March, 1967, Cleveland Press

-- by Dick Feagler

D. A. Levy is a little man of 24 with a scraggly brown beard who talks in a soft voice and uses dirty words when he writes. The county prosecutor says he is a criminal.

"There is a little misunderstanding between what I’m doing and what the police think I’m doing," Levy said with a little smile.

He is on the sixth floor of County Jail, wearing blue jail coveralls with red lowercase "p’s" on the knees. He is charged with acting in such a way as to tend to contribute to the delinquency of minors and has been indicted on a charge of publishing obscene literature.

" I don’t think I contributed to anybody’s delinquency," Levy said. "What is obscenity? I don’t know. I don’t think the state knows."

Opinions are divided about the literary merit of Levy’s poetry. But the publicity since his first arrest had brought him a horde of followers among young people who wear "levy lives!" buttons and scribbles protest poems in his behalf.

His other defenders include ministers and college professors who, while not endorsing Levy’s poetry, fear censorship in any form and object to tactics used to quiet him.

SO WHO IS D. A. Levy?

"I was born in Cleveland and went to Rhodes High," he said. "I didn’t have enough money for college. I was in the Navy seven months. I got out after I developed manic depressive tendencies. Right now I am a paranoid."

"My Parents still live in Cleveland. My father, Joseph Levy, was a shoe salesman. I don’t see my parents any more. I think about them sometimes."

"I am part of a movement trying to make this planet more civilized."

"I use those words you call shocking because I am trying to communicate. That’s the way I hear people talk. That’s the way they talk in here anyhow. I don’t see any reason for people to be shocked."

I’m getting so I don’t care if I’m in jail or not," he said. "I might not have been arrested this time except there were so many people at my house that the Underground Thought Patrol couldn’t warn me. The Underground Thought Patrol tells me when the police are around."

Outside his cell, Jonathan Dworkin, Levy’s defense attorney, is preparing his defense with funds raised by his supporters. George Moscarino, assistant county prosecutor, is preparing the case for the state versus Levy.

SHOULD THE STATE of Ohio be protected against D. A. Levy? Levy says he doesn’t think so.

"Poets ought to be patronized," he said. "I’m not throwing bombs. I’m writing poems. When the bombs start to fall, we will need poems."

A deputy came and told Levy it was time for him to see the doctor. So Levy got up and shuffled away.

"Oh," he said, turning around. "The police took my mimeo (his duplicating machine). If you want to put something in the paper, put in that I need a new mimeo."

He needs a new mimeo.