “ . . . touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh (Italics mine) to renew me.”  The time has come for poet & philosopher to merge, to anoint the earth newly.

W: As curious as the following may seem, Existentialism remains a modified remainder of 18th/19th century argumentation as a kind of insular quantity. The latter argument invoked a divide that the early racialists and classifiers nurtured and seeded. Names such as Cuvier, Blumenbach, Samuel Morten,  and Arthur de Gobineau most forcefully come to mind. The latter casting their collective lot via the fostering of division. In this context American Indians, subjugated Africans, Asians of all stripes remained at the level of tadpoles and lynxes. Never to be equated with the human ideal reserved for the vaunted Greek ideal. 

When Sartre, and Husserl, and Levinas, invoke human scale as their most significant point of concentration, it rumages, around within a delimited purview via a constricted socio-political humanism it's glossary naturally fails at rendering the other. This glossary attempts to define  singularity as a type of human experience as the central integer within the flux of cosmic number.  Add to this, it seems to assume its subject to be the condition of European consciousness as it emerged from 2 devastating Global conflicts, from the social devastation chronicled by Dickens during the rise of the Anthropcene. Of course we can never forget the shadow cast by the 80 million slaughtered Indians in the Americas, and the 100,000,000 maimed souls due to the trans-Atlantic circumstance that was the African holocaust.

Indeed, Existentialism rendered by the larger has failed to invest itself in the authenticity of the other. Indeed, it came to fruition during a span when Europeans seemed to wander without purpose across a pointless inscape littered with post-Hitlerian pyschic debacle.

*Editor's note: To read a second installment of Dialogics, please click here.

Will Alexander- Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist, who has authored over 30 books and chapbooks. He has read at venues stretching from Rotterdam to Los Angeles and is currently poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in Venice California. In addition to this he is a Whiting Fellow, a California Arts Council Fellow, a Pen Oakland winner, an American Book Award winner, as well being both a recipient of the Jackson Prize for poetry in 2016, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in 2018. He resides in Los Angeles.

Heller Levinson, the originator of Hinge Theory, lives in New York where he studies animal behavior.  His book, Un--, is planned for Spring publication (Black Widow Press, 2019).

the road to holy road by Heller Levinson

the road to holy road

sacredness                   circuitry

                   leeward

to spill into the envelope of holy

                                                     (arousal’s concubine

A-strings on fire

spun coincidentals

scouting absence in the dish towel

counting the exits in cessation

where contiguity shades into analogy & metonymy morphs into metaphor & synecdoche 
scrambles suggestion the hegemonic solution is a slow burning intercourse

upon the lingual mattress

the road is both low & high

circuitous & straight

the road is both perilous & safe

the command

is to ascend

in combinatorial seepage

Heller Levinson, the originator of Hinge Theory, lives in New York where he studies animal behavior.  His book, Un--, is planned for Spring publication (Black Widow Press, 2019).