Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

#12 Roosevelt After Inauguration (Fuck You Press 1964). An Installment in Jed Birmingham’s series of the The Top 23 Most Interesting Burroughs Collectibles.

As a Burroughs collector, I am envious of those who collect Bukowski. Back when I was working at Second Story Books, a beautiful copy of the Loujon Press It Catches My Heart in Its Hands came into the shop. The minute I saw it I felt jealousy rushing over me, like a shot of rotgut burning down my throat. Here is a fine press effort from one of the giants of the Mimeo Revolution. Jon Edgar Webb’s Loujon Press was and is famous for its over-the-top publications and for the arduous and meticulous manual labor that went into producing them. Facts which Webb made sure his patrons and readers were well aware of. It Catches features a beautifully illustrated cork cover, colored paper with deckled edges, and exquisite letterpress work. As a bonus each copy was signed by Bukowski in silver ink. This is persistence, dedication, and obsession in publishing. It also does not hurt that these poems represent some of the finest Bukowski ever wrote. Why is there nothing like this in the Burroughs bibliography? You can see where my envy comes from.

Sure, Burroughs was in The Outsider, which make no mistake is a beautifully constructed mag, but It Catches, along with Crucifix in a Deathhand, are on another level. Few people know that Burroughs almost got there himself. The first issue of The Outsider included an excerpt from The Soft Machine. In conjunction with his submission for issue one, Burroughs also sent Webb a packet of cut-up material from himself and other authors experimenting with the technique, namely Sinclair Beiles and Harold Norse. There was correspondence back and forth about a cut-up issue of the magazine, which never occurred although Burroughs appeared in later issues. Again we come to What Ifs? What if Webb published a cut-up anthology with all the pomp and circumstance of Bukowski’s It Catches or Crucifix? Such an effort would put later fine press publications involving Burroughs, like The Cat Inside, to shame.

Of course, that What If never was, but at Second Story Books, It Catches was within my grasp and I reached deep into my wallet in order to grab it. Even with a substantial discount, the book was about the same as one of my paychecks if not part of a second. My marriage was falling apart at the time and there was a mortgage to pay, but I could not resist getting in on the Bukowski action. There are a lot of proverbial camels, straws and backs around this period and it is difficult if not impossible to focus on just one but hanging out with Buk did not help things. Bros not hos will not get you anywhere. For some perspective, this was also a time in which I was forced to put my run of Fuck You, a magazine of the arts up on ebay to make some quick cash. This was the equivalent of selling an internal organ. I sabotaged it by pricing the set rather high and luckily nobody bid on it. A few weeks after the posting, I received an anonymous email expressing how happy he/she was for my sake that the magazine went unclaimed. My financial prospects were somewhat dire and buying Buk threatened to put me, not on skid row, but in default on my mortgage. In buying It Catches, I literally did not get paid, which was not an uncommon situation at the time. I spent more on books than I earned in selling them. Everything went back into the coffers of Second Story Books. Completely irresponsible, I know, but Bukowski’s bibliography from the 1960s will do that to you. It encourages you to make bad decisions. Looking at It Catches now and reading the poems in that context, I can honestly say I have few regrets.

If you are a collector of the Mimeo Revolution like I am, please forget about focusing on the A items and the C items. It is all about the B-list: Burroughs, Bukowski, Berrigan, Blazek and Brainard. That is everything you need to know and everyone you need to buy. Out of that list Bukowski stands out until Black Sparrow took over his bibliography. I have stated my case on that matter in the Bunker and it does not need repeating in detail here, but for me all those mimeo and little mags before John Martin took over the show are so seductive. The book that stands out is The Genius of the Crowd published by 7 Flowers Press in 1966 on a letterpress by d.a. levy and Jim Lowell of Asphodel Bookshop, with prints by Paula Marie Savarino, in small run of 103 copies. It is crude to say the least and some of the pages are actually trimmed envelopes. A form of mail art perhaps. This type of DIY publishing is as fine an example of printing as anything Arion Press churns out. It is quite simply sublime. In the raid on Lowell’s bookshop, many of the copies were seized for obscenity and it is thought that around 40 copies have survived, many of those in institutional holdings. It has become a true stopper for Bukowski collectors. In Al Fogel’s list of Bukowski rarities, The Genius may well stand along as the Holy Grail. Ken Lopez recently had a dampstained copy for $8500.

Despite my love for Jeff Nuttall, I have to grudgingly admit that levy, a suicide at age 24, was the greatest mimeographer of all-time. He was not a draftsman, but an experimental artist, a master of the medium, much like Johnny Thunders is the god of punk guitar. Sloppy, uneven, a manipulation of slurs and blurs, levy’s Scarab Poems and “AGAIn? Yur primer cord is showing” with its blobs, its acknowledgement of the physical nature of ink, its superimpositions, and its fading are as radical as the artwork of the Abstract Expressionists. Karl Young argues levy’s case best:

Taking a cue from blurs and set-off, levy began overprinting texts, sometimes for visual effects alone, sometimes as a technique to obscure some words while leaving others visible, creating a new text out of an old. A number of other mimeographers had reversed stencils, printing texts backwards. This was invariably done to produce results that were merely cute. levy worked reversed stencils in conjunction with other print runs to produce meaningful interactions of directions. His most resourceful use of mimeography came from over-inking stencils. Slight overinks were one of the perennial annoyances for veteran mimeographers. In a number of late works levy achieved a surprising range of text alteration and abstract graphics through various degrees of over-inking and cylinder impression. The initial results of these prints were often single sheets which he then had reprinted offset so as not to disturb the imbalance he had set up. In this process, he had completely jumped over the standard limitations of mimeo, turning it from one of the most tediously restricted forms of letter reproduction into the tool for one of the most dramatic forms of visual poetry of the era.

Another What If — a dream work for me, and one that would have have been at the top of my list of Burroughs collectibles — would have been a combination of levy’s most experimental mimeography and Burroughs’ most radical cut-ups with juxtapositions of text and image, as distributed by levy and Lowell. As I wrote about on the Bunker, Burroughs was on levy’s radar, but it was not mutual. Burroughs mingled in more established circles within the anti-establishment.

The most levy-ish publication, think Marrahwannah Quarterly, of Burroughs’ bibliography is the Fuck You Roosevelt After Inauguration. Although printed mimeo not letterpress, it has the look and feel of The Genius of the Crowd. Or more accurately, it is the closest Burroughs ever got to being published in such a manner. If levy was the greatest mimeographer, Ed Sanders ranks as one of the finest, most successful, and most influential mimeo publishers. I am less impressed with his glyph work than his ideal merging of context and content in his publications. Sanders was as much a revolutionary printer as Benjamin Franklin. In Sanders’ hands, the mimeograph serves as a weapon in the total assault on the culture along with underground bookshops, rock music, marijuana, fucking in the streets, and experimental film. All of which Sanders had his hand in. The Marijuana Newsletter deserves a mention here and could easily have made my list as it combines the best elements of Fuck You Press with Burroughs’ interest and involvement in alternative news outlets. I could be argued that by picking Roosevelt instead, I went with the more traditional and easy choice. Yet there is a lot going on in that seemingly simple publication; as I wrote on the Bunker, Roosevelt was a fuck you to mainstream publishing, City Lights, and the United States government.

I received my copy of Roosevelt as a Christmas gift from my mother years ago. She had no idea what it was and bought it on James Musser’s (Skyline Books) suggestion. When I opened it on a bright sunny day in Florida, my mother was horrified. She held it between her fingers like a used condom (which reminds me of levy’s Cleveland Prints, one of his highspots). “I paid for this? What the hell is this; this is what you wanted?” Oh, hell yeah! And I still do. In the realm of mimeo, where the down and dirty is heavenly, this is as angelic a publication as you are going to find. I find it quite simply beautiful and beautifully simple. “Glories stream from the underground below/Heavenly hosts sing Hallelujah.”

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

A Secret Location on the Lower East Side is one of my bibles, but the failure to document the Cleveland mimeo scene in any detail seems a major hole. Granted Clay and Phillips’ book could not cover everything, and Cleveland was briefly mentioned in the introduction, but levy would have been a nice corrective to the book’s largely coastal vision. By building on the framework of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology many diverse voices get silenced. The Marrahwannah Quarterly or the Third Class Buddhist Oracle by levy or even Douglas Blazek’s Ole provide a much more vibrant view of Midwest little mags than that most discussed of little magazines, the Chicago-based, Big Table. A look at the mimeo tradition in the Midwest supports the idea that Main Street was much less sleepy and complacent artistically and politically than commonly believed.

This snub got me thinking about what I consider an interesting omission in levy’s publishing efforts. Given William Burroughs’ willingness to publish anywhere in the 1960s, why did he not appear in Cleveland? Burroughs and levy would seem to be a natural fit. In late 1964, levy journeyed to New York City and immersed himself in the poetry reading scene of the Lower East Side. The chronology complied by Smith and Swanberg states that levy went to readings at Le Metro, The Cellar, and The Paradox. Burroughs read at Les Deux Megots Coffeehouse in 1963 / 1964 as recounted by Daniel Kane in All Poets Welcome, and levy attended the reading. levy stayed in New York for a month performing and immersing himself in the New York scene. This experience was instrumental in levy’s decision to initiate a coffeehouse scene and reading series in Cleveland.

levy met Ed Sanders in 1965 and received copies of The Marijuana Newsletter issued by Fuck You Press. levy may also have received Roosevelt After Inauguration or even the aborted APO-33: A Metabolic Regulator. Burroughs appeared in both issues of The Marijuana Newsletter. Soon after his correspondence with Sanders, levy began The Marrahwannah Quarterly. Burroughs’ stance on drugs would have fit right in with that mimeo, but as we will see later on levy was critical of Burroughs’ drug-induced philosophy and writing (“rug scribbles”). Like levy, Burroughs was personally familiar with censorship and obscenity trials. In addition, Burroughs’ cut-up experiments paralleled levy’s concerns with concrete and visual poetry. Both writers also experimented in a visual manner with collages and incorporated textual and typographical elements from the typewriter and newspaper unlike many other collagists of the time. levy and Burroughs would seem to be two peas in a pod.

I always assumed that Burroughs’ absence was based on his social class and established literary reputation. My cue for this assumption was Charles Bukowski and his supporters. Reading through Bukowski’s letters of the 1960s (a fun and worthwhile exercise by the way), it is clear that Buk resented the Beats, particularly Ginsberg, as fakes and poseurs. In a questionnaire complied by Anthony Linick for a dissertation, Bukowski listed Gregory Corso and Robert Creeley as his least favorite poets. Corso would represent the dislike of the Beats. Creeley stands for the established and successful avant poet, particularly of the Black Mountain variety. Before he was 40, Creeley had made it as a poet and was a leading light to succeeding generations of poets. Bukowski regularly blasted all manner of counterculture and established poets in his letters, Dirty Old Man columns, poems, and in his little mag, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns.

Given his outsider / underdog status, it seems natural that levy would harbor a similar resentment to established avant-garde figures. In a letter to dr wagner from 1966, levy describes Burroughs as “the adding machine addict.” The reference to the Burroughs Corporation suggests levy’s awareness of the corporate and privileged status of Burroughs. Granted Burroughs clearly benefited from his family connections (nowhere more so than in Mexico after the shooting of Joan), but the myth of his wealth was greatly exaggerated. Kerouac perpetuated the rumor that Burroughs was a millionaire. He was not. Yet he was connected to wealth and privilege. More important and probably more grating on younger writers, Burroughs was connected to the international avant-garde, including major avant publishers like John Calder and Grove Press. By the mid-1960s, “the adding machine addict” had rise from drug-addled obscurity to become a Delphic oracle of sorts who prophesized on all topics of the day. Burroughs was something to measure up to and react against.

This levy clearly did and he is conflicted on Burroughs as an influence. Take Allen Ginsberg for example. I would suspect a bit of jealousy and resentment against the Beat guru who so ruffled Bukowski’s feathers. levy hosted Ginsberg in 1966 at a benefit reading in Cleveland. Ginsberg was in the process of crossing the United States for his Fall of America collection. This was the “Wichita Vortex Sutra” period, a poem that has aged well given today’s current events with its look at war, the media, and Middle America. Reading over Ginsberg’s biography and Smith and Swanberg’s book, it appears to be that the two poets used each other for their own purposes, rather than there being mutual admiration and cross pollination. At least that is the sense I get. Ginsberg kind of blew into town, created a fuss, raised some money, and annoyed the police and the squares. Did he help or hurt levy’s cause? Connections with levy definitely added a feather to Ginsberg’s cap given what levy had come to represent in the counterculture. Clearly, levy has a complicated and conflicted relationship to the Beats.

In August 1968, levy wrote “Suburban Monastery Death Poem.” Written near the end of his life and at the end of his rope, this is a devastating poem that shows the potential and power of levy. levy died at 26, an accomplished poet, but still learning and developing. As mentioned in d.a. levy and the mimeograph revolution, Ginsberg did not write Howl until the age of 30. Who knows what heights levy could have attained? In this poem, levy cries for help: “I don’t want to die in Ohio anymore.” Burroughs is one to whom levy reaches out. levy writes, “William Burroughs — rescue me! / forget that!” The line highlights the attraction / repulsion levy felt for Burroughs. As mentioned before by 1968, Burroughs was viewed as a prophet and a savior to many in the counterculture. With his appearances on album covers, underground newspapers, men’s magazines, and other alternative outlets, Burroughs transformed from a voice in the wildness to a talking head. levy’s line reminds me of “The Seeker” by The Who with the lyric: “I asked Timothy Leary and he couldn’t help me either. They call me the Seeker.” levy and the Who yearn for answers and a guru but at the same time fail to find the guidance they so desperately desire. levy and The Who are also cynical regarding the ability of the counterculture’s leading figures, like the Beatles, to provide answers at all. Timothy Leary and the Beatles are merely media projections and creations. There are no answers. There is only hype. Burroughs represents another media creation of the avant-garde.

Given levy’s interest in concrete and visual poetry, his experimentation with collage, his familiarity with the little mag community, his relationship with the Beat Generation, and his interest in drug and alternative cultures, I believe wholeheartedly that the figure of Burroughs had to be confronted and overcome by levy. levy viewed Burroughs as an important yet ultimately oppressive and, as we will see, inadequate influence. Clearly, levy wrestled with Burroughs.

In a remarkable passage included in a packet of ephemera sent by levy to Marvin Malone of Wormwood Review in the days leading up to his suicide, levy discusses Burroughs as a writer and his relation to his own poetics. The letters and other artifacts he mailed to intimates around the country represent levy’s legacy. They form part of the picture of how levy wanted to be remembered. Michael Basinski in his introduction to the letters mentions that some of the letters discuss the modern poetics of Creeley, Ginsberg and Olson. What is revealed is an intellectual poet deeply involved with the poetics of his time.

In a letter to dr wagner from 1966, levy writes:

I sit down 10-20 times a day and glans equinox dropping thru may STONE hinges sighted on syrian frontier the eglyphian stroboscope study course & its been occuring to me that the STROBE is; when assembled a form less jumble & a master piece of chaos that should even jolt ole Budge out of his gravey TRAINing center — the strobe codex cannot be broken — we have discovered an absolute means of time-warp-jump-the-rope communication that may surpass burroughsian lucidity — or the Rug scribble of the adding machine addict is to easily ascribed to rug scribble — while the strobe is primarily a non-rug scribble — perhaps anti-acid? Rug scene — if you stare at the strobe long enough the obvious patterns vanish — the problem is how can we get passed the censors & get the thing on ToVo (TOVO) as in demi-tovo-western version of TASS which is another version of Ouspenskian political mysticism

In this brief passage, it is clear that levy held many of the same obsessions and concerns as Burroughs. levy’s excitement over discovering “an absolute means of time-warp-jump-the-rope communication” echoes Burroughs’ fervor over the cut-up and yage expressed in various letters and interviews. In The Yage Letters, Burroughs writes, “Yage is space time travel.” In The Job, Burroughs states, “I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event… Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.”

The concern with passing the censor reminds me of a similar line from Naked Lunch in the Talking Asshole routine. Burroughs writes, “That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between the bureaus, because there is always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness…” Both levy and Burroughs sought a literary form merging high and popular culture techniques that would allow them to explore and maneuver in those spaces in between, the little gaps of freedom in the monolith of the dominant culture and in the controlling aspects of language. levy also expresses his knowledge of Western media control of information and its close ties to Soviet oppression. Both realized the United States and the Soviet Union are heavily invested in stifling freedom of speech and free thought. The manipulation of media outlets is a key element in that process.

levy’s letter to wagner suggests that Burroughs did not appear in levy’s publications because levy was critical of Burroughs’ work. levy writes, “we have discovered an absolute means of time-warp-jump-the-rope communication that may surpass burroughsian lucidity — or the Rug scribble of the adding machine addict is to easily ascribed to rug scribble — while the strobe is primarily a non-rug scribble — perhaps anti-acid? Rug scene…” Burroughs in levy’s opinion was too lucid. levy describes Burroughs’ work as “rug scribbles.” This refers to “drug scribbles” with the “D” removed. Similarly, I also misread this as “rag scribbles” thinking of the British slang for heroin and a prostitute, an “oily rag.” The use of British slang in my mind refers to the fact that in 1966 Burroughs was living in London. In this light, levy felt Burroughs writing was merely drug centered and drug induced rambling whereas his work “anti-acid” and a breakthrough beyond drug-speak. By the mid-1960s, drug jargon and philosophy were becoming old hat, cliché and a straitjacket to open expression. Burroughs, and even Ginsberg and Kesey, were talking of going beyond drugs as a means toward heightened perception.

levy is using “rug” in this manner, but “rug” is also British slang for trite, tired, cliché, obvious. This would tie in with Burroughs’ lucidity. As I have written above, levy prized obscurity and noise in communication. levy states, “Why concrete? What can be more obscene than refusing to communicate.” levy felt quite rightly that his problem with the censor had less to do with four-letter words than his failure to express himself clearly and directly in a manner the common reader could understand. Obscurity equals obscenity. I have pointed out this element of pornography in connection with Burroughs in a previous Bunker column, but levy felt Burroughs did not go far enough with his cut-up and maintained ties to open communication, narrative, and discernable pattern.

levy writes, “if you stare at the strobe long enough the obvious patterns vanish.” Compare the stroboscope to the Dream Machine. levy lays down the problem with Burroughs’ cut-up experiments; they do not abandon “obvious patterns” despite his desire to obliterate word lines, destroy the tyranny of the sentence, and topple the blocks of meaning conveyed by syllabic language. In short they are too lucid. Brion Gysin, the guru to Burroughs, saw Jungian archetypes and visual patterns in the Dream Machine. In an essay on the Dream Machine published in Olympia Magazine, the Olympia Press’ response to Grove’s Evergreen Review (republished in Brion Gysin Let The Mice In, Something Else Press as well as in the Brion Gysin Reader), Gysin writes quoting Ian Sommerville…. “After a while the visions were permanently behind my eyes and I was in the middle of the whole scene with limitless patterns being generated around me.” He writes about “patterns of color” and “elements seen in endless repetition.” On the other hand, the stroboscope as envisioned by levy wants to break and complicate patterns. In an essay on the Tibetan Stroboscope, Karl Young writes, “Technically a stroboscope is an instrument used for industrial and scientific procedures that call for the intermittent flashing of beams of light… Strobe light can seem like a mild means of questioning the nature of perception. Still the strobe light can make what people usually take for granted as perception seem much less certain. Under a strobe, light and darkness constantly alternate, which can be seen in terms of existence and nothingness, or in the dualism of many occult traditions…The news is changes in perception.” Burroughs and Gysin claim to pursue a similar interest in deranging and challenging perception but they continually return to pattern and endless repetition. Take for example Gysin’s permutation poems or his artwork. Pattern and repetition are privileged over plurality of meanings and multiplicity of perception. Karl Young in connection with the stroboscope as envisioned by levy: “The images abound in contradictions, paradoxes, oppositions, and kinds of flipping polarities that at times attract and repel each other.” The Dream Machine moves away from this frantic motion and “flipping” to “limitless patterns” and “endless repetition.” The Dream Machine quickly becomes boring and too lucid.

Perhaps, levy’s literary form of the strobe is a reaction to Burroughs’ writing. Before reading the letter quoted above, I viewed Ed Sander’s Egyptian influenced poems as a major influence on levy’s work in this line and they were, but Burroughs might also play an important role. I think the focus here is in part on the cut-up experiments of the 1960s that appeared in seemingly every major little magazine of the time. Yet I want to narrow down to one magazine in particular and suggest that levy’s comments and his development of the stroboscope provide an interesting critique to a particular experiment of Burroughs’. The magazine in question is C: A Journal of Poetry and Burroughs contribution to Issue 9: “Giver of Winds is My Name.” Here, Burroughs experiments with glyphs accompanying a cut-up. Burroughs also contributes “Intersection Shifts and Scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch.” These works are Burroughs at his most poetic. In 1966, Ginsberg stated in a Paris Review interview that Burroughs was really a poet. It is easy to think that Ginsberg had the work from C Journal in mind. I believe levy must have seen Burroughs’ piece in C as well. Given his intimate knowledge of the little magazine scene, particularly in the Lower East Side due to a friendship with Ed Sanders, it is likely levy saw a copy of this issue. C 9 was published in the Summer of 1964 before levy’s stroboscope poem and his letter to dr wagner. As I have mentioned earlier, levy travelled to New York City in late 1964 where he saw Burroughs reading and just as likely read a copy of C 9.

Like in the Egyptian Stroboscope, Burroughs utilizes hieroglyphics in his cut-up in C 9. In The Job, Burroughs states, “The study of hieroglyphic languages shows us that word is an image… the written word is an image. However, there is an important difference between a hieroglyphic and syllabic language. If I hold up a sign with the word ‘ROSE’ written on it, and you read that sign, you will be forced to repeat the word ‘ROSE’ to yourself. If I show you a picture of a rose you do not have to repeat the word. You can register the image in silence. A syllabic language forces you to verbalize in auditory patterns. A hieroglyphic language does not. I think that anyone who is interested to find out the precise relationship between word and image show study a simplified hieroglyphic script. Such a study would tend to break down automatic verbal reaction to a word. It is precisely these automatic reactions to words themselves that enable those who manipulate words to control thought on a mass scale.” Burroughs talks the talk here but his cut-up work fails to satisfactorily break the urge to “repeat the word” or “verbalize in auditory patterns.” The hieroglyphics are mere window dressing. levy realizes that the cut-up experiment, like the Dream Machine, is built on repetition of words and images that construct a pattern despite the desire to break free into silence such as the figure of Lady Sutton Smith appears in My Own Mag and other publications of the period. On one level this goes down to the source material of the cut-ups. Burroughs utilizes the same basic material for many of his cut-ups: recycled bits and pieces from the word horde of Naked Lunch. As Davis Schneiderman demonstrates in an unpublished essay, Burroughs repeatedly cuts-up the same front page of the September 17, 1899 New York Times. In addition, levy feels that Burroughs lays down the same old con. He writes like he speaks, in a monotone, due to his recycling of old material that relies on chance and the scissors for a fresh perception. levy sees that Burroughs is addicted to a static word and image bank and thus condemned to parrot the same old phrases despite the cut-up. Burroughs cannot cut his ties to the forces of control imbedded in “obvious patterns” and word lines. He cannot keep out the echoes of his recycled writing out of his “new” material and thus never truly risks obscurity, silence, or miscommunication. As quoted earlier, Burroughs stated on the cut-up: “I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, they do mean something…” The most interesting aspect of the cut-up to Burroughs is their “lucidity,” their clarity of meaning. Burroughs shys away from “simply random juxtapositions of words.” levy embraces this aspect in the stroboscope at the textual and visual level.

This analysis is at a textual level and says nothing of the visual elements that deeply interested both authors. In this case I would say that Burroughs preferred clean mimeo. Compare his Time and APO-33 to levy’s Tibetan Stroboscope. Both writers utilize elements of typewritten text and collage, but levy deliberately makes his text illegible. I suggest that Burroughs did not manipulate dirty mimeo in order to further his creative ideas. Proof of this is his reaction to Ed Sanders’ work on APO-33. Burroughs objected to the imperfections of this production and felt they were not appropriate. This says much about Burroughs as an established and commercial writer. Imperfect mimeo and poor layout reflected poorly on Burroughs’ reputation as a professional. levy on the other hand embraced this seeming lack of skill in order to challenge reader’s expectations and to suggest elements of censorship and miscommunication. This is another example of the lucidity that levy saw as a failing in Burroughs’ work.

As I have written before, Burroughs always remained aware of the reader and sought clear communication above all. levy sought to challenge that relationship more confrontationally through “destructive writing.” The strobe as literary form is a “master-piece of chaos.” Burroughs made gestures in this direction but by the late 1960s he would come “back now to write purely conventional straightforward narrative” as he would state in The Job. Burroughs found that purely experimental writing was something of a trap. Perhaps had he lived levy would have felt a similar pull away from the more experimental concrete work of his late career.

d.a. levy and the mimeograph revolution is a revelation for anybody interested in the Cleveland scene, the little magazine, and the alternative poetics of the 1960s. The book centers levy in Cleveland yet succeeds in showing how he searched beyond the city limits for inspiration and how his influence rippled outward from Euclid Avenue. For years, there has been a valuable base of raw material, original and reprint publications, letters, and artwork, on which to build the critical reputation of this misunderstood poet. Smith, Swanberg, and their contributors provide several bricks to that structure. Hopefully critics and writers will seek out levy’s work as there is much to learn from and about him. levy is an inspiration as a poet, a publisher and as a community builder. The project he began in Cleveland has yet to be completed in that city and beyond. The positive benefits of such an effort were sorely needed then and maybe even more so today.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In my piece on Eric Mottram, I wrote that I first came into contact with d.a. levy while browsing through the stacks at the University of London Library. Looking back on it, it is weird that I had to go overseas in order to discover this most American of poets. levy is American in a sense that is increasingly in peril in these troubled times. He is a figure of protest, dissent, independence and self-reliance. levy might be a counterculture poet of the 1960s, but I can see him fitting in with Thoreau who refused to pay his taxes and went native (even if only half way) as well as with firebrands like Thomas Paine who took to their printing presses in protest against British tyranny. Reading levy in 1992 much closer in age to levy than I am now, I do not think I appreciated what a special poet and person he was. Fascinated with the Beats, I placed levy in that tradition and bought into the myth of a man suicided by society. I remember being somewhat underwhelmed by the poetry in comparison with the myth.

Much has changed in me and the world at large since I first read levy. Many of these personal changes, such as my newly sparked interest in mimeo, printing techniques and the small press; my obsession with creative communities; and my fascination with literature’s role in popular and political culture play right into the obsessions that drove levy. I also require a sense of tradition and literary history as background to fully appreciate a writer, and a dedicated group of scholars and artists are constructing the critical edifice necessary to build up the reputation of this largely misunderstood poet. I think the internet has really helped establish this home base. Several wonderful websites have grown up around the Cleveland mimeo scene and levy in general. Deep Cleveland is a case in point, as is the d.a. levy page. The Cleveland State library possesses a tremendous collection of levy’s work, as does Kent State. The library has been very active in scanning and making available the contents of their collection. From what I can tell they are at the forefront of this trend to make library holdings available on the internet. The power of the Cleveland scene in the 1960s cannot be separated from the vitality of public spaces like bookstores, coffeehouses, theaters, revolving door apartments, and crash pads. In my opinion, it is not a coincidence that the rebirth of Cleveland parallels the city’s efforts to reclaim and examine its rich history. The Rock and Roll Museum is the most obvious (and maybe controversial) example of the role of history in the rebuilding of Cleveland, but institutions like the library are crucial as well. levy realized the value of a well-stocked library when he donated alternative books and magazines to the public institutions of Cleveland. As Ed Sanders suggests, the Rock and Roll Museum would benefit from an exhibit dealing with levy and the Cleveland scene. The Cleveland mimeo scene is certainly intertwined with the rebellious spirit of the popular music of the 1960s.

A reluctance to take old anecdotes at face value seems to be the order of the day in the academic community dedicated to the writers of the immediate post-WWII era. Kerouac, Bukowski, and Burroughs are the Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink and Pecos Bill of American Literature. The tall tales surrounding these writers have obscured their true legacy. The veneer of myth covering these writers and making them so shiny and glossy for short-sighted fans is being rubbed away. Critics are getting at the bedrock surface below. The documentary on Bukowski, Born into This, takes the old, seldom seen footage and lets it speak for itself. The Bukowski letters continue this process. The result is a much more literary and, even in some ways, more sensitive Bukowski. The book Kerouac’s Wild Form (among others) reveals the radicalism of Kerouac by demonstrating his intellectual side and by laying bare his roots in the creative cross-currents of the Post-WWII avant-garde. James Grauerholz examined “the” Beat Myth, the William Tell shooting of Joan Vollmer by William Burroughs, in an effort to get to the bottom of this mystery that lies at the heart of Burroughs’ creative life and of his “secret of fascination.”

The valiant efforts of librarians, collectors and archivists who have saved the ephemera of the Cleveland scene from destruction are beginning to bear fruit. The levyfest in Cleveland is part party and part symposium. The word is getting out about levy beyond a handful of academics and collectors interested in the relics of the mimeo revolution. One proof of this is a recent publication by Bottom Dog Press: d.a. levy and the mimeograph revolution. The book, edited by Larry Smith and Ingrid Swanberg, delves deep into the life and work of levy far beyond the usual mythmaking.

This is most obvious in the treatment of levy’s suicide. For years, I believed that levy was hounded to death by a fascistic Cleveland. Besieged by legal troubles, levy took his own life to escape the oppressive police state atmosphere. This is an important element of the story but it is not the whole tale. At the time of his death, the light at the end of the legal tunnel was in sight. levy, had he held out, would have been cleared in Cleveland. He could have sought out more hospitable pastures like California or New York, and as the book states, such plans were contemplated and were in the works. The circumstances around levy’s death are much more complex: a combination of police-state hounding, a fragile state of mental health, relationship problems, and confusion about his creative future and role. What is clear is that levy was a figure out of Ginsberg’s Howl or Artaud’s essay on Van Gogh. That is if you get to the radical and political center of those works. levy was persecuted by society but it was not for his drug use or use of dirty words. They were the pretext. levy was a wanted man for the critical, questioning, and contrary nature of his thought. levy was an enemy of the state because he challenged the unassailable myths of the United States and the Western world head-on. As the recent essays make clear, levy, like Olson, was a historian. He found out for himself, and the powers that be did not like what he uncovered.

I think the comparison with Olson is instructive, and a major source of my ongoing and growing interest in levy. Like Olson, levy is an archeologist of the morning. levy explores beginnings, roots, and foundations in order to understand where things stand in the Now and in the Future. His interest in Egyptian history and script was one aspect of this digging in the past as was his excavation of the history of Cleveland. Like Olson with Gloucester and William Carlos Williams with Paterson, levy initiated an intense relationship with the city of Cleveland. I can think of few writers so active in community building outside of the major metropolitan areas on the two coasts. Surely, Olson and Williams explored their home bases in depth, but they did not attempt to construct an alternative community outside of the pages of Paterson and The Maximus Poems. Cleveland in many ways was levy’s muse and his major creative project. The city on the lake lies at the heart of his poetry. For example see Cleveland Undercover.

Olson also comes into play with his ideas of composition by field in the essay Projective Verse. A look at levy’s mimeo work reveals a poet greatly concerned with the appearance of the poem on the page. levy’s work recognizes the page as space. Swanberg and Smith’s book is wonderful in this respect, solidifying levy as a concrete / experimental / visual poet. The book also explores how the means of production dovetailed with levy’s literary concerns. This placement of levy in the forefront of the poetic avant-garde is extremely interesting and does justice to levy’s poetic project.

The focus of the levy book may be the mimeo revolution, but the essays in the collection greatly expand the range of levy’s work. The levy presented here is a deeply intellectual poet who was intimately in touch with the political, social, and literary crosscurrents of his time as well as time gone by. levy’s reach extended far beyond Cleveland in inspiration and influence. The levy presented here is less a stereotypical hippie, counterculture poet and more the experimental, avant-garde poet and publisher.

In this line, I found particularly interesting the treatment of levy as an artist. The most obvious example of this is his work with the mimeograph machine. I have read precious little on the actual mimeo process and its effect on and relationship with the creative process. Smith and Swanberg’s book provides many insights here. The book ties together the importance of the typewriter in poem-making as demonstrated by Olson in Projective Verse. The poet could become his own typesetter and lay out the poem on the page. Stencil cutting continues this process in the act of do-it-yourself reproduction. levy mastered the mimeograph, manipulating it for complex visual and typographical affects. I had never heard of the distinction between clean and dirty mimeo until reading this book. I always assumed that smudgy, inky pages were unintentional. Not true. Such effects were harnessed by levy in his concrete works to bring up issues of illegibility, obscurity, censorship, and incomprehensibility. levy incorporated blots and smudges as a typographical form of noise, static or feedback. Karl Young writes,

Taking a cue from blurs and set-off, levy began overprinting texts, sometimes for visual effects alone, sometimes as a technique to obscure some words while leaving others visible, creating a new text out of an old. A number of other mimeographers had reversed stencils, printing texts backwards. This was invariably done to produce results that were merely cute. levy worked reversed stencils in conjunction with other print runs to produce meaningful interactions of directions. His most resourceful use of mimeography came from over-inking stencils. Slight overinks were one of the perennial annoyances for veteran mimeographers. In a number of late works levy achieved a surprising range of text alteration and abstract graphics through various degrees of over-inking and cylinder impression. The initial results of these prints were often single sheets which he then had reprinted offset so as not to disturb the imbalance he had set up. In this process, he had completely jumped over the standard limitations of mimeo, turning it from one of the most tediously restricted forms of letter reproduction into the tool for one of the most dramatic forms of visual poetry of the era.

levy was not incompetent with the mimeo, but a savvy manipulator of the medium who sought to further his interests in concrete / experimental / visual poetry.

The argument is made that levy was one of the foremost practitioners of the mimeograph. His work is very impressive. I am much taken with the work of Jeff Nuttall in My Own Mag. I would characterize Nuttall’s work as clean. Nuttall strives for clarity in his inking and chooses to add the element of disruption with the use of scissors, the razor, fire or collage. The visuals in My Own Mag must have been difficult to create with a stencil, and the painter and draftsman in Nuttall comes to the fore. The visuals, like the comic strips and covers in My Own Mag, are more traditional, more conventional, maybe an example of what could be called classical mimeo. levy’s work with its blobs, its acknowledgement of the physical nature of ink, its superimpositions, and its fading reminds me of Abstract Expressionist and Pop techniques. I am thinking of levy’s Scarab Poems and “AGAIn? Yur primer cord is showing.” The solid band of ink of “AGAIn?” reminds me of a mimeo Rothko, if Rothko incorporated text in his painting. There are splashes of ink and blots like in the work of Jackson Pollock. The superimpositions, fading of text and image, and the failure to reink calls to mind Warhol’s Marilyn paintings of the early 1960s where such effects bring to mind mortality, impermanence, transitoriness. Nuttall stained his magazine (Issue 9) but I do not get the same flashes from his work. The fading and illegibility of the text in My Own Mag I take to be “the standard limitations of mimeo” and not an intended and manipulated affect.

Like Nuttall, levy was also a painter and illustrator. Russell Salamon points out this aspect of levy’s creative endeavor providing color images of the Cleveland Prints. levy created two sets of prints depicting a “used inked condom” in collages. Salamon points out “the free speech element” of these prints. I found these collages very compelling, and I did not know why until I read Karl Young’s essay: “At the Corner of Euclid Ave and Blvd St Germain: d.a. levy’s Parables of Local Necessity and Universal Decentralism.” Young recounts, “Jokes about the difficulties [of mimeo], such as that drawing on a mimeo stencil being comparable to writing with the claw of a hammer on a used condom, made up a sub genre of its own.” It was then that I saw the prints as a comment on the mimeo process. The prints also comment on free speech and communication in another way. In “Intro to the Cement Fuck,” levy writes, “as for obscenity… which is more obscene jacking off into a wastebasket becauz nobody wants to make love, or getting a bayonet in the guts.” In an interview with Andrew Curry of Dust, levy speaks of his work in relation to masturbation. levy was aware of the tie between excess, waste, and obscenity in a capitalist society. The mimeos of Cleveland bypassed normal distribution channels, ignored the mainstream publishing industry, and flooded the limited market with a baffling array of editions, limited editions, and reprints. The theories of Georges Bataille on potlatch and excess production come to mind. In a similar vein, levy states, “Why Concrete? What can be more obscene than refusing to communicate?” levy’s poetry with its failure to communicate its message clearly and simply is obscene. Again his poetry becomes and celebrates wasteful exercise like masturbating in a wastebasket or condom. levy was drawn to concrete poetry in part because of these intellectual, political and philosophical underpinnings. Many of the essays in d.a. levy and the mimeograph revolution make clear the capitalist critique that is implicit in not only his poetry and art, but also in his means of production and distribution.