SMELLING MARY
by Heller Levinson

Brave New World Order Books
Howling Dog Press, 2008
206 pages,  6" x 9", paperback
Double covers / durable binding.

ISBN: 978-1-882863-98-3

Retail through Amazon.com: $30
SAVE by direct order from HDP: only $19.95. Howling Dog's discounted price includes shipping to the continental USA and represents a discounted price for individuals.
ORDERS: Send check or money order for $19.95 per copy, made out to Howling Dog Press c/o P.O. Box 853, Berthoud, CO 80513-0853.
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Description:  Hinge Theory Poetics, as originated by Heller Levinson; Edited, designed, and illustrated by Michael Annis, HDP founder & senior editor. Features 9 interior color art plates dividing the Hinge modules and graph-
ically enhancing the aesthetics of
Hinge Theory.  Includes a compre-
hensive critical discussion on the dynamics of Levinsonian Hinge Theory by Mary Newell and André Spears.

"Take a line like light analyzed as supine and you will find delicacy of image and syllable. Take a line like paradigmatic breakdancing and you will find nerve and boulevard in intellectual headspin. There is a generosity of spirit at the core of Heller Levinson's poetry that urges a convergence of science & passion. Words smelt, melt, unite, and explode. Fuse, flow, flirt, and flip. This is anti-poetry at its best. Petruchio on steroids. Heisenberg at the bowling lanes. Wild in its discipline and certain of its uncertainty." --John Olson

smelling mummification         
              
     -- Language as bandaging, enwrapping
              the soul-forces, jolting into eternalities
                    through the modality capstones.  H.L.



endearment        endur-ment       chaste
'The brain was one of the few organs the Egyptians did not try to preserve.  They weren't sure what it was for, but they assumed you wouldn't need it in the next world.'
(Modern medical science defines death as the brain failing to signal, illlustrating how overweighted it is in our culture and, in contradistinction, how little the Egyptians esteemed the contraption.  Hinge, in concert with the Egyptians, seeks to toss the dualistic, Aristotelean brain, in favor of embracing the affective imponderable on the road to holy road in the land of holy writ. )
in the bandage of mummy -- formula
housed verities        constabled with wrap
blanching Marys - sequential evaporatives - in detrital disrobe
preservatives:  linguistic strips carriaging     pliancy partnering ascensional alacrity trust       
the windings
& runoffs         place to place
then ...
the road to mummification road
the road to duration
cannibalized

As reviewed on Amazon.com

(Five Stars) Astonishing and beautiful, January 5, 2009
By Gina Naahi (los angeles, CA)
I don't read much contemporary poetry, and I'm not easily pleased with what I read anyway, but "Smelling Mary" is a different kind of work: You don't have to be a lover of poetry to fall in love with this book.  You don't even have to be a lover of language. You can be a scientist, or a mathematician, or one of those people who solve every one of the NY Times puzzles every week, and still, you'll be intrigued and fascinated with this book. It's a beautiful work, but that's not all; it's also groundbreaking in that it uses poetry as a means to reveal the essential constructs of logic and understanding.

(Five Stars) Grab IT!, December 12, 2008
By Ian Powys "bookman" (Florida, USA)
I have long been admirer of poetry, but, of late, have encountered nothing but a deluge of insipid banality, until, now, until --SMELLING MARY, this is a milestone, a paradigm shift as significant as "Leaves of Grass," this is the real stuff and finally, once more, my zest for the written word has been re-ignited, don't wait, don't hesitate-Grab it/Buy it!!!

http://www.amazon.com/Smelling-Mary-Heller-Levinson/dp/1882863984/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231877910&sr=1-1

HELLER LEVINSON, the author and creator of Hinge Theory, has spent his entire literary career inventing and reinventing poetic form into the expansion and alteration of what he envisions as universal linguistics within applied poetics. Thus far in his work in language development, he has yet to devise or discover any existing theory more revealing of the building blocks and social tools incorporated in linguistics, than that of the matrices evolving within applied Hinge Theory. Hinge Theory is the nucleus of Levinson's new collection of poems, Smelling Mary. Levinson engages and unleashes universal forces of language and primeval revelation. His work is hinged to history, revealing an essential coda for reinterpreting it. During world crises, the overwhelming impulse of social structure is to homogenize and uniformly shrivel the human spirit. Levinson's work salvages and empowers our interior landscape, creates tools/techniques to enrich, deepen, and vitalize it. Hinge is conceptual and inceptional. As one sees in Smelling Mary, the philosophical interweavings of Levinson's work embrace Derrida, Foucault, Mallarmé, and Wittgenstein, while musically resonating with Prokofiev, Monk, Coleman, and Coltrane. Hinge is multi-linear, revealing a multiplicity of meanings from multiple angles and matrices simultaneously; it hinges onto work from past or present, recreating it at any given point with new layers of meaning and application. The more one engages it, the more Hinge unfolds fluidly, dynamically, to expand one's consciousness and perceptions. It is a power shift of language and empowers the use of language into a wholly unique paradigm of linguistic applications. It is associative, but it is not random, though randomness can evolve, then devolve back into non-random constructs, even though Hinge unfoldings may take odd turns of consciousness. Levinson works throughout the paradigm of language metamorphosis. His compositions run from traditional to highly esoteric and visionary in function, application, and what he terms "species impact," i.e., how language/linguistics change the brain's synaptic chemistry and physiology. Conceptually, it aligns with broad theories of the "meme," and Wittgenstein's "language games." States Levinson, "Language evolved from original interstellar gases which brought forth life. It is the primal source of creation." In Smelling Mary, Hinge Theory portends no less than the profound renewal and revivification of language through exploring infrequently used terminology, word juxtapositions and connotations (and the invention thereof), and poetic examination of the interconnectivity of the word matrix, therefore, of concepts and life experience. Hinge Theory explores the intrinsic musicality of language, aligned in respect to some of the precepts of Ezra Pound [for one, a poet who does not study music, is deficient ]; it thrusts forward the experience of poetry as the musical breath of life, and the poet, therefore, composes and "plays" the verbal disciplines. This unfolding Linguistic Destruction, Construction & Reconstruction implies prodigious ramifications affecting and extending not only to literature and linguistics, but also to art, music, science, education, sociology, politics, psychology, religion, and, potentially, to every human discipline. Hinge Theory in activation transfigures language to impact profoundly on life itself, summarily promoting transcendence in the reader's perception of the "I Am." Hinge Theory changes the core of thought processing. The mapping out of our world (including our role within it and responsibility toward it) through Hinge Poetics is a lifelong project, altering and revolutionizing our current perceptions of the reality we inhabit. In the truest sense, it is a major linguistic paradigm shift.

To hear the Heller Levinson "Hinge Theory/Smelling Mary Interview" on RadioActiveLunch, hosted by RadmanX, click on the RAL logo above. RAL broadcasts and streams live from Vassar College Radio (WVKR) - 91.3 FM - in the Mid Hudson Valley, Wednesdays from 12:00 - 2:00 PM. During each broadcast, RadmanX is accompanied in the lunch room by local musicians and experts on important socio-political happenings. Call in at 845.437.7178.

"In Heller Levinson's SMELLING MARY, language swelters, rotates, rises, in keeping with its own intrinsic balance. Thus, the words raise themselves above the contiguous, like a galvanizing dawn replete  with new experience."
           --Will Alexander

"SMELLING MARY makes connections between cyborg consciousness, cosmology,  and poetry; the book moves  by fractal self-reference, lyrically performing Russell's paradox of the self-containing set. Levinson mixes genres of verse, interviews, and personal correspondence to multiply & displace the writing self. Here, smelling becomes an analogy for investigation sniffing out the truth of being alive at a moment of radical historical flux."   

Visit Heller's website: click on photo