June 4, 1981, Cleveland Press

-- by Dick Wootten 

d. a. Levy (he preferred the lower case) was a gentle, shy and despairing soul who wrote poems in the late 1960’s in Cleveland. The poems had dirty words in them and for that he was persecuted and prosecuted.

"if I scratch, if I write," which tells of his short and sad life, will be shown at 8 p.m. Saturday at Strosacker Auditorium at Case Western Reserve University. The movie was made by Konstantin Petrochuk.

The world premiere is sponsored by Spaces Gallery at One Playhouse Square where a poetry reading by Cleveland poets will take place Saturday at 2 p.s.

I saw the movie at a screening early this week and was impressed with some of its professional touches and provocative content. Perhaps because my wife knew levy and I had met him, I was hooked on this film. But I also think the movie has a compelling nature, not because levy’s poetry has any great staying power but because of the tragic nature of this simple human being’s story.

Hough was still in ruins from the riots and the police were nervous. Parents worried about their kids taking drugs. Young people hated what was happening here and in Vietnam. They were angry and used four-letter words to shock the world out of complacency.

In 1967, Cleveland police arrested levy on an obscenity charge for reading his poetry in a coffeehouse where high school kids were listening. Some say he was reading one of the kid’s poems. Eventually the charge was dropped.

Levy had become "good copy" for the newspapers. He was called the underground leader of the concrete and social comment poetry movement in Northern Ohio. Our Dick Feagler championed him and made the police and prosecutor’s office look silly for picking on such a harmless little guy.

Levy, who admitted being manic depressive and a paranoid, committed suicide at age 26 on Thanksgiving Day, 1968.

Filmmaker Petrochuk said he became curious about levy after picking up a book of his poetry while he was a student at Kent State. He had never met levy but soon became obsessed with his story.

Petrochuk went on to receive his master of arts in film making from Kent in 1975. With the help of money from the Ohio Arts Council, he shot five hours of film and taped 15 hours of interviews. He has spent two years editing it all down to one hour, which may still be a little long.

He has tried to tell about levy and this episode in Cleveland history in an honest and straightforward way. He sought out levy’s friends, including beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg, and had them reminisce into the camera. We see levy’s poems and underground newspapers and views of where he lived and worked. There is only one movie clip of levy himself.

Petrochuk regrets that he couldn’t get any of Cleveland police and members of the county prosecutor’s office to be in the film. As a result, the movie comes out one-sided as far as the legal issues are concerned.

But as a series of loving recollections of the unfulfilled life of a sad, likeable and driven man, the movie is successful. It may not immortalize levy but, at least for a while, it revives the levy legend.

Two weeks before his suicide, he went around, in effect, saying goodbye to all of his friends. Also an abstract artist of orts, he begged me to take one of his paintings. I didn’t want to but finally did. It was torn.

A few years later I threw it away.