Craft: d.a. levy

d.a. levy (Darryl Alfred Levey, 1942-1968) was a Beat Generation poet from Cleveland who died young, at 26, but was unique in his range producing not only lyric poetry, but concrete poems and collages, mostly reproduced on mimeograph machines. These were part of a small “mimeo small press movement” in the late sixties to make inexpensively produced alternatives to letterpress or offset printing technologies.

levy lived very poorly, but hoped he could devote his life to his home city, Cleveland. Like other avant-garde artists from Cleveland—Russell Atkins and Albert Ayler come to mind—levy’s work has no final message: the message is to make art.

Constantly facing poverty and hostility, levy turned toward concrete poetry as a “a breakdown in communications, or the ultimate verbal finger….Word scramble everything.” Perhaps as an attempt to move toward the ideogram with less friction or interference surrounding interpretation, levy’s concrete or collage poems attempt to share “non-understanding.”