(This d.a. levy booklet is 1.75″ x 2″)
Cleveland’s d.a. levy put a shotgun to his head and his brains all over his apartment wall in 1968 at the age of 26, beating my brother Cat who four years older and nineteen years later blew his brains all over the back of his brand new pickup truck bed. Cleveland’s hard on its poets.
levy was suicide prone anyway, but was especially depressed because the Cleveland police were hounding him for reading a poem in public which contained the word fuck – said he was contributing to the delinquency of minors, which is funny in a way because the poem he was reading was written by a minor in the audience.
Allen Ginsberg, the Fugs and a host of others came to Cleveland to help raise money for his defense before he decided to check out.
levy’s famous for starting the underground mimeograph poetry press revolution in Cleveland – he published himself and others via his Renegade Press and Seven Flowers Press.
He also printed Cleveland’s first underground newspaper titled the Buddhist Third-Class Junkmail Oracle.
Since levy was against copyrighted material (he frequently used the term “copyrot” in his paper) anyone may print his poems. A fine example of one of his most famous — Suburban Monastery Death Poem (a 37 page book length poem) — may be purchased for $5 at Crisis Chronicles Press.
For more, here’s a Wikipedia entry: d.a. levy
fotos by Smith
love this..