July 15, 1966, Cleveland Press

-- by Judy Prusnek 

d. a. (Darryl Alfred) levy, erstwhile underground leader of concrete and social comment poetry movement in Northern Ohio is about throw in his mimeograph machine.

At 23, the Rhodes High School graduate has spent the past three years organizing readings, attempting to stock Cleveland library shelves with "good literature" (on art, contemporary poetry and oriental religion/philosophy) and, in general, championing the local poet with dogged, shoe-string efforts.

Subsisting on $400 a year, levy’s sole livelihood has meant cranking out by hand reams of local poetry, charting it to the Asphodel Book shop in the Arcade and hoping it will sell "for the cause."

TO DATE, LEVY HAS PUBLISHED over 150 poets 35 of them Ohioans.

"But someone else has to start doing this," he said. "One way is for me to stop. Patrons are nowhere."

After a seven-month stint in the Navy and a succession of part-time jobs, levy in a self-imposed world of rent worries, parental rejection, one meal a day, Zen meditation, nonexistent patrons, a typed sutra prayer pasted on the bathroom wall with an abhorrence of the status-seeking "tenny-boppers."

"Tell the tenny-boppers who admire me in droves that I am not a romantic figurehead," he said. He explained this term for the pseudo-beat teen-agers as those who "think they’re hip but don’t know who Kerouac is."

To sow his and other poets’ feelings, levy is publisher of the 7 flower press (formerly Renegade Press).