November 26, 1968, Cleveland Plain Dealer

The angles did not visit me I suppose I will have to go to them. – d. a. levy

In a room full of mattresses and girl, d. a. levy’s friends held an upbeat, informal wake yesterday, blaming a society which "forces poets to extinguish themselves."

They planned to send out postcard announcements of the poet’s untimely death. The postcard to be sent out was supposedly d. a.’s favorite. It shows pigs in a pigpen. The caption is: "We like it here."

Darryl Allan Levy, 26, the high priest of Cleveland’s tenny-bopper hippies and new sound poets, was found shot in his East Cleveland apartment Sunday night. Two fellow poets, R. J. Sigmund and Steve Ferguson, discovered the body.

"I BECAME suspicious that something was wrong because he’d done a lot of strange things in the past week," Sigmund said. "Sunday night we couldn’t get into his place and we figured something was really wrong."

Sigmund said Levy had done these things in the past week:

Corner Samuel R. Gerber said yesterday it would take a week to determine if, indeed, Levy was a suicide. East Cleveland’s detective chief, Lt. Milton Jennrich, said he was "100% sure" Levy killed himself with the single-shot .22-caliber rifle found at his side.

If I paint Windermere on my apartment door like a Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign will it keep the angle of death away?

Levy, a James Ford Rhodes High School graduate of 1960, was a quiet, gentle man in constant rebellion against the values of what he saw as a "phony, upside-down world." He came from a middle-class background. His father was a shoemaker. He was discharged from the Navy after six months as a "manic depressive" and started writing poetry.

He was in constant scrapes, with the law, too, most notably for being charged with conduct tending to cause the delinquency of juveniles by writing poetry which a judge found obscene.

THE JUDGE SAID his poems were "literary garbage, filth for filth’s sake and nothing else." Levy countered by saying that the judge was a "vulgar and ill-informed critic of my writing."

"In my publications and readings," Levy said. "I try to communicate with the average person and sometimes using swear words is the only way to do it. I wanted to get kids to start writing and tried to give them an outlet for their work by publishing it. I could have left them alone to bash their heads in against the sidewalks or I could have taught them to make Molotov cocktails. But I didn’t do those things."

LEVY PUBLISHED his own poetry and published a series of underground journals, the most notable being The Swamp Erie Pipe Dream and his latest The Buddhist Third Class Junk Mail Oracle.

He was a boo-hoo of the Neo-American Church, a group which believed in the psychedelic assassination of politicians and putting LSD in the water supply. He hailed the merits of psychedelic drugs, he defended marijuana, contending it was less dangerous than alcohol.

"All I want to do," Levy said, "is write poems, say what I want to say and be able to turn on once in a while. Is that too much to ask of your country?"

HE BECAME a symbol of the hippie movement in Cleveland. Writers referred to him as the "hippie king" and stickers and buttons proclaiming "LEVY LIVES" and "LEVY NOT LOCHER" were every where.

When he was charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors by writing his four-letter poetry, The Plain Dealer editorialized: "Practically every time he looks up from his work, he can behold a cadre of bluecoats, their hands ready for the quickdraw if the dangerous Levy should ever show fight. Harassing him … is making Cleveland look more like a province than it really is."

A FRIEND said: "When ever the cops busted somebody for smoking pot or doing something illegal, like jaywalking, they thought d. a. was behind it. They made him into a kind of God figure for all the teeny boppers who came down to Adele’s Bar from the suburbs each weekend."

In the last year, though he dropped from the headlines. "He wasn’t the hippie king anymore," an East Cleveland policeman said, "because the whole hippie set is dying off. There are less people here to sit around and be overwhelmed by his alleged magic."

Levy spent the last year living quietly with his common – law wife, Dagmar, a green-eyed, auburn-haired girl who designed his poetry book covers and supported him by working as a waitress at a carry-out restaurant.

THEY PAID $75 a month for the apartment at 1744 Wymore Avenue, East Cleveland. The landlady said Dagmar paid the money promptly each month. Levy became more and more depressed. He was finding it impossible to make a living writing his poems.

Asked by a judge once what he did for a living, Levy had replied: "I sell poetry for 89 cents a day." Tongue in cheek, the judge advised him to ask for more for his poetry.

While his poems were published in many underground journals, none of his poems appeared in respected poetry magazines of in major circulation magazines. He told an East Cleveland policeman last week: "There’s nothing to live on, nobody cares, there’s nothing to live on."

"WE COULD BE going for a walk," his fellow poet Steve Ferguson said, "and d. a. would say : ‘Let’s commit suicide tomorrow,’

"He didn’t really like anything he wrote. It was all a joke. He had to live up to his own symbolism but he didn’t believe in anything anymore, in what he was doing."

"He was peaceful and beautiful," Sigmund says. "He had more knowledge than anyone I ever knew. He said he thought of himself as three or four hundred years old and lived that way."

"Everybody does the same thing. It’s all a game. Some people are remembered, some people are forgotten, at least he’ll go out as a legend, like Hemingway."

LEVY REJECTED society’s values and tired to live by his own. Ironically, the last poem he published was about money. The lines appear in the Buddhist Third Class Junk Mail Oracle. Paraphrased, they say:

"Hey, what do I have to do to get ten grand?"