Time Traveling to the Wilds of Beat Era Cleveland
Time travel may not be realized in our lifetime, but if it were to be so, I realized as I put down d.a. levy’s new book, I would return to 1968 CE (“Christian Era” is what “Anno Domini” is called now, my high school daughters inform me). . . skipping New York and Paris, avoiding the doppelganger conflict of watching myself get arrested at demos, the insane police violence I saw, a primer in radicalizing, at war with war, losing my virginity, getting my first poem published. . . and I'd head straight to the wilds of Beat era Cleveland, you better stop me right there.
Beat era Cleveland?
In The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle: the Art and Poetry of d.a. levy, investigative editor Mike Golden has created the look, feel and smell of mimeo, which was levy’s blood and medium. Matte cover, 10-point sans serif blur font, muddy reprints of covers and collages, evoke the era of collating parties and hand-stapling. (Check Granary Books’ recent, gorgeous A Secret Location on the Lower East Side for an encyclopedia of the era.) But The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle also gives levy his due as protodeconstructivist/visual-conceptual artist/poet, who, with youth and nerve (and a healthy dose of hallucinogens) turned conservative, Christian, steelmill Cleveland into an energy vortex on the 60s counterculture zap map.
(from “Cleveland undercovers”) Because this book exists, d.a. levy may rise again. St. Poet, scrawny hyperactive half-Jew outcast, ramming it home on the mimeo and hand-cranked letter-press, publishing Sanders and Bukowski, interviewing Lou Reed (“What do you think about the current state of society?” “We’re staying at the Howard Johnson’s.”), giving R. Crumb his first publication, penning epic poems (“The North American Book of the Dead,” “Cleveland: The Rectal Eye Visions”). By mid-1968, he had published over 55 books and nearly 30 issues of magazines. He had been busted the year before, for obscenity (his poems), Ginsberg and the Fugs showing up to do a benefit reading, a stockbroker in New York bailing him out. 1968 and levy was getting his first real poetry successes as well, invited as a poet-in-residence to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught telepathically and wrote, as ever, voraciously. Then, shrouded in myth, drugs and CoIntelPro, it ended, a .22 to the forehead, 1968.
He was 26.
Read on, to discover how this new edition of The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle could help drop-kick levy into contemporary multimedia consciousness.
page 1 2snowflakes chased them into a today
of RANDALLberry sauce
THISTLEDOWN trumpets &
CRANWOOD forms for a quarter
the santa claus cat with the golden
horn winds the narcotic horses
lets them go
i get so excited i swallow my binocular
forget the lady at my side knitting
new flags for the revolution
i get so excited watching my $2 to show
pony sit down & write a short story
i accidentally break all my fingers &
the lady? the pony?
oh well, both were unplugged
and Now the track is as clear as
a shaved box &
i can spend the rest of my lives
lost in the parking lot looking for
the death chariot of the sun.
