SOME CRITICAL APPRAISALS OF d.a.levy’s Work and Life

                            "i have a city to cover with lines." -d.a.levy

Poet and essayist Gary Snyder: “I feel brother to Levy not only as poet, but as fellow-worker in the Buddha-fields. Levy had a remarkable karma: he saw who he was, where he was, what his field of activity was, and what his tools were to be. . . . ‘I have a city to cover with lines’ His hometown, Cleveland, that he wouldn’t move from. Like the Sioux warriors who tied themselves to a spear and stuck it in the ground, never to retreat. Why? An almost irrational act of love—to give a measure of self-awareness to the people of Cleveland through poesy. . . . Poets must try to get them together—playing a funny kind of role, today, as pivot-man, between the culture-change and the persistence of the Single Eye of knowledge. d.a.levy finished up his karma early—‘reborn as a poet in an industrial society’ but he did his job well.”- “The Dharma Eye of d.a.levy”

Poet-Critic Karl Young: “Poetry was an essential part of the scene [for levy], not a detachable ornament or amenity. It embodied creativity, vision, intensity, subversion, searching alternate or expanded consciousness, personal commitment, the supremacy of individual perception—all basic virtues of the counterculture. . . . levy’s mysticism isn’t for everybody; but his expression of it should be an essential part of everyone’s understanding of what American poetry, including visual poetry and book art, has been and can still be.” –“The Turning Pages of Light and Darkness: d.a.levy’s Tibetan Stroboscope”

Literary Kicks: “In many ways the tragic story of d.a.levy mirrors that of the late ‘60s. born October 29, 1942 in Cleveland, Ohio, levy achieved both fame and notoriety in his brief career as a poet, pamphleteer, and counter-cultural icon. Influenced perhaps as heavily by the European Surrealists as by the Beats, levy was a major influence on the underground press movement, producing scores of small books and magazines, the bulk of which he gave away on the streets, using only a primitive hand press (and later, a donated mimeograph). . . . By mid-1968, levy had published over 55 books and nearly 30 issues of magazines.”

Critic-Biographer, Mike Golden: “Despite his extraordinary output, he was not a machine or a stenographer. He was simply a poet. . . . He may have disclaimed the role of martyr or spokesman, but if ever a poet stood up for all other poets’ rights to speak what they see and feel, and stood up for all poets’ obligation to be, as Pound put it, ‘the antennae of the species,’ d.a.levy qualified.”-The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry

 

Poet-Critic-Editor, Ingrid Swanberg: “d.a.levy had a very great internal freedom: He questioned everything. Such freedom would always put him at odds with society, with its tendency towards appropriation as a means of control — no matter the reigning ideology. . . . Despite protections offered by the First Amendment, freedom of speech can’t be instituted, lesislated or appropriated. Freedom of speech belongs to the being of poetry. You might think America would love its poets more—but are we in America really freedom-loving? What does it mean to love freedom?” 

–“An Interior Burning: The Silence of d.a.levy’s Zen Concrete.”

“i still have a city to cover with lines.” –d.a.levy