The Rabbit Barks Back

---

everyday i sit here

trying to become one of you . . .

as a poet i try to learn 

how to remain human 

despite technology 

& there is no one to learn from 

i am still too young to 

be quiet & contemplative 

note: peace & awareness are

like two small birds 

trying to leave the planet 

because they are tired of dying 

〜 d.a. levy, SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM

Still today there are basic biographical errors made with d.a. levy, and the literary history of Cleveland remains a curiosity. Even levy’s name is frequently misspelled or misstated. In a recent issue of the Cuyahoga “Collective Arts Network,” his name was stated as ‘Darryl Alfred Levey’, although he changed his middle name to Allen, and his parents stopped using ‘L-E-V-E-Y’ in 1946, only four years after his birth.¹ In his editorial notes to the first scholarly work published on levy, Alex Gildzen recalls: “The poet once told an audience at Kent State University that bad teachers were responsible for his signing his name in lower case letters.” levy explained: “I don’t write my name in capital letters because I can’t make good capital letters.” Kent Taylor further notes levy’s peculiarly early change in his middle name, noting that he did not want to share a name with MAD Magazine character Alfred E. Newman. His deliberate initialization was perhaps also chosen for just as irreverent a reason, in imitation of the initials for the renegade styling of a military haircut he would have received in the Navy, a “duck’s ass.” In disavowal of the authorial practices in commercial publishing, alongside Canadian concrete poets such as bill bissett and bpNichol, levy was an early initiator of adopting a lower case and often initialized signature. 

Many accounts of levy’s life begin with his obscenity and delinquency trials, whose settlement is often directly connected to his suicide. Tangled in this legal frenzy is the arrival of Ed Sanders’ band The Fugs and poet Allen Ginsberg in Cleveland for a benefit reading to raise funds for trial expenses. These two occurrences have formed the popular understanding of levy’s life, shaping him into a countercultural figure of the Midwest associated with Beat literature, freedom of speech, and drug advocacy. However, this is the history of journalistic reminiscence, and it has come to also characterize literary history of the period. However, this account says less of levy than the needs of our psychological economies and our culture’s need for outsiders, outlaws, martyrs, and rebels—the rebellion of artists—however tragic. Do we give up ground so easily to be society’s permanent strangers? The only real sense of any “underground” is in living and working in your cousin’s basement. 

Otherwise, D.R. Wagner notes the significance of the small press as a site of discovery and collaboration. “The underground was real, but that was because everybody had to start publishing somewhere. Understand, this was just before photocopying changed the world. The underground was a chance for correspondence. I thought it was glorious that you could write out into the world and get these responses back from people . . . I don’t think we approached it as secret rituals or anything.” The literary network surrounding levy and his contemporaries developed from mailing lists akin to that of the Lettrists. However, despite his own attempts to the contrary and myriad interventions from friends and scholars, such as Kent Taylor, Larry Smith, Ingrid Swanberg, T.L. Kryss, Allen Frost, and Karl Young among many, levy is still caricatured at best as “a promising poet that never developed”² or, at worst, as a beatnik with no original contribution, just as the newspapers accused him of being in his lifetime.³ 

Perhaps no work has done more to mischaracterize, mythologize, and make sensational levy’s life than Mike Golden with his confusingly titled anthology The Buddhist 3rd Class Junkmail Oracle, which rips its name from levy’s final periodical. It is no accident that the most widely printed and publicized edition anthologizing levy has framed the popular account of his life and work. Rather than explore the vision of his poetry in his social context, Golden recounts the legal persecution and insinuates “a tragic story that bristles with conspiratorial implication” of levy’s murder.⁴ Among less extreme examples, in a poor review of d.a. levy & the mimeograph revolution Philip Metres claims levy as “one of the Ginsbergian ‘best minds’ who descended from the Beats and became a casualty of the sixties.”⁵ In a strange moment in the comic retelling of his life, Cleveland’s own Harvey Pekar has levy ask before his suicide: “How symbolic would it be if I blew my brains out?”⁶ And perhaps most unfortunately, the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History simply characterizes levy as a countercultural figure, focusing on his harassment and suicide. Notably, he does not appear in The Dictionary of Cleveland Biographies. levy is relegated to Cleveland’s history. His life isn’t so much a life, but a historical occurrence or aberrance of history.⁷ 

In the edition of Kent State’s Serif dedicated to levy, scholar Eric Mottram retreads levy’s reply to the Cleveland press and police where he explains: “With their cooperation i have been turned into a symbol, and i sincerely hope that in their incompetence they do not attempt to turn me into a martyr. Martyrs are absurd and i certainly don’t want to be reborn in a world in which everyone is attempting to imitate a foul-mouthed saint. The city is working overtime to turn me into a myth . . . I am an outsider becauz i am a poet, becuz i have 2 ¼ eyes.” While Philip Metres and others have placed levy within Ginsberg’s Howl, Mottram argues that his work points beyond Howl, “and beyond Howl there lies in the absence of that poem’s exhilaration in the articulation of disaster . . . an inheritance of the finest poetries.” Although levy writes in Cleveland undercovers of the already occurring revolutions of quiet towns, with the clear failure of the New Left in Chicago 1968, Mottram argues that the revolution has decidedly not begun or perhaps remains entirely unconceived and unconscious. “levy is left with Cleveland and a poetry which cadences his anger and sensitivity, a completely realized form for his part in the wasted sacrifice demanded by America.”⁸ The scope and ambitions of levy’s work exceeds all his contemporaries. His life should not be considered an epic, but his work may form the possibilities of modern epic poetry in its historical horizon.⁹

“The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood,” writes French playwright and poet Jean Cocteau, and perhaps no 20th Century author has been so severely misunderstood as levy.¹⁰ But, if to be praised is to be annihilated, we are fortunate that levy has not been held widely in admiration. Although he has many connections with what we may now call ‘Beat’ writers, levy shares less with Allen Ginsberg, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture, and far more with local poets Russell Atkins and Kent Taylor as well as contemporaries, such as Gary Snyder, Tuli Kupferburg, and Michael McClure, the latter of whom shared the alternative term ‘Meat’ poets with Chicago poet and publisher Douglas Blazek. levy’s interests lied less with rebellion, free speech, or drug use, and more with social transformation, the development of Buddhist traditions in North America, and, as a publisher and poet, supporting the growth of an independent literary tradition in Cleveland and globally.

In contrast to popular accounts, political historian Joseph Starobin discusses how “the New Left which arose in the sixties thinks of itself as a break from the past, especially from the Old Left [of the labor organizers]. The New Left believes it is rediscovering America as no previous generation has. This phenomenon has been extraordinary—these millions of sensitive, courageous young people . . . they have confronted the nation with its priorities of placing private accumulation of wealth ahead of public needs; the intolerable burden of racism; the cost of trying to hold back the revolutionary transformation of underdeveloped [regions] by frightful military power, an attempt which has . . . revealed America’s impotence.” These radical ideas found political legitimacy and were made common across society. Social issues, protest of foreign conflicts, and electoral campaigns are still the main harbors of much political energy and thought today, just as they were in the latter 20th Century.¹¹ 

Since its regulation, labor organizing remains at the same standstill without an interrogation of political economy. Although short, levy’s life spans an interminable period of time where there still existed in force the Old “Party” Left, the New Left, anarchist contentions, and a growing student populace, from which later emerged broad social movements like the hippies, but also youth organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as well as groups, such as the Neo-American Church, Yippies, and Weather Underground. A primary distinction must be made between the traditional party and labor organizations of the Old Left and those of the New Left, the latter of which organize themselves around social issues and State policy. levy was not an active member in any organizations of the Old Left and, despite his affiliation by newspapers with beatniks and hippies, he was just as distant from these social movements as the political groups of the Old Left. Perhaps because of his organizing as well as his rejection of the State and the money economy, he has been identified as an anarchist, but this investigation belies only further abstraction from his person, poetry, and activities. First we must confront the myth of the man. 

the fear i feel & write of 

is often not my own –

i keep thinking i’m paranoid

but considering my inability

to adjust to our corrupt

civilization i like to believe

that paranoia is justified/

LAND OF THE FREE¹²

Contrary to what one may expect of the editor of Renegade Press and the Marrahwanna Quarterly, levy did not present himself as a rebel or traffic drugs. As his parents buried his ashes on that cold December day in 1968, they cast their son in quite different terms, emphasizing his generosity, school record, and merit as an Eagle scout. Carolyn Levy spoke to reporter Dick Feagler about her son Darryl, not d. a.: “He was a good boy. I wish you would write about the kind of boy he really was. Even when he was a little boy I knew he would be artistic. He was a kind boy. After he graduated from high school he went into the Navy and worked as a medic. He liked the work. I think he might have stayed in except his father had a serious eye operation and he had to come home. He got an honorable discharge, you know. I think he could have been a beautiful poet.” Though perhaps oblivious to his intentions to leave the Navy, levy’s mother and father understand that his project was not misanthropic or reactionary. His was a project of realizing and overcoming the liberal principle of freedom in American society. As levy writes in the PARA-CONCRETE MANIFESTO: “Our concrete poems are paranoid songs of murder and rape/ litanies to the American God. We have replaced “IN GOD WE TRUST” with “FUCK FOR THE BUCK” in an attempt to become real American citizens.” This is the revolutionary spirit of the American project, a recognition of the revolutionary aspect of capitalist society, which can only be overcome through its own perversity, rather than be addressed by social reforms, such as drug policy, educational programs, or economic agendas. The divine spirit which once guided society was not perverted by money, but that spirit always was money and contains already within it the possibility of a new form of freedom. 

A large component of New Left social movements in the U.S. was advocacy for drug reform, which some took to be revolutionary in of itself. Labor historian Ben Fong argues, however, that “the wave of the great pharmacological wand had not produced the “epochal event” of Leary and Ginsberg’s predictions, but rather a frightening and heavily commercialized nightmare.”¹³ More often, drug policy is not about drugs but a form of social management, and drug use remains for us a means of maintaining some form of control over our lives that we may otherwise lack. In fact, Fong argues “the countercultural backlash to the Fordist era, represented in the choice of marijuana and psychedelics over your mom’s barbiturates and your dad’s amphetamines, did not so much mark the beginning of another period as it did a reaction to the particular culture of postwar society that was still very much in line with that society. In this ‘60s counterculture, though celebratory rather than demonizing of psychoactive substances, was not so different from the middle-class temperance reform cause: virtuous in its self-conception, confused in its outrage, and unwittingly committed to leaving the basic structures of capitalism alone.”¹⁴ After all, with legalization passing in Ohio and much of the U.S., marijuana is now another industry as any other. 

While Leary and Ginsberg were made just as much a spectacle by journalists as they themselves wanted to confront the spectacle of society with psychoactive drugs, levy sought out another terrain entirely for literature and drug culture. In founding and editing The Marrahwanna Quarterly, levy recognized that society had become dependent on drugs. His insight was to bring literature into the sphere of drug culture because drug use, abuse, and its regulation is the anxious preoccupation of modern society. Drugs become a fetish for both conservatives and revolutionaries, while the terms of debate remain on drug law and education. 

While the aims of the hippie movement cannot be conflated with the New Left, they both took place in the liberal consensus made by the large unions such as the AFL-CIO as well as leadership of the Socialist and Communist parties of the Old Left. A consensus on the grounds of labor organizing as with the NLRB and on the basis of policy reform. It is this consensus between labor and party politics that forms the background for the cultural formation of the hippies and other more expressly militant and propagandist groups in the peripheries of educational and political institutions. Reforms seek to change or soften the forms of suffering in a society, not abolish the conditions of suffering, those conditions invisible to us, though united in the reality of their cruel compassions.This is the stagnant political history that levy was born into and which we inherit.

Already at a young age levy had turned away from the faith of his parents, and his forced enrollment in the Navy after high school did nothing but inflame him further. He would no less resign himself to reform. As Jean Genet writes in The Criminal Child: “But the young criminal immediately rejects the indulgence and concern of a society that he has in committing his first offence, revolted against. At fifteen or sixteen or earlier yet, he has attained a maturity that others may not reach even at sixty, and he scorns their munificence. He insists that his punishment be unsparing.” In his threadbare travels into Mexico and across the United States, levy gave himself the education he was denied, and, after meeting his mentor Richard Allen Morris, he shouldered himself with a greater responsibility than the State could enforce or conceive—the responsibility to foster a literary scene while organizing for a political culture.¹⁵

While levy advocated legalization and exploration of drugs, after heavy use as a youth he used them sparingly, and he never considered drugs as a revolutionary force.¹⁶ D. R. Wagner colorfully recalls: “levy was the Primate of Ohio. The First Psychedelic Church. The Person. That was through Art Kleps, and all that Cranberry Lake crowd . . . but this was not the underground. No. In fact, that was probably the most open part . . . but it hadn’t hit the literary and creative people per se. That’s why it was unusual that levy was hip to it at the time. I was only high with him a few times, and it was very clandestine, because he didn’t want to get busted.”¹⁷ Concerning marijuana, on the Alan Douglas show, levy makes his most positive comment: “Well, son, I got brainwashed when I was a little kid with this Christian mythology. I had the illusion that I had to be a martyr. Smoking pot got that out of my mind.” He explains how everyone is “lighting up, one way or another. They’re lighting up on other people’s hallucinations, including television.”¹⁸ As his partner Dagmar Ferek explains in if i scratch, if i write, levy considered drugs a crude approach to self-exploration that was dangerous in comparison to the act of writing or the investigative methods of Buddhist traditions. 

When discussing his drug infamy in the newspapers, Andrew Curry asks levy about his relationship with the Cleveland counterculture, to which levy replies: “I like the way my Siamese cats need me. They say: Feed me or we won’t talk to you. And my cats are very good. They clear my head and stuff. And they guard the house. They keep evil spirits out. They have a function—I have no functioning agreement with the psychedelic people.” Nevertheless, levy is remembered in histories of the counterculture as a proto-punk writer and publisher of “stoner verse.”¹⁹ Newspaper headlines at the time of his trials ran: “Hippie Leader Levy Gets 6 Months in Jail”²⁰, and one of the first scholars to write on levy Robert Carothers labelled levy as a nihilistic hippie poet. When Carothers wrote to levy connecting him to the hippies, he replied that he had no relationship other than “newspaper distortion.”²¹

Although levy was charged with obscenity and contributing to delinquency of minors, his trials are indelibly connected to the Cleveland Police Narcotics Department, which conducted searches and raids in an attempt to land levy with drug possession or distribution. Many accounts also discuss the infiltration of federal forces into social movements as a miasmic background to his trials and death. While this is undoubtedly a fact, this explanation only retreads the eternal defeat of the counterculture allied to a revolutionary aim it never shared. This story serves also to explain the defeat of the New Left by its contamination in the countercultural cloud. The true defeat of the New Left and counterculture, however, has been their success as the now dominant culture of capitalist society, fragmented into social constituencies across electoral campaigns and policy debates. Revolutionary energy is not so much captured by the powers that be and transformed into the daily motions of life, but the freedoms contested at one time begin to frame the struggles for freedom today. The object of art is no longer the freedoms of today but languishes as an object of attention, already past but waiting to be summoned forth into an unidentifiable future. 

This is the black box and mirror reversals of modernity as its cultural movements metamorphose. Literature is listed, but its contents are impenetrable as cultural politics. Readers pass through each book to emerge unchanged or unrecognizable. Each book can be a countercultural act, but what exactly is being countered? All of society? The State? Big business? The wars? (Because there is always war, and there will always be business, and the State, all of which must always be resisted.) Books are written in protest of reality, but without any faith in reality as already transforming. Establishing levy as a countercultural figure narrows his biography to accounts of his harassment, which, then, narrows his publishing and writing into reaction to this harassment, namely free speech and drug advocacy. The transformative vision is lost to a reactionary impulse to defend liberal principles and a despondency that ends in paralytic renunciation. 

today being stoned

is a way of life

as crippling as television

& christianity or newspaper worship

and the 9 to 5 assembly line

its 1968 & the assembly line pot smokers

are here   I’M AFRAID of the beautiful people

they are crazy and they are irresponsible assholes

just like their parents – they don’t want to

make guns they don’t want to kill – woe 

to the american economy²²

Just as with the poets Federico García Lorca, Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Patchen, Diane DiPrima, and Octavio Paz, levy was a revolutionary, concerned not only with personal freedoms, but also with the conditions of social freedom. “There are radicals and there are Radicals and there are those who disappear in the middle of the day.”²³ Yes, a radical with a revolutionary aim, but this aim should not be confused with systems of governance. At his last reading in 1936 before his assasination by the Spanish fascists, Lorca exclaimed: “As for me, I’ll never be political. I’m a revolutionary because all true poets are revolutionaries—don’t you agree—but, political, never!”²⁴ To paraphrase Merleau-Ponty: “And so you renounce being a revolutionary? Yes, in order to be all the more revolutionary.”²⁵ The radical act of investigating the development of a political crisis ceases to be revolutionary once that crisis is socially resolved in the abolition of the conditions of its origin. Tomorrow and perhaps today, the revolutionary act will not be thought of as revolutionary, in the sense of the violent revolts of the 19th century, and certainly not rebellious as in the 20th century. 

In The Agony of the American Left, intellectual historian Christopher Lasch describes the rebel’s task as that of “the search for personal integrity . . . a politics in which authenticity was equated with the degree of one’s alienation, the degree of one’s willingness to undertake existential acts of defiance.”²⁶ He otherwise explains in The New Radicalism in America that the radical act often exists as a celebration of itself, as if action exists only to be recorded, and that record exists as a further act of defiance. Today, just as then, “rebellion is the privilege of groups who enjoy something that industrial society has not yet been able (or willing) to give everyone: leisure and education.”²⁷ As Mexican poet, critic, and ambassador Octavio Paz further illustrates: “Whatever society they come from, the rebel is an outsider: if he ceases to be an outsider, he ceases to be a rebel. Hence they cannot be either a source of change or a guide. They are the lonely combatant, the dissident, an isolated fact, and an exception. Industrial society has lost its center . . . cut off from the past and continually hurtling toward some vague future at such a dizzying pace that it cannot take root, [society] merely survives from one day to the next,” and the rebel is the redeeming figure of this situation. Authors like levy become the redeeming figures of a flattened history and lost, liberatory future. Paz continues: “The restless need to seize upon each new exception that comes along—in order to assimilate it, castrate it, and cast it aside—explains why the powers that be, especially in the U.S., are so tolerant of new rebellions. The ambiguous nihilism of rebel-artists is the mirror-image of the complacent, self-satisfied nihilism of those in power. The destiny of the rebel in the past was defeat or submission. Defeat is almost impossible today: the authorities tolerate any sort of rebellion, once they have clipped its nails and claws.” By making levy into a rebel, and the rebel into an object of worship, we domesticate them.²⁸ This has been the unwitting work of journalism and scholarship on levy and Cleveland poetry in general. Our diminishing of the revolutionary author’s vision into a figure who merely “rebels completely against conventional Western Society, in effect, establishes that society more firmly in its complacency.” Caught up in our revolt, we resign ourselves to the rules of power without challenging the power of the rules themselves.²⁹ Trappist monk, poet, and critic Thomas Merton goes so far as to argue that, “in fact, the enemies of the artist’s freedom are those who profit by his seeming to be free.”³⁰ For those without a positive social vision, the present is a wasteland and the future an apocalypse. “For [these] writers, society is the object of an aesthetic of opposition and resentment. They condemn the social order to confirm it, so that they can be its permanent stranger. They are a rebel, not a revolutionary.”³¹ The rebel desires to be seen, while the revolutionary writes invisibly. When asked to “write something constructive about east cleveland,” levy responds: “get me a passport – that’s constructive!” He continues:

i don’t see any other way

this city within me can survive

and i am already too old to be your future

you are always too late

you are always too safe

you are always too late

everyone wants to be jesus

everyone wants to be martyred 

everyone wants to be a bodhisattva 

without getting their hands dirty 

it doesn’t seem to matter anymore

if the cause is just

like unarmed confrontation 

i want to see the day when 

the city confronts me openly 

However, through his harrasment by the police, the trials, and his suicide, levy is made tragic, his death a sacrifice waiting to be redeemed or wasted, so he remains a figure martyred by the State. Each retelling of his life is often only a retelling of his death, the deaths of his doubles—further and further distant from him. Hardly a decade after his death, a Cleveland Magazine article made levy’s poetry out to be a series of poorly written, public suicide notes.³² His death is recounted like film noir, and even some of levy’s admirers make of his peculiar method of suicide a potential fetish—the gunshot wound through the “third eye.” The fact of its repetition makes it a fetish, but the insistence it carries demonstrates the intention of the deliberate act and accompanying awareness. However, the scene of levy’s death is belaboured at every chance. One has the impression that the repetition of the fact of his suicide is “a matter of pretending to certify death where the death certificate is still the performance of an act of war or the impotent gesticulation, the restless dream, of an execution.”³³ In this pop-countercultural resurgence, there is no d.a. levy outside of his harrasment, trials, and suicide.³⁴ The explanations of his death displace the more difficult task of uncovering the aims of his life. After all, “in a life which is over, the end is regarded as the truth of the beginning. His history becomes a kind of circular essence which is epitomized in each of his moments.”³⁵ As such, the trials have been discussed as the major event of levy’s life, though they have little meaning to his writing and activities.

Asking why we have the First Amendment, defense attorney specializing in the First Amendment Charles Rembar invokes Thomas Jefferson and Supreme Court Justice Holmes in observing the strange “conjunction of capitalism and intellectual freedom” in the functioning of a democratic society.³⁶ Although a seeming contradiction, levy’s trials demonstrate that our freedom of speech is a right because we, in fact, do not have freedom of speech. We have the right to speak and express ourselves, but few means to be heard and little control over the circumstances of our lives. In the marketplace of ideas, obscenity, as argued by Rembar, has so little social value that it does not amount to ‘speech’ or ‘writing’ within the meaning of the First Amendment. Less than speech, obscenity is hardly the expression of an attitude. The censorship of immoral sexual material for obscenity often aligns with the preservation of a political order by means of suppression, but the suppression of speech does not always serve to preserve a political order, and acts of expression cannot dissolve any political order. In many obscenity cases, censorship is pursued through injunction or administrative action, stopping the sale of books, and by pressure groups, but, as both the publisher and author, levy and his bookseller Lowell were unprecedentedly pursued by the local police and the county for criminal prosecution.

Rembar’s cases throughout the sixties with the Grove Press editions of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer established that speech with social value was protected under the First Amendment, but what social values? Whose social values? By pleading “no contest” levy concedes that his writing and publishing is what William P. Reilly of Citizens for Decent Literature called ‘subliterature’ or a ‘cesspool publication’. Perhaps no coincidence, levy’s first periodical was named The Silver Cesspool, playing off the oil-slicked Lake Erie and Cuyahoga river. In this way, levy concedes that his writing is obscene and gestures to how its obscenity is derived from the obscene reality of its society and surroundings. Obscene, that is, of no social value to the “present political and religious regimes”—and, therefore, in Rembar’s terms, his writing and publishing would not be protected as free speech.³⁷ A defense of levy’s work as literature and his activities as a publisher were entirely possible, but he decided to forgo any defense of himself or his work. To defend himself with the laws of the State, he would have been defending the codes and social conditions of an alienated society. This is why levy terms his legal incursions as “the dream trial and the dream trial inquisition.” By claiming obscenity, then, levy reveals how the freedom of speech always entails the restriction of speech: what does and what does not count as ‘speech’ as dictated by the community, State, and business interests. His work is only as obscene as the conditions of our society, “the books that show the world its own shame.”³⁸ While his case was not argued in this manner, and he had great concern also for troubling Lowell’s trial, this perspective on obscenity guided levy’s approach to concrete poetry. 

In her preface to concrete & etc. Swanberg argues that levy was put on trial because he transgressed social norms, because “modern culture cannot tolerate the anxiety of [an awareness of death].” Yet, does our society not only now tolerate this awareness, but also live on it? What is inexorable, however, is if this awareness of death is accompanied by transformative vision. What would the awareness of suffering be without an understanding of its conditions, potential overcoming, and path forward? An apocalyptic nightmare without any human future, let alone any rapture. But this awareness remains a destructive fantasy because of our inability to not only imagine but conceive practically a free society other than our own. levy’s poetry is not only concrete, but para-concrete, pata-concrete—as in pataphysical—para-pornographic, and sub-poetic. Obscene. Yes, language is broken down, visually, non-verbally, and even in the refusal to communicate, but what remains? The city and its people . . . 

Here, levy acts as a Socratic figure for Cleveland, though now, rather than act as the accusers, it is the poets that stand trial: “He does not plead for himself. He pleads the cause of a city which would accept philosophy. He reverses the roles and says to [his accusers]: it is not myself I am defending, it is you. In the last analysis the City is in him and they are the enemies of the [people]. It is they who are being judged, and he who is judging them.”³⁹ Cleveland and Cuyahoga county’s harassment is articulated as an attack on free speech, poets, and often Poetry itself, but the banal truth is that the police and courts could care less about poetry or poets. From one vantage, the harassment levy and his friends faced was a politically motivated act aimed to disrupt socially independent, intellectual activity, which could be legally argued at the time on the basis of obscenity and delinquency laws and which happened to find its permissible evidence in poetry publications and public readings. It is no small fact that levy and his friends were harassed not only for writing, but for their printing, publishing, and distribution. From another vantage, their arrests were entirely accidental or provoked by nothing more than a misunderstanding of their advocacy for drug legalization. Not the banality of evil, but only crude justice and stupid violence, all without any particular intention other than its justification. Blazek similarly argues: “Obscenity was a ruse. levy was a political prisoner. He challenged things that were sacred to America, but corrosive to the human spirit. He wrote about the obscenity of a dying world, and that upset a lot of people. levy had become a hero of the underground literature. Our Lenny Bruce, our Che Guevara.”⁴⁰ Yes, levy may have been a revolutionary, but he was certainly no militant, and to call him a political prisoner would entail conscious action on the part of the State. Ultimately, the harassment, trial proceedings, and closure of the coffeeshops and bookshops were far more unconsciously directed than they may appear in newsprint. 

While for Allen Ginsberg and his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights, the Howl trial, and its judgement in their favor, confirmed the social importance of their work, the trial for levy only confirmed that he had caught the public’s attention, even if only in misunderstanding. By embracing obscenity, levy demonstrates the power our speech lacks and the obscenity of our daily lives where we may speak freely, but we cannot live freely. As Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno illustrates: “The strong always seek reasons for justifying their violence, whereas the violence really suffices, for it is its own explanation.”⁴¹ But do we, then, need to justify or explain our existence despite the violence of our society, on the very terms of that society? No. As Oscar Wilde writes of his imprisonment: “It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.”⁴² Across his poetry and editorials levy let our society stand unjustified in all its naked violence. This is the slow violence of exploitation. Today, just as then, money is the violence of our alienation made material. The Supreme Court case Citizens United in 2010 established money as equivalent to speech and, therefore, a form of free speech. If money is a kind of poetry as described by poet and insurance businessman Wallace Stevens, then our lives are governed by the poetry of money. However, can the poetry of humanity now learn to live freely inside the machine?⁴³ 

The cylinders of the printing press, the barred windows of the prison and school, the machinery of the State. Now, the poets stand trial, but the real trial is each day, because we are often not brought to trial. French author Jean Genet describes in his novels the process by which State execution could be regarded as the highest form of recognition in modern society, not all too dissimilar to the recognition in arrest or imprisonment. Besides the politician and official, the criminal is one of the only State recognized persons in our society, though they transgress and, thereby, transcend the laws of that social body.⁴⁴ Kafka’s work excruciatingly describes the judgements and punishments in alienated society, eternally deferred, but ever present. The situation we all find ourselves in, the situation of K. at trial or attempting to reach the castle, the situation levy found himself struggling against every day in Cleveland.⁴⁵

cleveland – there are parts of me

you will not understand for centuries

tell me about your reality 

and i’ll tell *you

i do not believe in death

and i spend my days in 

amazement – wondering at your

callousness & your wide open hypocrisy –

not that i wanted much

a place to write

some printing materials

so i could take my time

& write beautiful poems 

& study

but you laughed

i watched my teeth rot 

& laughed

what could your schools teach me?

how to be a bad poet? After

paying out $5,000 – – –

or perhaps

after a scholarship brainwashing 

i could sit on my ass 

& write to an audience i helped to murder

with dead poems 

safe poems⁴⁶

In distinction to much of the Midwest, Cleveland emerged as a center of production during the early stages of the second industrial revolution. Northeast Ohio was the epicenter of the technologies that would forever reshape the world into a simple surface: oil production, railroad conglomeration, gasoline distillation, early automobile manufacturing, long distant telephones, public electric lighting, machining, and far more. When journalist George E. Condon discusses the Eastern European characteristics of Cleveland, there are more similarities to note than architecture and its large ethnic populations of Hungarians, Slovaks, Poles, and Czechs. In terms of manufacturing, Cleveland was one of the primary sites in North America where qualitative production transformed to quantitative production, that is, from artisanal to industrial manufacturing. Whereas cities of the “Middle-West” once served as the agricultural hinterlands of the Eastern coastal cities in the colonial period, Cleveland was the nexus between Chicago and New York, allowing for inland rivers and the Great Lakes cities to become their own commercial and manufacturing networks.⁴⁷ While developments in transportation and its artisanal base provided for early efforts at mass production, existing industry inhibited the region’s ability to shift towards Fordist and Taylorist production in the early 20th Century. 

Before the advent of laser printing, the mimeograph, a small scale duplicator, allowed individuals to print relatively high volume at low cost. Although levy’s early work with the letterpress was ornamentally unique and took advantage of deep-set impressions, with the mimeograph, levy could focus on the intellectual content of his work as would a medieval scribe, yet also run relatively high volume by allowing for the tendencies of the technology to guide his approach to textual material and visual design. Accordingly, levy’s relationship to the counterculture should more fundamentally be regarded as a relation to a change in methods of textual reproduction—the mechanization of printing made accessible to the individual publisher. On the scale of human society, this mechanization mirrors the change in political economy from feudal relations to capital relations in cultural production.⁴⁸ 

The counterculture itself emerges from access to technologies abandoned or freed up by industries. In this vein, levy develops an unalienated relationship with printing machinery. He often explores the shifting of cultural mythologies between the social systems of feudalism and capitalism, appropriating the terms and forms of capitalist relations as an immanent critique of alienated existence through the State, their wars, and money. In this treatment levy exposes the illusory character to human experience of these apparent forms and how their reality is not the limit of human society and culture. Concrete for levy is not merely a form of poetry, but an approach to production where thought and instrument merge, where “WHAT’S REAL IS BURNING,” where reality is both made and destroyed. 

the last medieval frontier

gothic ohio

a catholic whorehouse –

guardians of the light – BULLSHIT!

Nicene copyright – Bullshit!

secret ouspenskian groups

hidden in the suburbs – BULLSHIT

everyone using the groups 

to escape their response-ability

for Reality Now

poetry – the last round with

mental dysentery before

confronting the Reality of Oneself 

in relation to the reality of the

universe

poetry – the greatest bullshit of all!⁴⁹

While the Romantic searches for further frontiers, humanity has seemed to have exhausted them. But levy turns back to the walls and bridges of the medieval city, dwelling on the stone bridges of the Rockefellers in Forest Hills Park. Bearing the weight of its instrumental role in modernity, Cleveland perhaps remains the historical frontier for U.S. and global capital. The nexus of early industrial transformation, particularly in transport, the city and wider area took hold in the modernist literary imagination for Crane’s The Bridge, much as Kenneth Patchen’s poetry, and fascinatingly also across a great divide, Cleveland provides the foundational setting for both Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. 

Despite growing pains throughout its development as a transportation, commercial, and manufacturing center, Cleveland has retained many of its geographical distinctions with the Cuyahoga River, Cuyahoga Valley, and Erie lakefront. With an enduring Group Plan surrounding Public Square, the city’s infrastructure adapted to difficult terrain over the centuries, throwing up bridges along its main avenues and over its boulevards, from which have extended many seamless suburbs. The exodus of Cleveland residents to both new and old suburbs was not for any failure of the urban center itself, but rather a testament to the wealth and ability of its people to search for cleaner environments supported by  early adoption of automobile infrastructure.⁵⁰ During levy’s lifetime, the downtown developed its now familiar Group Plan, a light rail system as a part of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, and the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. Just as the city was reshaping itself, residents with the means to do so left to live elsewhere, often in the growing suburbs or older satellite villages along the canal and rail infrastructure. levy criticizes this escape as a form of limited freedom in one of his final poems SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM, which opens with the  “Glenville Shootout” and riots of 1968 (July 23-28) where Cleveland police and Ohio National Guard exchanged fire with a Black Militant group. Here levy perhaps also recalls the larger Hough riots of only two years previous (July 18-24, 1966). While the movement into further and further urban peripheries gave families, for a time, a glimpse of freedom; this displacement has created new forms of segregation, transportation difficulties with increasing geographical distribution, and social isolation. Personal transportation in the form of automobiles were the force behind population diffusion and personal communication technologies have become our coping mechanism. 

i cld try to tell you

about the hopeless despair 

ingrained the ghetto walls

& police brutality or police stupidity

or police reality is more than just words 

to define situations by 

students looking for a cause

the situations exist & continue 

quietly in the dark while the

protest goes on in daylight –

both unheard

Really 

the police try to protect

the banks – and everything else

is secondary

during the riots 

i watched the news

& didn’t pick sides for a change

i just sat wondering about all

the living room revolutionaries 

safe in the suburbs 

who cheered everytime someone 

was shot or a building went up

in smoke 

ten blocks away

it was real

thousands of tourists

arrived⁵¹

The result: decaying and disconnected infrastructure across an unevenly developed landscape. The failure of the suburbs is now evident, but the situation continues. Another history, another life is possible. If not inevitable, then the decision of how to live and how we want to change our lives cannot be avoided, unless we allow others to decide for us. levy’s decision to leave the Navy and hitchhike across the country only to return to his origins in Cleveland is his mythical moment of breaking with conventional life, yet also a return to the mythic normalcy of Gothic Ohio. This is when levy gained his definitive aims, when he realized he could be a publisher and an author, that he could become everything he felt his home environment lacked. As Kierkegaard argues: “To find the conclusion, it is necessary first of all to observe that it is lacking, and then in turn to feel quite vividly the lack of it. It might therefore be imagined that an essential author, just to make evident the misfortune that men are living without a conclusion, might write a fragment . . . though in another sense he provided the conclusion by providing the necessary life-view. And after all a world-view, a life-view, is the only true condition of every literary production. Every poetic conclusion is an illusion. If a life-view is developed, if it stands out whole and clear in its necessary coherence, one had no need to put the hero to death, one may as well let him live: . . . the development is complete.” This is why levy’s entire literary production appears at once immature and yet fully formed from the very beginning of his publishing project. His work as a whole retains a singular attitude and view toward life, while recognizing the writing of poetry as a game. This is also levy’s relationship with life and myth. When we “regard death as a conclusion [this] is a deceitful evasion, for death is related quite indifferently to the premise of a man’s life, and therefore is not a conclusion of any sort.” It is not the martyrdom of the “witness to the truth,” it is not the death of the revolutionary, but it is with the life-view of the revolutionary that society “renew[s] the life of the established order by introducing a new point of departure for it, a point of departure which is new in comparison with the fundamental presuppositions of the established order.”⁵² This departure for society is experienced by the revolutionary to be as necessary as one’s own departure. As Ian Gibson notes of Lorca: “The practice of poetry was absolutely necessary to Federico’s survival as a person.”⁵³All the same for levy. In distinction to the reactionary writer, for the essential author writing is essential to their existence, their continual survival, the continual conclusion that is their lives. What renews the life of the revolutionary author—their departing vision, the vision departing from society—also renews and provides a necessary point of decision and departure for all of society.

Before his “letter to cleveland” levy notes that Book IV of Kibbutz in the Sky will “xist in Cleveland’s future (if it has a future).” By leaving his book unwritten, levy leaves it to us to complete that Kibbutz in the Sky, and leaves for us the possibilities of Cleveland’s future and our failure, the necessity of our failure in taking up that revolutionary vision. The significance of levy’s work is in his vision and dedication to the concrete project of a future. Not the construction of a utopia, but seeing how unsteadily the world stands and tracing out the possibilities from what we have inherited of nature and past human generations. This is the call to freedom in poetry which is the unity of human society and nature. levy stakes his freedom with the freedom of all, which is why he can perhaps arrogantly ask: “can i recall the millenium instead of today? can i be the millenium?”⁵⁴ 

Adelaide Simon playfully compares how levy writes with the fearful sweat that German poet Rainer Maria Rilke “must have felt when he could not offer shelter to [Ernst] Toller from the counter-revolutionaries” and further notes a resemblance with Rilke’s proclamation in his Requiem für Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth: “Wer spricht von siegen, überstehen ist alles.” [Who speaks of victory, to survive/endure is all.] Yet, Simon argues that “levy is no Remington for Macleish to memorialize his terrible fall. And broke, trapped, and fearful, a skinny West side kid Midwesterner may make as calm a show of courage as Cowper in his career. Most of levy’s artistic life has been devoted to printing and promoting the work of other poets around the world. This buttresses the hope that Cleveland may maintain some toehold on an intellectual future. With so many mimeos . . . God only knows why someone had dubbed this the silent generation. In levy’s poetry and in the poetry of his friends, there are clues that lead one to believe that in time [Cleveland] can do more intellectually than survive . . .”⁵⁵ Let’s do more than survive. As levy seems to mockingly ask on the Ghost Press anthology cover: 

It takes a lot of hard work

to be a good American

. . . but it’s worth it!

Well, is it? Can you recall the millenium? Can you be the millenium? Can we ever fulfill the promise of freedom in our country? Our country “where tv is god, and money is god and to talk about love is guarantee you will not be understood and to try to love is a sign of insanity.” Our country where the post-WWII era has given way to endless regional wars across the world. In his time, levy criticized the Vietnam war and the complicit Cleveland industries, but he also emphasized how “THE WAR IS HERE!” There is no choice between either freedom or equality. We have freedom under law, but not in society, and attempting to assert equality through law cannot achieve equality. We want control over our lives and democracy in our institutions, but what is the basis of our freedom and equality? The basis of our freedom and equality today is our ability to produce and maintain value, to make profit. We are equal in our alienation to the extent that we can exploit and be exploited in order to live. This is the extent of our freedom under any and all forms of governments in the future . . . or in the past.¹⁹ levy’s poetry demonstrates not only the potential, but the necessity to rebuild the conditions for a productive and political continuity between our working lives and artistic disciplines. Let us regather the fragments of ourselves. But first we must endure . . .

---

1. Bree Bodnar, interviewing Brittany Hudak and rjs, “Zygote Press Explores a Local Connection to Outlaw Printing and Publishing with d.a. levy: Subversive Printmaking in 1960s Cleveland.” (CAN Journal, Winter 2024) Bizarrely, this article also misstates that levy took his life with a shotgun, as opposed to a rifle which all other accounts recognize. This mistake is likely sourced from Alan Kaufman’s introduction to The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, which is the only account that mentions this spurious detail. (Thunder’s Mouth, 1999) ↩︎
2. Derek VanPelt, “Death of a Poet: D.A. Levy left no suicide note. Except his poems,” (Cleveland Magazine, 1974), 75-82. ↩︎
3. Cleveland’s Dead Poet Society” by Christopher Evans (Plain Dealer) Further articles include “D.A. Levy:
   Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker” by Jed Birmingham (Reality Studio, June, 25, 2007); Misconception Articles: “Remembering d.a. levy“ (The Allen Ginsberg Project, Nov. 24, 2021);  “50 years after d.a. levy‘s Death, the legend of Cleveland‘s visionary poet and provocateur lives on“ by Mark Kuhar (Cleveland.com, Nov. 14, 2018)
   ↩︎
4. Douglas Manson, “Mimeograph as the Furnace of Loss,” from  d.a. levy & the mimeograph revolution, 191-204. ↩︎
5. Philip Metres, “Reading levy in Cleveland.” (Jacket 34, October 2007) http://jacketmagazine.com/34/metres-levy.shtml ↩︎
6. The Beats: A Graphic History, “The Harassment of d.a. Levy,” written by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle, art by Gary Dumm. (FSG, 2009) ↩︎
7. Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, compiled and edited by David D. Van Tassel and John S. Grabowski. (Indiana UP, 1996) ↩︎
8. Eric Mottram, The Serif, “d.a. levy: Cleveland’s Survival Artist,” 5-13. Manson refers to Golden’s essay “Portrait of a Young Man Trying to Eat the Sun,” from The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle: The Art and Poetry of d.a. levy. (Seven Stories Press, 1999) ↩︎
9. Erick Trickey, The Epic of d.a. levy. (Cleveland Magazine, Oct. 19, 2007) https://clevelandmagazine.com/articles/the-epic-of-dalevy/ ↩︎
10. Jean Cocteau, from “Le Rappel à L’Ordre.” This quote serves as an epitaph for Allen DeLoach’s periodical INTREPID in which levy occasionally had work published. ↩︎
11. Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-57, “Introduction.” (Harvard UP, 1972) ↩︎
12. levy, Kibbutz in the Sky, “pre-face” to Book II. ↩︎
13. Ben Fong, Quick Fixes, 141. (Verso, 2023) ↩︎
14. Quick Fixes, 143. ↩︎
15. Jean Genet. The Criminal Child, translated by Charlotte Mandell and Jeffrey Zuckerman. (NYRB, 2020) ↩︎
16. PRAPS I SERIES. ↩︎
17. D.R. Wagner, “An Interview with D.R. Wagner,” conducted by Swanberg in zen concrete & etc., 238. ↩︎
18. zen concrete & etc., 216-217. ↩︎
19. heads together, 1965-1973, edited by David Jacob Kramer. (Edition Patrick Frey, No. 354.) ↩︎
20. W. James VenVliet, “Hippie Leader Levy Gets 6 Months in Jail” (Plain Dealer, 2-21-68) ↩︎
21. Letter excerpted in if i scratch, if i write.Otherwise available at Kent State Special Collections d.a. levy and family archive. ↩︎
22. SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM, “Forest Hills Park.” ↩︎
23. “Letter from an Invisible Greek.” (Litmus, November 1968) ↩︎
24. Ian Gibson, Lorca: A Life. (Pantheon, 1989) ↩︎
25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventure of the Dialectic, translated by Joseph Bien. (Northwestern UP, 1978) ↩︎
26. Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 288. (Norton, 1965) ↩︎
27. Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left, 23. (Knopf, 1969) ↩︎
28. Octavio Paz, Alternating Current, “The Verbal Round,” translated by Helen R. Lane. (Viking Press 1973) [Siglio, 1967] ↩︎
29. Octavio Paz, Alternative Current, “Two Forms of Reason,” translated by Helen R. Lane. (Viking Press 1973) [Siglio, 1967] ↩︎
30. Thomas Merton, “Answers on Art and Freedom.” (Lugano Review 1965) ↩︎
31. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, “Why Write?” translated by Bernard Frechtman. (Harvard UP, 1988) [Gallimard 1947] ↩︎
32. Derek VanPelt, “Death of a Poet.” ↩︎
33. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International, “Spectres of Marx, I. (Routledge, 2006) ↩︎
34. Baudrillard, Simulacrum & Simulation, “The Strategy of the Real” ↩︎
35. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words. (George Braziller 1963) [Gallimard, 1952] ↩︎
36. Charles Rembar, The End of Obscenity. (Random House 1968) ↩︎
37. he spirits of ohio, THE PARA-CONCRETE MANIFESTO, June 1966. levy authored the majority of the broadside, but the publication can be presumed to be a collaboration between D.R. Wagner, Kent Taylor, levy, and, more than likely, drew from concrete artists don thomas as well as Dom Sylvester Houédard among many others. This publication was preceded by the Cleveland Manifesto of Poetry (Principles Behind the Writings of 6 Cleveland Poets), which was published in June 1964 by James Lowell at the Asphodel Book Shop. Edited by levy, this manifesto compiles brief notes from Russell Atkins, Russell Salamon, Adelaide Simon, levy, Jau Billera, and Kent Taylor. ↩︎
38. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis. (Random House, 1909) ↩︎
39. Merleau-Ponty, “In Praise of Philosophy,” translation by John Wild and James M. Edie (1952) ↩︎
40. Blazek, untitled, from zen concrete & etc., 205. ↩︎
41. Miguel de Unamuno, Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, translated by Homer P. Earle. (Sublunary Editions, 2023) ↩︎
42. De Profundis. ↩︎
43. Frank Lloyd Wright, “Fabrication and Imagination,” (The Architectural Record, October 1927) ↩︎
44. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, translated by Bernard Frechtman (Grove Press, 1963) [L’Arbalete, 1943] Miracle of the Rose, translated by Bernard Frechtman (Grove Press, 1966) [Librairie Gallimard, 1951] ↩︎
45. Franz Kafka, The Castle, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. (Knopf, 1965) The Trial, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. (Knopf, 1987) ↩︎
46. [Kibbutz in the Sky, Book V, letter to cleveland] ↩︎
47. Thomas F. Campbell and Edward M Miggins, The Birth of Modern Cleveland. (Associated UP, 1988) ↩︎
48. Noam Chomsky, “Governments in the Future.” (Poetry Center in New York, April 1970) ↩︎
49. SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM, “Forest Hills Park.” ↩︎
50. Lewis Mumford, The City In History, 391. (Harcourt Brace & World, 1961) ↩︎
51. SUBURBAN MONASTERY DEATH POEM, “Part Zero – Celebration with Rada Drums.” ↩︎
52. Søren Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler or a Cycle of Ethico-Religious Essays, “Introduction,” translated by Walter Lowrie. (Knopf, 1941) [1896] ↩︎
53.  Lorca: A Life. ↩︎
54. Untitled [“GOMA”], ink on paper, reprinted on the back cover of concrete & etc. ↩︎
55. Adelaide Simon, from ukanhavyrfuckinciti bak. (Ghost Press, 1968) This essay introduces Cleveland undercovers. ↩︎