I never met d.a. levy in real time. We communicated thru letters, poems, magazines sent in the mail. A slower time in some ways, the response of a correspondent would be measured in days or weeks, not hours [or minutes]. But the immediacy of the mimeograph machine - the ability to make reproductions of the word RIGHT NOW.

And distribute them on the street or put them in the mail RIGHT NOW.

Made d.a. levy and the scene that coalesced around him a threat to the slow pace that the dominant powers were trying to impose on America in the mid-late Sixties.

We had the "Dodge Revolution" on T.V., mainstream trying to co-opt [cor-rupt] the demand for change from the young and the marginalized. But giving dangerous poetry to the children of the middle class could not be co-opted.

A wise man once said that the value of the content of a publication is in inverse proportion to the cost of the paper it is printed on. Fragile, brittle mimeo paper, a samizdat format, cannot be as easily co-opted as the Beatles or Led Zeppelin riffs which are used to sell cars in the new millennium.

We cannot imagine d.a. levy verses being appropriated by corporate America turned to its own interests.

But the man was human. No Bodhisattva this. Suffered despair and tasted exaltation like the rest of us. And did his best to stay true to his ideals; knowing that knowledge is power, d.a. encouraged the youth to engage in the seeking and propagation of knowledge, "fill in the spaces with words" [Tantric Strobe], without losing sight of what makes us uniquely human.

If you look inside
you find yourself
                          outside.
[Cleveland Undercovers]