d. a. levy
The Fenn College Poetry Center of Cleveland was officially established on April 14, 1962. Dr. Randolph Randall, the Chair of the English Department, was ill and in hospital, so I was named founding director by Dr. Donald Tuttle, the acting chair. My only collaborator in the venture at the college was the late David French, the audio-visual technician of the College and an amateur poet who would complete a Ph.D. in history at Western Reserve and later become Dean of Erie College, not far up the road toward Buffalo. He and another Poetry Center habitué, Al Cahen, would inherit the Cleveland poetry magazine American Weave from its founder, Loring Williams, who presided over the Poetry Center Forums which began that fall. A local Afro-American writer, Louis Albion Williams, was the focus of the Center’s first Poetry Forum on October 19th. Julie Suk has written a memoir about it:
“My first introduction to Lew [Turco],” she wrote, “was at the Poetry Forum at Fenn College, now Cleveland State. I had just moved to Ohio from Birmingham, Alabama. Newcomer to poetry after a half-hearted painting career, I decided to venture down to the Forum and try out a few poems. I dropped my name in a basket by the door and walked in expecting a small group of readers and friends. Wrong! No smattering of people. Instead, a large and lively crowd celebrating guest speakers topped off by an AME Zion Church choir singing spirituals. ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ ‘I Wish I Knew How I’d Feel to Be Free,’ ‘There Is No Hiding Place Down Here’ — exuberant rhythms I grew up longing to listen to over and over,[…]”
Another charter member of the Poetry Forums was Darryl Allan Levy, or “d. a. levy” (sic, å la e. e. cummings, as he liked to sign himself sans capital letters), born in Cleveland on October 29, 1942, to Joseph J. and Carolyn Levy. The unusual spelling of his middle name is the same as that of Edgar Allan Poe, and I have speculated whether his parents deliberately named him after America’s first “Decadent” poet; if so, it was an ominous portent.
Soon after the Poetry Center opened, Levy came to see me in my office on the eighth floor of Fenn Tower on the corner of Superior and West 24th Street. He told me that he had never graduated from high school — that was apparently a lie; I have no idea why he told it — and asked if it would be possible for him to get into the College without the diploma. I said I'd try to work it out, and I arranged an interview for him with the admissions office. I asked him, though, please not to shoot himself in the foot, as I knew he was wont to do, but of course, that's what he did. He deliberately botched the interview and was not allowed to enroll. After that, all he could do was come to the Poetry Center programs and, of course, make a life for himself in the city.
This is what I believed happened at the time, but since then I have had reason to doubt my interpretation of those events because, according to other sources including Wikipedia, Levy had, in fact, graduated from high school, gotten his diploma, and enlisted in the Navy. I was only eight years older than Levy, and I, too, had spent time in the U. S. Navy, four years of active duty from my own high school graduation in 1952 to 1956 when I entered college on the G. I. Bill, graduating in 1959 and attending graduate school from 1959-1960. The instructorship I held at Fenn College was my first full-time academic appointment, and I would, in fact, not complete and receive my M. A. until 1962, the same year that the Poetry Center was founded.
If Levy was at that time twenty years old, he must have graduated from high school in 1960, the year I came to Cleveland and Fenn College, and he appears to have spent a very short time in the Navy. He must either have been a Naval Reservist while he was still in high school, which is doubtful, or he was discharged early for some reason. In an e-mail message of Wednesday, December 16, 2009, my former Fenn student Russell Salamon wrote me, “d. a. levy told me about that. He was trying to get discharged, first for physical reasons[,] then he started to behave in an erratic manner, argued about the validity of the military. I think he also meditated, spent [s]ome time in the brig. He was not on the ship more than a few weeks.”
If my calculations are close to being accurate, then Levy could have made a regular application for admission to Fenn College. Was his request some sort of test he was applying to me? Did he deliberately ruin the interview with the admissions office because he knew that his true history would be discovered if he were admitted?
If it was a test of some sort, apparently I passed, for Levy continued to attend the Poetry Forums and the other Center programs, and he even asked me to submit work for some of his publications, for he had somehow gotten hold of a table-top hand press and founded the Renegade and the Seven Flowers imprints. Levy began publishing the work of his local friends and acquaintances, including young writers around the country and Russell Salamon who was his roommate for a time. Salamon’s chapbook of poems from Levy’s Renegade Press, which he dedicated to me, was titled Parent[hetical Pop]pies. It appeared in 1964, the year of his graduation from Fenn. Russell was eventually the author of an epic of sorts about Levy titled Descent Into Cleveland. It described the underground scene in the city during the ‘sixties, Levy’s involvement in it, and it led up to Levy’s suicide.
Salamon spent much of his time in Cleveland trying to keep Levy interested in life, for apparently his ambition was to kill himself, and he talked about it often. Levy did not have a great deal of talent as a writer, but I think he desperately wanted to be remembered when he was gone, and the best way to do that, perhaps, was to be notorious. The local poet Russell Atkins, founder and editor of the Cleveland poetry magazine Free Lance, wrote me in Oswego, New York, in 1967, “Well, I suppose you might have heard that d. a. levy and some of the group here have become objects of the police, FBI and narcotics agents. Much cause célèbre in the making here.” An elegy I wrote for levy, “Words for White Weather,” was written on request for a memorial publication when d. a. committed suicide the following year, 1968.
WORDS FOR WHITE WEATHER
for d. a. levy
On a gross day, in a green month
once, a child was Summer’s lover.
She, heavy with worlds, sent
the child bouquets of amber light. Giver
and taker, she tossed him petals;
in good barter he gave his leman
words shaped like flesh
of fruits: sweet peach, tart lemon,
berryheart whose vine goes
twining with grass. She gave
him this too: a grassblade made
the frost’s sickle, lush love
turned root rape, the maggot’s
carnal slither. No matter. Her
kiss was decay. Still, his songs
weather the winter.
Five years later I rewrote the poem and used it as an example of hypallage which is an exchange of words in phrases or clauses, a technique e. e. cummings used often, and cummings was one of levy’s influences. The disjuncture of hypallage allows lines to work ambiguously on more than one associative level, and it is sometimes used humorously: “I smell a smile; will she rat on me?” instead of I smell a rat; will she smile on me? Here is the poem I wrote for levy revised through hypallage; it is interlined: The lines in normal print are the original version; the italicized lines are the revised version:
WHITE FOR WEATHER WORDS
for d. a. levy
On a gross day, in a green month
On a green month, in a gross day,
once, a child was Summer’s lover.
A child was once Summer’s lover.
She, heavy with worlds, sent
She with worlds sent, heavy
the child bouquets of amber light. Giver
giver, the child light: bouquets of amber
and taker, she tossed him petals;
and she tossed him petals. Taker,
in good barter he gave his leman
he gave3 his good leman in barter
words shaped like flesh
flesh like shaped words
of fruits: sweet peach, tart lemon,
swet of fruits: peach, lemon, tart
berryheart whose vine goes
vine whose berryheart goes
twining with grass. She gave
with grass. She gave twining
him this too: a grassblade made
too a grassblade, made him this
the frost’s sickle, lush love
frost’s love, the lush sickle
turned root rape, the maggot’s
root turned the maggot’s rape,
carnal slither. No matter. Her
no carnal matter. Her slither
kiss was decay. Still, his songs
was his still kiss. Songs decay
weather the winter.
the winter weather.
I was thankful not to have been in Cleveland when Levy took his own life, nor in 1984 when another Poetry Forum member, Jau Billera, followed Levy’s example. I've known self-destructive people, but d. a. levy was world-class in that regard. I suppose his death was inevitable, but it was very sad. He was a harmless little guy, really, and not the wild Beat renegade he liked to act; however, some people do remember him as the most famous native Cleveland poet after Hart Crane, also a suicide, which is an accomplishment of sorts.
