d.a. levy, Pioneer in Visio-Textual Art
Zen Concrete & Etc.
by d.a. levy, edited by Ingrid Swanberg. 245 pp; 1991; Pa;
ghost pony press, 2518 Gregory St., Madison WI 53711. $29.50 ppd.
The initial charm of this nicely-produced, richly-illustrated
large book is the immediacy with which it brings the sixties to
life, at least for anyone who spent his twenties there, as I did.
Just about everything of the era is in it: the sometimes jejune
but always impassioned and compassionate politics; the sometimes
jejune but always free-ranging and committed devotion to art; the
struggles over obscenity, complete with busts; marijuana and
various psychedelic drugs; the paraphernalia both physical and
mental of exotic Oriental religions; and the wonderful, if
sometimes frazzling, sense of everything's coming to fruition at
once.
Almost always an implicit or louder part of the
textual poems that make up about half the book are the politics of the time, as in his "Suburban Monastery Death Poem," for example, where he writes, "Really/ the police
try to protect/ the banks - and everything else/ is secondary,"
or in his four "visualized prayers to the American God," which are comprised mainly of dollar signs.
The devotion to art is burstingly there in the sheer amount of
poems and collages in the book, particularly considering that
they are a mere selection from the ouevre of a man who died at
26.
As for the obscenity wars, they explode in the excellent over-view from the
early seventies of levy's life provided by Douglas Blazek.
Twice, according to Blazek, levy was arrested for distributing obscene poems.
AND THIS COURT HAS A RIGHT TO PROTECT
KIDS FROM THIS KIND OF FILTH FOR THE SAKE OF FILTH AND NOTHING
ELSE as one of the judges involved thoughtfully put it. Levy was clearly a victim of persecution, for one of his arrests was for publishing a poem by a minor that contained the word, "fuck," in it. Although levy was never convicted of the charges against him, the persecution took its toll on him
and certainly contributed to his eventually killing himself.
Drugs are only peripherally in levy's poems and collages, but get more attention from levy's friend, the poet D. R. Wagner, whom the book's editor, Ingrid Swansen, interviews, and in the personal reminiscences of levy by Kent Taylor, as well as in a wonderfully black-humored fragment from a radio talk show featuring levy and a few of his friends which ends with a woman caller's saying, "I think the boys are absolutely right! I think it's great! Why don't we all just bug out, and we'll see who provides the groceries, and makes the shoes..." with Levy interrupting by asking who needs shoes and the host's observing that levy is wearing a pair.
Buddhism permeates levy's poetry and collages, though in tension with
his propensity for agitation and despair. As for the sense of going-somewhere that the sixties symbolized for so many, it is there not only in levy's poems and collages, but in the descriptions of his publishing (via offset and then mimeo), his organizing of and contributions to poetry readings, his leaving free copies of books he'd published at public libraries, and selling them on the street, and all his interactions with people like Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg.
By now it should be apparent that a signal virtue of this book is
its bringing levy himself, through his friends' reminiscenses of
him, to life. Literary Biography and Social Document--
as just these two things alone, Zen Concrete is well worth buying. But its
greatest value is as a collection of levy's art.
That begins with Zen Concrete, 1967, which consists of a sequence
of what levy called "experiments in destructive writing." Its
first page contains something that apparently was a poem, but all
its letters have been blacked out. Trivial? Perhaps. But
considered as a kind of drawing of literary process, it begins to
say more than On one level it says not of silence but of
silenced writing--and this no doubt refers, in part, to the
attempt of the police in Cleveland to silence levy as a poet by
twice arresting him for purveying obscenity. But it also speaks
of the poet's disappointment with his medium. Also, the canceled
words look like they're seeping larger, flowing toward the
paper's edge, or even misting upward off it, into subtler
expression. Other things that cross the mind: that some portions
of the poem are only lightly scratched out, and others heavily,
and passionately, defaced suggests the poem's personality--as
does its still apparent shape. As a composition its author
turned against, it is amusing, too, particularly at its start,
where lines between lines had to be canceled--as if the poet,
dissatisfied with his effort first tried to rewrite the beginning
of it, then gave up. The title, "Selected Writings," which is
left unmarked at the top of the page with levy's name and the
year of composition, suggests something of the artist's sardonic
self-contempt for his presuming to work up an Ouevre out of
matter better blacked out.
But the piece is most important for setting up levy's series as a
whole. The second work in it, "Totem," consists of more blacked out lines of print, but with a little oval sun added off to the left, and
the text reversed (due, d.r. wagner informs us in an interview
included in the book, to levy's practice of "backfeeding" pages
through his mimeograph). Most of the text is in a narrow,
irregular column, and looks like a totem pole. But not all the
letters in the thing have been blacked out. The result? Words
in the process of going against themselves, and into self-
obliteration in an act of worship? Or the reverse: letters
backing out of a dying act of worship and on their way toward
asensual pragmatism as normal words? Both, I contend--into a
tension of opposed magics.
In the third segment of levy's sequence cut-up texts are
superimposed on a silenced text; one of the additions concerns
Cambodian statues of the Buddha; another is a snippet that contains
just the word, "(dharma)." The main addition, however, is an
upside-down text, mostly blackened out. But scraps of material
remain readable: "come," "gain refuge" and "they didn't," among
them in the upside-down portion; "red walls" "as twilight formed"
and "staring at" in the rightside-up text it covers. Many
meanings are possible: a world of words and orientations going
meaningless, but with havens preserved within? And of course
more than a hint of the salvation of levy's brand of Zen. So,
like many poets after him such as Doris Cross, John Stickney,
Greg Evason, jwcurry and Tom Phillips, levy is here silencing a
given text down to some poetic or otherwise aesthetically
meaningful essence.
As the sequence continues levy adds more and more subteties,
e.g., a half-page with just a few scattered fragments of
illegible words above a text on . . . the Beginning, which opposes
a page whose silenced text looks like a brick wall. As a whole,
Zen Concrete becomes a treatise on the Varieties of
Disintegration and Ressurection, as well as a visual poem one can
go back to as often as one can to the best paintings.
A year later levy was adding visual cut-outs from girlie
magazines, books of reproductions of Buddhist statues and other
artworks, and elsewhere, while building on his techniques of
textual destruction and collage for even richer though sometimes
disorganized-seeming work that looks contemporary, and has had a wide if not yet academically-
acknowledged influence on the best visual poets of the present..
Meanwhile he was turning out visio-textual work of an elegance
that almost seems slick. Ny favorite of these appears to be
something clipped from a Greek newspaper. Three circles of equal
diameter have been collaged over the clipping, and two more
circles of the same size drawn intersecting two of them. One of
the first set of circles contains blown-up Greek lettering in
white on a black ground; a second has similar lettering in black
on a white ground. The texts are perpendicular to the clipping's
text. The third of the cut-out circles is mostly blank, with
just a shade of small disappearing lettering. Some dots, a
dotted line, a solid line and a bent line have also been drawn on
the work to suggest, for me, some kind of geometric analysis.
What to make of such a jumble? I'm not sure. But I find all
kinds of hints of antiquity versus the ultra-modern field that
particle physics, with its extensive re-use of greek lettering,
is; headline-topicality versus details of Final Importance that
are turning away and rising from them. Platonic ideals.
As a textual poet, levy was not as significant or groundbreaking
as he was in what I call "pluraesthetic art" to mean art that is
meaningful in more than one aesthetic way, as visual poetry is
expressive both as words and as visual images. An early extended
poem, "Cleveland undercovers," is mostly angry stream of
consciousness near-prose in the manner of Ginsberg's "Howl" about
levy's hometown, and perhaps greatest obsession, for he wrote
about it constantly, and could not seem to leave it for more than
a month or two at a time, in spite of the growing attentions of
the police. But some of its lines have a poetic flare, for
example, "i have a city to cover with lines,/ with textured words
&/ the sweaty brick-flesh images of a/ drunken tied-up whorehouse
cowtown/ sprawling & brawling on its back." He was only 23 or 24
when he wrote it. Others of his longer poems are as energetic,
and solider. My favorite of them (at the moment), "Warriors
Rest," performs all kinds of incantatory, surrealistic zigs on
the idea of a "Spade Queen" as playing card, queen of night,
queen of death, black woman, whose "dark dancing is/ a shadow
moving across/ the moon at dusk," versus a warrior's white
horses, and other whites until "later the shadows/ of new sun
dances/ enter her mind/ like frightened moons// in the morning
smoke/ like black bridges to cross."
There is so much more to be said, but, oh, the Cleveland of space
considerations! So I will end with my conviction that it would be no disservice to Keats, one of my greatest
heroes, to describe d.a. levy as his 20th-Century American
equivalent.
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