Time Traveling to the Wilds of Beat Era Cleveland
i am moving ahead in time
the american people have survived
the revolution
everyone is happy
no one is alive
everything is run very efficiently
someone old is reborn
haunted
& starts looking in his head
he is already programmed to not
look in his head
the sky explodes. . . . etc
(from “The Old Bohemian Hall 1967”)
d.a. levy was the 60s. He played the small press world (which was, oh, say about 20 publishers at the time, cf. Len Fulton’s Dust Directory) like a harp, played the (notion of) book like a symphony, turned Cleveland into Oz (“I have a city to cover with lines” from “Cleveland undercovers”), dealing hands-on (fingers to keys) with US apartheid (East Side vs. West Side Cleveland, split down the middle by the burning Cuyahoga River). He fought the war at home, not marching in DC, not moving to New York or San Francisco, not attending the Democratic Convention (Ed Sanders tried to convince him to come). He fought the war in Cleveland, via his handpress, a poetry bookstore (Jim Lowell’s greeny flower, mythic Asphodel Books), readings on street corners, in coffee houses and church basements. On the cover of his prescient, graphically deconstructed book The Tibetan Stroboscope is his ultimate comment on the relationship of poetry to state: “all copyrot rejected by author.”
On the cover of The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle: the Art and Poetry of d.a. levy, editor Mike Golden puts “Art” first in the subtitle, and he layers the book with all manner of zine covers, typewriter cut-up/newspaper typography/Buddhist art/nekkid women porno collages, actual newspaper articles about levy’s bust and death, his death certificate, a hilarious very early R. Crumb cartoon, The Cement Fuck (a book of concrete poetry, 1967), and The Tibetan Stroboscope (an erased and crossed-over more-black-than-white deconstructed book, 1968): In a 320 page book there are 118 (mostly full-page) black-and-white illustrations. I’d hesitate to comment on the authenticity of the repros of smeary mimeo originals. But the hilarious scramble, the psychedelic leaps, the rhetoric slashing with porn and religious iconography prove Golden’s point -- levy, known as a poet and counterculture hero, was a multitalented artist, and his experiments work both as art and by giving extraordinary insights into what the 60s really felt like. Eight exquisite color pages achieve Instant Nirvana.
The original Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle was levy’s last mag (now, “zine”), following The Silver Cesspool, The Marrahwanna Quarterly, Polluted Lake, Poets at the Gate, The Puking Pigeon #1 or The Fucking Duck #1 or The Search for the Holy Houkah Revealed #1 and Shit Sheet -- the names alone evoke the era. He published 17 issues of Oracle in less than two years, and after his death thirteen “last issues” were published by his friends.
Poetrywise, he was everywhere. His poems chant, rant a la Ginsberg, dancing with rhetoric, bringing the war home; his concrete poems cut-up graphically as Gysin and Burroughs were doing textually; his “Litany of the Green Lion” is a performance score, “a ready-made litany / fill in the blank spaces with the name of yr particular deity/” He addresses Philip Whalen, he echoes Frank O’Hara:
Picasso working for Walt Disney
Inc begins making an abstract
animated movie on the life of
Ronald Reagan
(from “It’s a Matter of Presentation,” 1968)
In 1956, Ginsberg had written, “America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.” Ten years later, levy:
cleveland i gave youand the epigraph from “The Para-Concrete Manifesto”:
poems that no one else had time
to write
& you arrested me
AND I DONT EVEN CARE
THE SUPERIOR MAN sucks his dinner from the gutter, rather than lick the Rectal Eye of the OHO establishment (from the U Ching).
A previous, somewhat smaller levy collection, zen concrete & etc. edited by Ingrid Swanberg (Ghost Pony Press, 1991), presented levy in a more spacious and elegant, elegiac fashion. Here in The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle, “Cleveland undercovers” is reproduced directly from the original, jolting, jumpy typewriter, alleviating the problem of how to reproduce levy’s misspellings and inconsistencies, an issue made more complex by levy’s own rewrites and the variants in the Swanberg and Golden texts. For example, Golden edits “Lettre to Cleveland” to “Letter”: a detail, but levy’s “Lettre to Alan Katzman,” which he published in an edition of 400, indicates a lean to playful frenchifrying. Golden also leaves out the sweet Coda that concludes, “the first time I balled / was on Memorial Day // It was something else.” He removes the hand-drawn swastikas that are on zen’s version of “Para-Concrete Manifesto,” inserting a Tibetan chop instead; he drops the penultimate line, “the three blessings; Amen” in the aforementioned “Litany of the Green Lion.” Oracle also does not include the stunning typographical experiments “(comment on the acid landscape),” with flailing parentheses and type on the back of the stencil mirror-write, and “Visualized Prayer to the American God,” which improvises the US flag typographically years a la Johns.
It’s the bomb (can we explode them?) to have these two levy books, and Oracle’s new release, from the vigorous Seven Stories Press, somehow wild heir to levy’s own Seven Flowers Press, has a real chance to bring this shamefully neglected poet to a big new audience. Its flashy cover and hilarious mimeo tactility (like vinyl, man!) could help drop-kick levy into contemporary multimedia consciousness.
~Bob Holman
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On to Part II of our feature on the life & work of d.a. levy: “a .22 to the forehead, 1968. . . . He was 26. . . . Was it murder most foul by a trip buddy who ends up marrying levy’s girlfriend? Or romantic, drug-induced, professionalism-poeticizing-on-the horizon suicide?”
