A decade later, David “Pere Ubu” Thomas would see Cleveland pretty much unchanged as punk tried to pick up what hippie had left undone. In a recent interview, Thomas opines, “We occupied an underground. But, worse, an underground in the life of a city that was itself considered, wrongly, to be nothing more than a backwater. Everything meaningful, cutting edge, avant garde, we were patiently informed was to be found only in New York City. We were nothing but provincial rubes.”

Jello Biafra, Pedro Pietri, Ellyn Maybe, many others, all are unconscious heirs to the levy legacy.

from “night life” (1963)

pass the goatskin
pour the wine
run on the endless beach
forget -- remember
run

from “The North American Book of the Dead”:

working out the problems of the universe
thinking weird thoughts
writing paranoid poems about the police
nothing to do except
change the kitty litter, take out the garbage
. . .
HERE I AM (this is not peyote, LSD or booze)
      VISION I / the toilet bowl has an aura
the aura is blue
the toilet bowl is the buddah
. . .
One may leave the body by leaving the body
      he writes 'EXIT' on his toe
      he writes 'EXIT' -- on his navel
      i leave by the crown of thorns

[last couplet:]

you can have my buddha nature
for a juicy steak and a joint

from “Cleveland undercovers”:

in the beginning was the cat nation
crying
herring, mussels and irish potatoes
then the white man arrived and
blew up the bridges with baking soda
submarines and the moved to
cincinnati
. . .
NOW that's why there are more poets
in california
it being more romantic to
wreck in San Francisco than
to be a discrepancy in Cleveland
. . .
SOMETIMES CITY I walk at dawn
past the trucks parked
on the cold mornings edge
of the old viaduct to look at
the sore mouth of the Cuyahoga
eating and eaten by the dawn
and the city. . .

Bring it home, d.a. As the romantic notion of the poet dying young, a suicide, evolves to poet as worker, in the world, activist working towards social change, the publication of The Buddhist Third Class Junk Mail Oracle is a sign that the art is secure enough to dig past the officially anointed and remember the fallen who contributed their lives to poetry.

--Bob Holman

Other US poets of this pantheon:

• Larry Neal (1937-1981), D.C. founder (and the spirit of) the Black Arts Movement (died of massive heart attack, not suicide).
• The Ozarks' Frank Stanford (1948-1978), whose epic the battlefield where the moon says i love you is due to be republished by Lost Roads Press, which he founded with C.D. Wright.
• Steven Jesse Bernstein (1951-1991), master of spoken word nastiness, the Burroughs of Seattle Grunge.
• And a survivor, Frank Lima, who recently published his first book in twenty-five years, and whose extraordinary idobelieveidobelieve will be published in October from West End Press.

All the above gives the lie to the notion of the current poetry resurgence as a blip fad. The return of Lima, O'Hara's chief protégé and the first Puerto Rican poet to surface, is a sign, as is levy's reappearance.

each poem---a new death of WORDS AS ART
each poem---a death of ASS ART
each poem---a death
each poem
a poet
A

(from “The Para-Concrete Manifesto”)

page 1 2

N.B.: Ingrid Swanberg, editor of zen concrete & etc., also operates the marvelous d.a. levy Web site with Karls Young and Kempton. Plenty of visual and textual poems. Among other juicies is Jim Lowell's devastating levy bibliography. You can find “(Comments on the Acid Landscape)” there, too.

More d.a. levy links & poems are in our May 1999 feature on alternative poetry distribution & our September 1999 interview with Alan Horvath, who has republished much of levy's work.

Thanks to Alan Horvath for corrections in this article. His handsome remimeos of levy material can be obtained from:

A. Horvath
P.O. Box 2943
Vancouver, WA 98668-2943

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