1. What was it about levy’s work that first drew your
interest, and what was it about the work that distinguished him from
other poets you had read?
2. What has kept you reading him (if you have been doing so over a
long period of time), and/or why do you think his work will continue
to interest you in the future?
Possible additional questions:
3. How has levy influenced your own work?
4. How has his work affected your sense of the work of other poets
and/or of poetry in general?
These read to me as much the same question, or all answerable
within the same piece, so I think I’ll just plunge in here and
attempt to address each of them in the process of pulling together my
thoughts on levy’s work.
Which means I want to talk about the work, first. Not the man, not
the myth, but the poems. Because that’s where I started with
levy. I wasn’t quite two years old when he died, so I
can’t speak from the point of view of a collaborator, a friend,
or even a cultural peer. I can only speak from the point of view of a
poet who writes lexical and visual poetry, a publisher, and a
self-publisher.
“Whatever
levy was or wasn’t, he was emphatically not
simple.”—Karl Young
As a poet who writes lexical poetry, I find in levy’s work a
directness of speech that is consistently—even to my over-read
sensibilities—startling.
HELLO JUDGE ADAMS
yes, $20,000 is a fair fine for
a jaywalking ticket, sorry, i
was thinking about fucking &
i didnt see the light
you can have my drivers license too
i cant afford to park in this city
I love this for the detail of not just “HELLO JUDGE”,
but “JUDGE ADAMS”. I step inside this for the cadence in
the “sorry” set off by commas. I can see the traffic light
the speaker in the poem says he cannot, because I can imagine thinking
about fucking while crossing a street in a city I can’t afford
to park in.
This skill of his at plain talk is modulated by an unusually deft
sense of touch in phrasing which allows the unsaid to resolve itself
in the reader’s imagination as the implied dots are
connected.
unread skin magazines to be cut up
for collages
What a complex image this creates. A stack of skin magazines (the
visual of color oversaturated fleshtones on advertisingly glossy
stock), unread (implies a lack of ability to provoke), sit waiting to
be cut up (a hostile act, but the line break postpones the precise
nature of the hostility), and then we find it’s for collages (to
make art with, to provoke others with).
Together, these two characteristics of levy’s writing work to
deliver tight combinations of effective one-two punches:
i just wanted to be like everyone else
& everyone i knew was taking drugs
everyone i knew was reading the P.D.R.
& developing psychosomatic illnesses
just to get pills
any pills
what else was there?
television?
jacking off to the commercials
the old lady nibbling yr fly
during the food commercials
RUN & TAKE A PISS BEFORE THE MOVIE STARTS AGAIN
the television nibbling at yr fly
until the old lady returns
This passage reminds of William S. Burroughs talking about the
so-called “War on Drugs”, and how absurd it was for anyone
to imagine that drug use could be stopped by going after the sources
of supply instead of the causes of demand. We should know
better. Where there is sufficient demand, there will always be people
willing to risk being the supplier. But the question of why large
numbers of a country’s citizens would be attracted to
recreational drug use is a Hard Problem, and as a society we really
don’t want to know those answers. levy says it better and in
fewer words.
Who hasn’t wanted to be like everyone else? Look at the
chant-like repetitions of everyone everyone everyone, taking reading
developing, and, get pills any pills. I love the question “what
else was there?” because levy answers it himself with the act of
making the poem. What else, indeed. And inversion of images is
precisely the right literary device to illustrate the inversion that
occurs “nibbling at yr fly”.
As a poet who writes visual poetry I recognize in levy’s work
an engagement with his means of production that was intimate enough to
create a style that is simultaneously exploratory and confident. That
bears repeating, exploratory and confident. This is the
combination of qualities that separates “dirty” (as
it’s been termed by others) visual poetry from the merely
careless. From books whose covers were made from cut apart paintings,
to intentionally over-inking mimeo stencils for specific effects
it’s clear that levy entered into collaborations with the
materials he was working with. I never get the sense, from any of
levy’s work, that what I’m seeing is the will of one
artist imposed upon a surface. I feel like I’ve been invited to
share in the experience of how marks are made.
Much of levy’s visual poetry is cacophonic, all of it
benefits from closer examination. I formulated a line in my mind to go
here, and then thought I better let it simmer for a couple of days to
make sure what I was saying was accurate. After three days, I believe
it is. I can think of no type of visual or lexical element that would
be out of place in a levy composition. There’s no style he
couldn’t successfully appropriate, no icon of sexuality or
religion or politics he couldn’t leverage to his own ends. The
whole huge onrush of material that constitutes experiential reality
was fair game. I simply do not get that sense from other visual
poets. I could see levy pleased within Birney’s single font
work, but I can’t see Marinetti so subtle. I could see levy
using Cobbing’s techniques, but I can’t see Denker using
them. I could see levy slip easily into bissett’s spelling
unconventions, but never Young or Dutton.
From a purely technical standpoint, there are aspects of many of
levy’s visual poems that pull my attention in and get me to
consider the problems of how did he do that? From pieces of criticism
and recollections of levy written by others I’ve learned that he
often improvised visual effects during the actual printing
process. There are aspects of many pages within The Tibetan
Stroboscope, for example, that I would be at a loss as to how to
replicate in a new work.
I am aware of the fact that many readers connect with levy’s
work on the basis of its spirituality, but this is not a connection
point for me, nor is it a hindrance. Themes of religion and the search
for enlightenment/god regularly occur, and certainly contribute to the
overall sense of voice that I draw from the work, but, in the same way
I don’t need to have seen “that spot of light / on Euclid
Ave” to benefit from a trip there with levy as tour guide, I
don’t need to have the same ultimate destination in mind,
either. Humans of all belief structures can identify with:
when leaving the body
one does not look back
when leaving the body
one goes to the
Lotus of a Thousand Petals
getting there one must cross
his own mountains
Everyone gets there
EVENTUALLY
As a publisher and as a self-publisher of poetry I need to
acknowledge a debt to levy. His example was one of three that got me
involved in publishing others, and changed my world-view of
self-publishing, which is two ways of saying that his example changed
what publishing meant to me. Publishing is not a system that rewards
quality, it is a means by which individuals are able to postulate,
argue for, and defend ideas.
levy’s publishing was a call to action, through action. It
was absolutely leading by example, not by exhortation
alone. “Samizdat” means, literally, self-publishing. When
levy recognized that mimeo put the power of mass duplication within
even limited financial means he helped make the act of self-publishing
more politically dangerous than it had ever been. Mimeo made it
possible, for the first time ever, for a single individual to make
widely available their commentary on events that were still
unfolding. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Assume for a
moment that a government agency could be corrupt. Now imagine a poet
responding to their corruption by reading poetry in public which
identifies their corrupt actions. It’s not too far of a stretch,
at that point, to imagine the poet being brought up on trumped up
charges and two days later quietly whisked away to, oh, say,
Gitmo. But it becomes much more difficult (though, sadly, not
impossible) for that kind of whisking away to happen if in the two
days between the charges and the whisking away the poet can crank out
200 copies of what’s going on and have them in the hands of the
general public, or even the courtroom spectators. That’s the
kind of shift in power distribution that causes upheaval.
I also gain from levy’s publishing efforts the ability to
recognize in publishing what I’d previously learned in a career
in the restaurant industry. What I learned on the line during the
rushes was that there are three ways to do everything. There’s a
right way, a wrong way, and a right NOW way. You can get buried if
your drive for artistic perfection is untempered by a passion to get
it finished. The right way is theoretical, the wrong way is a
disaster, the right NOW way is what gets urgent work done. The right
now way sees a need and doesn’t – no, it's more accurate to
say and can’t – wait for all the stars to line up,
for all the perfect materials to be in hand. The right now way sees
what needs to be done and asks: how can we make what we have do
what we want done? When the question is phrased this way action is
implicit and cannot fail to happen.
Lastly, I would like to talk a little bit about what I know of the
archetype levy has come to represent to a lot of people, and about the
role of the avant-garde artist in relation to the established order in
general.
The events of levy’s life can be mapped in a way that makes
some of the mythologizing seem, if not justifiable, at least
understandable: charismatic underdog and multi-talented rebel dies
young with no witnesses. To my way of thinking, though, that is so
wildly over-simplified that it’s meaningless, and I don’t
find it consistent with what levy himself would have wanted. I think
levy wanted to turn people away from apathy, and hero worship
doesn’t do that. Hero worship more often than not is just
another form of passivity, an excuse to do nothing but watch if the
hero is alive, or an excuse to do nothing until another one like him
comes along if he’s dead. levy wasn’t about waiting around
for something to happen, he was about the urge to make things
happen. When levy says “im tired of being the instigator”
I hear Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke saying “Get out
there yourself. Stop feedin’ off me.”
The establishment doesn’t like the avant-garde, but, the
avant-garde doesn’t like the establishment, either. It’s a
symbiotic relationship in which each feeds off of the other, requires
each other. The establishment is responsible for the codification of
culture so that it can be efficiently transmitted to society at
large. Institutions are inherently conservative, the avant-garde is
anything but conservative. Institutions depend upon the avant-garde to
keep culture moving, the avant-garde depends upon institutions to have
something to push against, to push off from, in order to expand the
bubble of knowledge.
So, it might seem like it’s a moot point to talk about the
status of levy’s work within the establishment. If all things
avant-garde are simply going to be assimilated by the establishment
over time, anyway, why get all worked up about it? Because not all
things avant-garde get assimiliated. The inherently conservative
nature of institutions makes them prone to nepotism, cronyism, and
agenda-based exclusionary practices. The voice that says:
you can watch the ones who
didnt move fast enough
they are dying
& they are called Poets
people used to be afraid of poets
now they dont listen anymore
is never going to be welcomed, with open arms, into the canon. In
the interest of keeping a watch on the watchers that’s a fight
worth fighting, but for myself, I think levy’s place in history
is assured by the work itself. If that particular place turns out to
be at the edges, poking the snarling dogs we are with a stick, well,
serves us right, we need it.
they are waiting for me in the future
but then, ill be someone else
All passages quoted above are from levy’s “Suburban
Monastery Death Poem”, except the one which begins “when
leaving the body” which is from his “The North American
Book Of The Dead”.