Thursday's Place: Coventry Road

There is one in every city, although by the time we notice them they are on the verge of becoming tourist traps.  The stages are familiar:

1.  A middle class neighborhood is established.
2.  The established middle-class leaves for the suburbs, a new immigrant class enters.
3.  It becomes a lively, if poor, immigrant neighborhood.
4.  The old immigrants are assimilated into the mainstream culture and leave the neighborhood.
5.  Increasingly, shabby homes and businesses begin to develop as subsequent residents are transient.
6.  Discovery of the neighborhood by students and artists looking for cheap digs; the shabbiness becomes chic.
7.  Full integration of the younger, counter-culture population.
8.  Increasing desirability of the area based on inexpensive housing, opportunities for start-up businesses, and a cultural cache based on the neighborhood's recognized hip-ness.
9.  Invasion of the gentrifiers; rents rise precipitously and local businesses offer increasingly expensive, exclusive goods.
10.  Full tourist appeal with tour bus stops and photo opportunities; so much so that the absence of cultural viability goes unnoticed.

So, North Beach and Haight-Asbury in San Francisco; Venice Beach and Silver Lake in Los Angeles; Greenwich Village, East Village, Williamsburg, etc. in New York, Squirrel Hill and Shadyside in Pittsburgh; Adams Morgan in D.C.; Dinkytown in Minneapolis; Ocean Beach in San Diego...well, the list goes on.  As I noted, there's at least one in every city.

In Cleveland, Ohio, it was Coventry Road.  Well, it's now known as the Coventry Village and it's not, technically, in Cleveland, but in Cleveland Heights.  No one really cares much about that distinction, except maybe the Cleveland Heights Chamber of Commerce.  It's a short drive, or mid-length walk, from Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Case Western Reserve University, the University Hospital system, the Botanical Gardens, and many other sites.  It includes the most interesting cemetery in the metro area.

So, let's follow the process, shall we?  I'll make some stops along the way for the sake of cultural or personal commentary.

The area was farmland that was converted to a neighborhood in the late 19th century for the burgeoning middle to upper-middle class community.  At first, large houses were constructed.

Well, imagine it in 1900 and without the self-consciously "hip" paint job.

The working class, who cannot afford grand homes, begin to move into a collection of stately and handsome apartment buildings.  This growth was aided by conveniently placed streetcar lines.

Above is what was my building.  I was always saving for one of those apartments with the wrought-iron terrace that overlooked the courtyard.  Mine was on the first floor with only two windows and no cross breeze.

By the 1930's, the established middle-class had begun to move further away from the city, as public transportation improved and as cars became more available, and an incoming ethnic population replaced them.  In the case of Coventry Road, the original demographic of the new neighborhood was made up of displaced European Jews.

As the immigrant population of the metro area became assimilated, they, too, began to move away from a neighborhood that was now regarded as too close to the city to offer a comfortable life.  The number of empty houses increased and the apartments began to host an increasingly transient population, which caused the neighborhood's decline as there were fewer long-term residents with strong community roots.

Students, mostly from nearby CWRU and Cleveland State University, then began to discover the formerly gracious apartments, with remarkably reasonable rents, and move in.  Along with them came artists, actors, writers, musicians, criminals, and less-talented hangers-on to populate the area.  As it is now the mid-sixties, and the full cultural revolution is occurring, Coventry Road becomes the locus for the beats, then hippies, in this portion of the Midwest.

As a nod to times gone by, even the contemporary street signs need to be groovy.

By the mid-1970's, the hippies have faded away but those with some smarts have opened bookstores, record shops, clothing emporia, and bars with live music.  The last business from the pre-counter-culture days, a corner deli, remains and serves as the spindle for neighborhood life.  Also, as the unofficial headquarters for the Cleveland chapter of the Hell's Angels.

By the time of my residency, it was known as Irv's Deli, and was a place notorious for stale bagels and criminal activity.  It was great, in other words.

Across the street was a dive that was known by various names through the years, although I always think of it by the name it carried in the 1970's, The Saloon.  I regard it fondly as it was the first place in which I was paid to play in a band.

An unprepossessing street presence, matched by its clientele

My earliest audience, back when smoking in bars was not only allowed, but normal.  

Of the many things to be experienced on Coventry, it was the one place to find avant-garde books, records [it was where I bought my first "grown-up" music: the Sgt. Pepper album], and even films that were not available anywhere else in the city in those days before Internet commerce.  Coventry Books, with its unadorned sign, sold a lot of European experimental literature, including the full catalog of Grove Press; Record Revolution carried recordings [on vinyl] of all of the groups that, while rarely played even on FM radio, were well-known to the 20-somethings of the era.  A proper coffee house could be, and still can be, found on the corner.

And the local cinema, the Heights Art Theater, would show a representative collection of European films, even in the days when those films were considered "obscene".  In fact, their viewing of Louis Malle's "The Lovers" in 1959 resulted in a police raid, several arrests, and eventually an appearance before the Supreme Court, an event which occasioned a justice famously to state that while he couldn't define pornography, he knew it when he saw it.  The Theater would win the case.  As it was a five minute walk from my apartment, I would often enjoy Lina Wertmuller films and the Friday night showings of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".

Coventry Road was also the home of of D.A. Levy, Jau Billera, and Harvey Pekar, three members of a loose confederation known as The Cleveland Beats and credited with serving as sentinels for the New Bohemian era in American letters.  There was certainly a proliferation of small periodicals dedicated to verbal expression that could be found in the neighborhood, most of them published for free on "borrowed" mimeograph machines.  One of those crudely printed quarterlies, Harpoon! [God help me, that was the name] would hire me as editor, a job that became, during the two years of its existence, one of my favorite experiences.

I don't think it was because of my editorial ability so much as it was because I taught at a high school and had access to a mimeograph machine.

Well, you get the idea.  A lot happened in that small area that, while a minor echo in the greater cultural history of the United States, provided those of us of that generation and inclination a place of freedom.  Now that my parents are deceased and my friends and remaining family disseminated throughout the rest of the world, my occasions to return home are few and far between.  However, when there, I still stay at a nearby hotel just so I can roam those streets again, lament that it is a shadow of its once vibrant and creative self, and marvel how it is now firmly locked in step #10 as a tourist region where people gawk rather than groove.

And that's okay, as that kind of feast is in perpetual motion.

Since I'm cleaning nostalgia out of both my head and my computer files, here are some more photos.

A quiet morning on Coventry Road.

The area in front of the former Heights Theater and Tommy's.

A ghost sign from one of the ancient businesses.

A blending of old and new buildings.

It was a good store.  It's now a new and used paperback bookstore by another name.

The humble record store where I spent many, never wasted, hours.

Some Personal History

I had the occasion on my latest trip to Cleveland to stop by a couple of places that were formative in my early self-education.  The first was the former Coventry Road Books, now known as Mac's Backs, which is located in what was once the counter-culture area of the city.  It was here that I could find books that were offered nowhere else and be introduced to ideas and perspectives that were beyond those presented by any of my high school teachers.  It was in this neighborhood that a seminal indepedent theater company was founded and located, where the first and only Greenwich Village-style coffee shop in the city would be found, and where highly original musical acts would perform.  Even in college, when home for holidays, I would make the trek to "the road".  It's also the only non-university bookstore where I could find copies of the poetry of James Magner, of whom I wrote a couple of years ago.

 

[Forgive the 'cloudiness' of the photos; it wasn't smoky, I was using the phone's crud cam. 

As ever, click to enlarge.]

Although smaller than it once was, as the aforementioned coffee shop has expanded into the bookstore, it's still a source of uniqueness.  As a bonus, next door is Record Rendezvous, where I bought my first "real" album.  [It was Sgt. Pepper, in case you were wondering.]  "The 'Vous" store downtown was where the term "rock and roll" was coined.  Now, it mostly sells t-shirts and drug paraphernalia in a rather poor attempt to evoke the lost relevance of the neighborhood.

Also, 'cash' for old record albums, which are now back in vogue.

The other source of my autodidactism was the Cleveland Museum or Art, which is the finest of its kind in the world, boasting one of the West's largest collections of Asian art and medieval armor, along with impressive collections of Western art.  It's also absolutely free to the public.

The new atrium connects all of the buildings of the museum, which is wise given the severe weather of the Midwest, and also serves as a great place for weddings, graduations, and other celebrations.

This was my favorite exhibit when I was a boy, for obvious reasons.

The Christian and Asian collections are sublime, too.

A reredos.

An 8th Century portable altar.  Nice, eh?

 

This is approximately the size of a shoe box.

 



Shiva dancing above the meditative garden:

And, of course, my old buddy Hanuman, the monkey god:

Thursday's Place: Caffe Trieste

It's not a very prepossessing place, although the places featured on Thursdays rarely are.  That lack of pretension is probably what made or makes them popular, as they attract a crowd that doesn't want the surroundings to distract from their own affectations.  Also, they tended to be cheap, like those whom they attracted.  Since I primarily write of places that were popular with the creative class, that's no surprise.

In the 1950's, the North Beach neighborhood in San Francisco was an enclave of Italian immigrants filled with culturally specific restaurants and groceries familiar to anyone who has ever grown up in an ethnic neighborhood.  As with a dynamic that we have noted before with the Coventry Road section of Cleveland, North Beach began to attract a more bohemian crowd who found the relaxed atmosphere and low rents to be desirable.

This was aided somewhat when the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened a small bookstore in the neighborhood where one could find inventory not to be found in other stores.  As the genre of literature he promoted became dominant, and as he also opened a small publishing press for those who could not find support in the mainstream industry, the City Lights Bookstore became the magnet for those who would transform the Italian neighborhood to that of the counter-culture.

Looking every bit the Frisco poet

In the midst of it all, opened in 1956, was the Caffe Trieste.  Its owner, Giovanni Giotta, missed the real espresso and cappuccino of his hometown in Italy and opened the only place outside of New York's Little Italy where one could find the real thing.

[A note for those younger than I: In the days before ubiquitous, boutique coffee shops, espresso was basically mud in a cup and cappuccino was mud topped by a blast from a can of Reddi-Wip.  No, I'm not kidding.]

As both City Lights and Caffe Trieste opened around the same time, a trip to North Beach could include both on the itinerary and the coffeehouse offered the perfect place to read some volume purchased from Ferlinghetti.  Shortly afterwards, it would become a perfect place to write something to be published by Ferlinghetti.

Hence, one could order a proper espresso in the Caffe and be surrounded by habitues such as Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Brautigan, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, and Kenneth Rexroth.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti, now 100, still frequents that large, copper cappuccino steamer.  Paul Kantner, one of the founders of Jefferson Airplane and creator of the "San Francisco sound" in rock music, made it his home away from home; and Francis Ford Coppola wrote the draft of the screenplay for The Godfather in a quiet corner.  Well, not so quiet when he was there, as he wrote with a portable, manual typewriter.

Giotti, commonly addressed as "Papa Gianni", would preside over his small, corner business for sixty years, surrendering his mortality at the age of 96 in 2016.  In addition to brewing the first, and still authentic, cup of cappuccino on the West Coast, Giotti was also an amateur musician who would share that talent with anyone who would come through his door.

From his obituary:

By the early 1970s, more than a dozen coffee shops dotted North Beach, but none was as musical as Caffe Trieste. Gianni and his son Gianfranco began performing for the cafe on Thursday mornings in 1970. The concerts grew so popular they were switched to Saturday afternoons.Mr. Giotta, who had studied opera in Trieste in his early 20s, would be joined onstage by Gianfranco, a semiprofessional singer, and Mr. Giotta’s wife, Ida; his other son, Fabio, would sing and accompany on accordion. The family would perform solos, duets and full choruses, primarily from Italian and French operas. Favorites were “Chella Lla,” “Figaro,” “Katerine” and “Funiculi, Funicula.” Professional singers visiting San Francisco began to stop in.

While Giotta would open other branches of Caffe Trieste in other areas of northern California as his success grew, the original was the only one that maintained that neighborhood cache and, as it turned out, the only one to survive his family's legal battles over his will.  After a few months of concern that this literary and artistic landmark would close, it was saved when cooler heads prevailed.

While North Beach is no longer the artistic cauldron it once was, and San Francisco currently is working through some traveler-unfriendly realities, one may still enjoy an honest cup, gaze upon the collected photographs of those who made the culture of the American Century, and marvel at what it is to be in the right place and the right time and reap the rewards of hospitable service to one's neighbors.

The List of Thursday's Places, Thus Far

Cafe Frankenstein - The proto-surfer, beat hang-out that was a headache to the cops, man.
The Elbo Room - The inadvertent magnet of Florida spring break crazy
The White Horse Tavern - "Jack, go home"
Don the Beachcomber's - Wacky tiki in old California
The House of Swing - Where jazz is king
The Mermaid Cafe - Greeks, geeks, hippies, and Joni Mitchell
The Oxford Bar - Remember to wear your old school tie and be prepared for murder
Musso and Frank Grill - Stick to the martinis and chicken pot pie
Charlie's - At the shore since '44
Cornelia Street Cafe - A moment in fading New York
La Cave - A lot can happen around used church furniture
The University of Leeds Refectory - Mushy peas and 98 decibel rock
Harry's New York Bar of Paris - Have the $40 Bloody Mary and pretend you're drinking with Hemingway
The Campbell Apartment - Hidden elegance on Vanderbilt Avenue
The Majestic Grill - Dogs
Coventry Road - Beats, Hippies, and a kid English teacher
The Algonquin Hotel - Cats and critics favorite
The Eagle and Child - Hobbits, Narnia, and the Golden Dawn
CBGB - "Why are these walls...wet?"
The Kite - Only in the islands
Caffe Trieste - Italy meets boho in Frisco
The Cleveland Museum of Art - The best museum in the United States, that's all
The Souks of Marrakesh - "For five dirham, you can step on the cobra."
Christian's Hut - The movable movie set
Shakespeare and Company - The bookstore that gave us our high school reading list
The Smiling Dog Saloon - Even better than a bowling alley
Margaritaville - A tiny burger shack that became an industry
Tintamarre - A desert island, a makeshift bar, and Whiskey Pete
The Dune Shacks of Provincetown - Rustic living for the artistic class
The Checkerboard Lounge - Chicago's gift to music

Harry Crosby

He had gifts that would have made him an explorer, a soldier of fortune, a revolutionist: they were qualities fatal to a poet. --Malcolm Cowley

You may be forgiven if you never read, nor heard of, the Outré Literary Quarterly.  It existed in and around the Coventry Road neighborhood of Cleveland's east side back in the very late 1970's and very early 1980's.  In its earliest days, it was printed on a mimeograph machine after hours in the main office of Cleveland Central High School or, again after hours, in the English Department office at John Carroll University.  

The Outré was, without question, a bit pretentious, in addition to sometimes being sophomoric, esoteric to the point of obscurity, and self-conscious.  Given that it was the creation of three guys in their twenties who enjoyed beat poetry, punk/new wave music, foreign films, and the CoEvolution Quarterly, that shouldn't come as a surprise.  However, that also meant that the poetry and prose found in the Outré was not what would be found in other periodicals.  Much of it was solicited from graduate students, street poets, songwriters, thwarted housewives, and bookstore or tea house owners. Anyone with a scintilla of literary ability could make a submission and, this was the important part, be taken seriously and graciously by the editors.  

Although the three editors were able to create a welcoming platform for artistic expression, including some pieces that were determinedly experimental, they weren't as adept at the business end of the enterprise.  The Outré Literary Quarterly lasted a glorious six issues.  [Yes, I was one of the three.] 

There was a publisher who served as the model for this literary madness, though, as he had done something similar fifty years before, although in Paris after World War I instead of Cleveland after Vietnam.  As this proto-publisher was dedicated to opening up the rather tight world of creative writing, he was so much on the mind of the three editors that his visage would appear in the upper left corner of every cover of the Outré.  When inevitably asked his identity and the reason for his prominence, the only explanation offered was, "That's Harry Crosby.  Not the singer."

Crosby was born in 1898 to wealth and privilege as the nephew of J.P. Morgan.  He was raised to be the quintessential Boston brahman, educated at St. Mark's School and Harvard, fully prepared to enter into whatever bank or business would have him, although it was unnecessary for him to actually earn a living.  Instead, a significant experience radically altered his world view.

There have been some marvelous stories and books about the ambulance drivers and crews of the American Field Service during The Great War, made all the more interesting as a number of those soldiers would become prominent in literary circles.  Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, ee cummings [that's how he spelled it, although most articles "correct" it to conventional forms of grammar], W. Somerset Maugham, and [my mother's cousin and Yukon poet] Robert Service all drove converted Ford Model T's to and from the battlefields, often at great risk and with no small amount of bravery on display.  Harry Crosby was one of that group and it was during those rather dark days of war that he met the acquaintances who would be a part of his social and professional life until his death.

 

   
While not participants in the same way as were the soldiers in the trenches, the AFS and other ambulance drivers still were privy to the horrors of war.  Their responsibility was to take the screaming, maimed, mad, and dying victims of battle away from the field, unable to help in any substantial manner other to serve as transportation, from one place of mayhem to another.  Namely, the crude battlefront hospitals.  Here they would witness more trauma and more death; nervous breakdowns and aberrant behaviors.  It would have its effect.

Hemingway would be wounded while fulfilling his duties, cummings would witness a gibbering madman eating the eyeballs out of corpses, Maugham would keep a tedious count the number of people he'd watched die, sometime in pieces.  While we nowadays recognize the particular realities of post-traumatic stress disorder, and have developed ways of treating its symptoms, there was no such thing in 1917-1918. 

So, it comes as no surprise that, during the remainder of his life, Hemingway became increasingly violent and dependent on alcohol.  cummings would be institutionalized for a period and, in his poetry [as well as his signature] reject things such as common punctuation or verse structure.  Maugham would write a cathartic novel about a veteran's disordered post-war life and the redemption he found through Eastern religion.  In their literary works and their life stories, one may see the echoes of what they witnessed.

Harry Crosby was no different.  Having been recruited at Harvard, he enthusiastically entered the war hoping to be of service to those in need. Without question, he worked with courage and forthrightness and earned medals in both the American and French armies for his bravery.  By the war's end, he was numb from the futility of it all and obsessed with his intangible, immortal partner in the AFS, so much so that one of his biographers would call him "The Man Who Was in Love with Death".

 

   
Crosby's return to Boston society was difficult.  That may be an understatement.  For the returning survivors of World War I, the United States seemed different and the old ideas no longer carried any merit.  Music would change, from the formal style of orchestras to the frenetic jazz of combos, financial speculation would increase so feverishly that it drove the wealth of the 1920's and, inevitably, the debilitating crash at the end of that decade, theater and literature would become experimental and somewhat racy.

Crosby, wealthy enough to be provided with work by his uncle, and driven by quiet demons, drifted from parties to social events to concerts to dances without any feeling of connection.  He had a Bartleby-like disinterest in the bank where he worked.  While this alarmed his family somewhat, he alarmed them further when, in seeking attachment to something other than his memories of war, he met, and began a notorious relationship with, a married woman who was a few years older and the mother of two children.  

Mary Phelps Jacobs, known as Polly, may have been the liberated woman of her era.  Not only was she, too, a member of the tightly-ruled Boston establishment, a descendant of some of the great families, but she had accomplished something that gave her both independence and her own considerable income.  In frustration with fitting into the new, European-style formal dresses, she updated her undergarments and invented the brassiere, even gaining an official U.S. patent for her invention.  

Honestly, of the people profiled in The Coracle, she may be the most accomplished, based only on her invention.

Feeling the wrath of Boston society for their uncommon, and openly sexual, relationship, and neither being bound to work or family, Crosby and Jacobs left the United States for a freer life in Paris and became founding members of what literary history labels "The Lost Generation".  [Jacobs would soon be divorced from her husband.  He had returned from WWI so traumatized that he enjoyed getting riotously drunk and watching buildings burn.  One could say she, by extension, was a victim of The Great War's horror, too.]

After much drama, including Crosby's relationships with other women [he was J.P. Morgan's nephew, after all] Crosby and Jacobs were married in 1922.  At his suggestion, and to augment their sense of personal change, Polly Jacobs changed her name to Caresse Crosby.  [As absurd as Caresse sounds, Crosby's original suggestion had been "Clytoris", so....]  Crosby then quit his job and dedicated his service and that of Caresse's to the burgeoning literary scene of post-war Paris, especially seeking out those whom he had met during the dark days of his ambulance service.

While originally intending to create a vanity press to publish only Crosby's poetry, given that Paris during that decade was filled with writers, poets, and artists, and as Crosby was fluent in French [it had been his major at Harvard], with Caresse he founded The Black Sun Press in 1928.  In addition to being devoted to finding new and original talent to present to the post-war world, in keeping with the taste instilled in him by his upbringing, Crosby made sure that the volumes he produced were of extremely fine and attractive binding, making them stand out in a field crowded by second-rate product.

Also, as Crosby's personal tastes were rather latitudinal, [he was notorious for hosting the wildest of wild parties among the expatriate community, occasions filled with alcohol, drugs, and the sorts of "interpersonal" exploration that one's mother and the Lord Almighty warn against], he and Caresse were not adverse to soliciting and publishing, without judgement, experimental, or even vulgar, writing.  

Of course, the standard for "vulgar" in the 1920's is tame compared to an evening's viewing of basic cable offerings in our era.  Many of those "vulgar" writers were, by the 1960's, commonly read in public high school curricula and awarded international prizes in the arts.

So, Black Sun Press became one of the first to publish works by James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane [previously profiled in The Coracle], D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, and Ernest Hemingway, among others.  With such talent in print, Black Sun was becoming the most successful publisher in Paris and was about to enter the American market in New York.  That's when things went, as the French say, comme un fagot.  [As it's slang, literally meaning "like a bundle", the expression indicates, in modern American idiom, everything going sideways.]

It was at this point, when his literary and business successes were about to become complete, that Crosby's un-processed war trauma, fascination with death, and wandering eye would collide.  Having met a young Bostonian woman, Josephine Rotch, in Paris as she was vacationing on the eve of her marriage, Crosby fell into an absurd affair with her, seemingly ending when she left Paris to return to the States for her marriage.

Crosby, now obsessed with his new love, returned to New York with Caresse three months later, ostensibly to celebrate the Yale-Harvard football game, and re-kindled his relationship with the former Miss Rotch, now Mrs. Bigelow.  Suffice it to say, their intense time together in New York was marked with the betrayal of their respective spouses, melodramatic nicknames [she was his "Fire Princess"] verse after verse of bad poetry written by the two of them to one another, and a remarkable amount of smoked opium. 

Sometime shortly after a party hosted for the Crosby's by Hart Crane, attended by many of Crosby's friends from his ambulance days and clients whom he had made known to the literary world through Black Sun, including e.e. cummings, Malcolm Cowley, William Carlos Williams, and Walker Evans [who, with James Agee, also profiled in The Coracle, would produce one of the great works of the 1930's]  Crosby and Bigelow were found dead in a lovers' hideaway in New York on December 10, 1929.  Crosby had shot Bigelow and them himself, their murder-suicide marked with verses left strewn about the room.  Naturally, the New York papers outdid themselves over the lurid quality of the scandal, with even the rather staid New York Times getting exercised about the details:

COUPLE SHOT DEAD IN ARTISTS' HOTEL; Suicide Compact Is Indicated Between Henry Grew Crosby and Harvard Man's Wife. BUT MOTIVE IS UNKNOWN He Was Socially Prominent in Boston--Bodies Found in Friend's Suite.  

Crosby's final verse, found among the mortal detritus, sums up his morbid philosophy: "One is not in love unless one desires to die with one's beloved. There is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved."  

Boston society was roiled by the deaths and would be divided like the Capulets and the Montagues until distracted a decade later by World War II.  As was unusual for the times, Crosby was cremated and his ashes surrendered to his mother and Caresse.  They never said what they did with them, although the rumor has always been that his ashes were scattered about Manhattan from an airplane, but that's always seemed apocryphal.

Josephine Noyes Rotch Bigelow is buried in Connecticut at the Duck River Cemetery in Old Lyme.  By happenstance, I came across her stone when searching for the burial site of Ezra Lee, America's first submariner.  Rotch-Bigelow's name is not included by the local historical society in the roster of the famous, or infamous, who are interred in the cemetery, making one wonder if the scandal still carries a scent after nearly a century.

With Crosby's death, coming as it did at the end of the Roaring Twenties and the beginning of The Great Depression, the Paris world of expatriate writers and artists began to dissipate, and with it much of the lingering residue of The Great War, as the next decade would produce another opportunity for the human race to practice self-slaughter.  Caresse would remain in Paris and continue The Black Sun Press for a few more years until she returned permanently to the United States.

While he was barely talented enough to be more than a secondary expatriate poet, Crosby's lasting contribution was in enabling the publication of poets and writers who, until that time, had been rejected by the more established houses.  Without his enthusiasm and acceptance of even the most outrageous of work, many of those who would define literature in the American Century would perhaps never have been discovered.  As Harry Crosby knew few, if any, limits in his own life, he brought the same expansiveness to The Black Sun Press' repertoire.

Those who haunt used book stores and auctions have discovered that, because of the quality and artistry of their binding, Black Sun Press books are currently highly prized and command some remarkable prices.  Crosby has been the subject of a serious biography, Black Sun by Geoffrey Wolfe, that attempts to put his brief life and considerable gifts in an historical context, and some of his recently discovered poetry was released in a new volume a few years ago.

What of Caresse, though?  Her life continued to be interesting and may be worth a future examination, itself.

D.A. Levy and the Cleveland Beats

“If you want a revolution
grow a new mind
and do it quietly if you can”

I taught poetry in schools and colleges for nineteen years, here and there.  Sometimes as a full-time faculty member, sometimes as an adjunct, sometimes as a visiting lecturer.  I've come to realize that there are two things about poetry I've always appreciated.  The first, and the most obvious, is that it elevates all elements of a language to art.  Not only through simple rhyming verse, but through tone, the pattern of the syllables, and the manner in which the very pronunciation of the words can create a kind of music without instrumentation.  Poetry delicately enlivens the mind and creates a synaptic theme for appreciating reality anew. [Wow, that last sentence is pure academic gibberish, isn't it?  Or is it poetry?!]

The second reason is more complicated and visceral as it appeals to another portion of my character, I suppose; that which appreciates art that is less...tactile.  For example, in my days as an indifferent and failed New Wave musician, it was "the scene" rather than the music that drew me.  The energy, the raw, undiluted emotion of primal music, the massive expectations and the sheer, wild puissance of the crowd and the band and the immediacy of shared experience. 

The people drawn to music, both musicians and fans, tended towards the fringes of society, either due to their youth or liminal habits or peculiar view of the world.  To be involved in the next, and decidedly non-corporate, development of popular music was intoxicating, especially when it had not even been noticed by the professional sentinels of the media.

Similarly, poetry, too, highlights "the scene".  While I can recognize the stirring themes of Tennyson, absurd world-view of Eliot, the vividity of Shakespeare, or the lyrical wonder of Wordsworth, I can also appreciate what has been offered by poets of, in my opinion, lesser efforts.  While they may have come and gone, or only heard on amateur nights at the corner bar/coffeehouse or at a "slam poetry" experience at a college, they were willing to extend their artistic sense into a verbal medium.

This means there isn't that much of a difference between a musician and a poet.  There are those who prefer to offer the classics, or at least the classical themes, and those who are more experimental. Some become recognized artists whose work is collected and presented to subsequent generations, others offer a more transitional effort that also plays a role in the greater corpus of art.  Both poets and musicians experiment, shove at limits that are artificially imposed, weave new themes and styles into expression, and attract followers who are eager to share in the poet/musician's art.  The life of David Bowie and the life of Lord Byron are not as separated as one might think.  Both, whether consciously or not, make their lives into an art form.

One of those poets of lesser effort but important influence was D.A. Levy, who established a forum and style for a school of verse that became known as The Cleveland Beats [which was also the name of the one of the bands in which I played].  I'm not a big fan of Levy's poetry, but I appreciate what he did and how he pushed the raw experience of localized poetry into a new, much less cautious and deliberate, dimension.  A testimony to his power was that, when I was a first-year English teacher in a Cleveland high school, I was advised not to teach Levy's works in my classroom.  Being banned from formal educational curricula is generally, in my experience, an indication that the subject may actually be valuable.

Levy was born David Allen but, with a young man's enthusiasm and as an homage to e.e. cummings, eventually shortened his name and rendered it in lower case so that, by the mid-60's, he was listed on posters and poetry collections as d.a. levy.  His family were members of the sizable Jewish population that emigrated from Europe during the 1930's and found jobs in the enormous and powerful manufacturing sector of Cleveland.  He was born in 1942, lived throughout the Cleveland area, and unlike other Cleveland poets such as Hart Crane or Langston Hughes, never left.  His overriding desire was to write the great Cleveland poem, much as had been done for Chicago by Carl Sandburg.

He was slight, quiet, and unimposing with an unremarkable voice; often seen in the centers of counter-culture life with those originally labeled "beatniks" and later "hippies".  His first poem to be read by a respectable audience, "Cleveland Undergrounds", sought to capture the dualism of his city.  It is an immature work, and derivative of many of the beat poets of the period, but shows an energy that many found compelling.

Other poems would be printed from 1962 to 1968.  These would not result in any form of mainstream recognition, but Levy would gradually become a legend in the Cleveland sub-culture that found its epicenter in the University Circle/Coventry Road area of the city and in a popular performance space located at the Episcopal cathedral.

[It's interesting that when I think back to my youth, much of the counter-cultural arts scene was introduced through the basement of Trinity Cathedral.  In those days, the Episcopal Church really was on the cutting edge of society, rather than simply believing itself to be.]

He would suffer a different type of recognition, unfortunately.  Disturbed by the movement that was consuming youth culture and creating friction with the political class, Levy and the other "hippies" would come under the aggressive scrutiny of the police, especially as their drug use and promiscuity became known.  Since Levy wrote candidly of the counter-culture experience, used sparing profanity in his art, and was recognized as a spokesman for the artists of his generation, he was targeted by local authorities and twice arrested for obscenity.  As the charges were somewhat vague and clearly designed to harass, nothing much came of them, legally.  However, they did contribute to what many of Levy's friends recognized as a growing mental disturbance.  In 1968, shortly after completing what is considered his most elaborate work, “Suburban Monastery Death Poem,” Levy took his own life.  As he was only 26-years-old, one cannot help but wonder if he would have continued to grow as an artist.

Beyond his poetry, however, Levy made another, and lasting, gift to the Cleveland literary scene. Using an old mimeograph machine, purchased from some school or church, Levy and some of this friends created the primary underground publication of its era, The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle. Beginning in the summer of 1967, its crude, blue print pages presented a collection of local poets who could not find a publisher willing to print the lyrics of hippies.  These poets, The Cleveland Beats, found local notoriety and earned an appreciation that continues to this day.  Without Levy, they would have never been known.

It wasn't simply a forum for poetry, either.  As noted in a magazine profile of Levy from a few years ago:

Paging through issues of the Junkmail Oracle, which levy first published in June 1967, is like paging through levy’s radical, rambling mind. Articles on Buddhism by Allen Ginsberg and Zen author Alan Watts, levy’s own poems and some by Charles Bukowski ran along with his wild collages, which mixed images of Buddha and Hindu gods with cutouts from newspapers, movie ads and skin magazines...When police shut down the bars and cafes at Euclid and East 115th, and fires struck the buildings, levy accused the cops and the University Circle development corporation of destroying the area to create a wall between blacks and whites. (Two parking lots and a McDonald’s sit at the corner today.) Levy also wrote about books, movies and music, even interviewing the Velvet Underground, the legendary art-rockers....

In retrospect, Levy was exactly right about the motivation behind the University Circle development, as it did create a barrier between the cultures that lasts until this day.  The development also, very gradually, destroyed the counter-cultural community through re-zoning, absurd rents, and the harassment from law enforcement.  From the late 1960's through the late 1970's, the clubs where we would play our eccentric music, the coffee houses where we could hear poetry recited, the theater company that produced experimental plays, the small bookstores, even the delicatessen that provided cheap, wholesome food on ample platters, would all evaporate.

However, there is an historic marker acknowledging the existence of the sub-culture and its artists, as if from some exotic, extinct tribe that surrendered to inevitable progress.  So there's that, I suppose.

There is also, like a brooding ghost, an image of Levy that can be spotted to this day on university bulletin boards, dormitory doors, some remaining independent bookstores, and the music clubs that have gradually moved further east and west.  His visage serves as a reminder that, behind the perpetual attempts of the city to be something other than it is, it remains the Jerusalem of the under-appreciated. And that's okay.

A video of Levy reading one of his poems may be found at the Cleveland Memory Project, which is still the most complete depository of his works.  As he was sloppy about seeking copyright protection and tended to release his poems far and wide, all of them are in the public domain.  In fact, most may be found for free on the Internet.

D.A. Levy and the Cleveland Beats

 

“If you want a revolution
grow a new mind
and do it quietly if you can” 

__________________________________________________________________

One never thinks that poetry can lead to martyrdom.

I taught poetry in schools and colleges for nineteen years, here and there.  Sometimes as a full-time faculty member, sometimes as an adjunct, sometimes as a visiting lecturer.  I've come to realize that there are two things about poetry I've always appreciated.  The first, and the most obvious, is that it elevates all elements of a language to art.  Not only through simple rhyming verse, but through tone, the pattern of the syllables, and the manner in which the very pronunciation of the words can create a kind of music without instrumentation.  Poetry delicately enlivens the mind and creates a synaptic theme for appreciating reality anew. [Wow, that last sentence is pure academic gibberish, isn't it?  Or is it poetry?!]

The second reason is more complicated and visceral as it appeals to another portion of my character, I suppose; that which appreciates art that is less...tactile.  For example, in my days as an indifferent and failed New Wave musician, it was "the scene" rather than the music that drew me.  The energy, the raw, undiluted emotion of primal music, the massive expectations and the sheer, wild puissance of the crowd and the band and the immediacy of shared experience. 

The people drawn to music, both musicians and fans, tended towards the fringes of society, either due to their youth or liminal habits or peculiar view of the world.  To be involved in the next, and decidedly non-corporate, development of popular music was intoxicating, especially when it had not even been noticed by the professional sentinels of the media.

Similarly, poetry, too, highlights "the scene".  While I can recognize the stirring themes of Tennyson, absurd world-view of Eliot, the vividity of Shakespeare, or the lyrical wonder of Wordsworth, I can also appreciate what has been offered by poets of, in my opinion, lesser efforts.  While they may have come and gone, or only heard on amateur nights at the corner bar/coffeehouse or at a "slam poetry" experience at a college, they were willing to extend their artistic sense into a verbal medium.

This means there isn't that much of a difference between a musician and a poet.  There are those who prefer to offer the classics, or at least the classical themes, and those who are more experimental. Some become recognized artists whose work is collected and presented to subsequent generations, others offer a more transitional effort that also plays a role in the greater corpus of art.  Both poets and musicians experiment, shove at limits that are artificially imposed, weave new themes and styles into expression, and attract followers who are eager to share in the poet/musician's art.  The life of David Bowie and the life of Lord Byron are not as separated as one might think.  Both, whether consciously or not, make their lives into an art form.

One of those poets of lesser effort but important influence was D.A. Levy, who established a forum and style for a school of verse that became known as The Cleveland Beats [which was also the name of the one of the bands in which I played].  I'm not a big fan of Levy's poetry, but I appreciate what he did and how he pushed the raw experience of localized poetry into a new, much less cautious and deliberate, dimension.  A testimony to his power was that, when I was a first-year English teacher in a Cleveland high school, I was advised not to teach Levy's works in my classroom.  Being banned from formal educational curricula is generally, in my experience, an indication that the subject may actually be valuable.

Levy was born David Allen but, with a young man's enthusiasm and as an homage to e.e. cummings, eventually shortened his name and rendered it in lower case so that, by the mid-60's, he was listed on posters and poetry collections as d.a. levy.  His family were members of the sizable Jewish population that emigrated from Europe during the 1930's and found jobs in the enormous and powerful manufacturing sector of Cleveland.  He was born in 1942, lived throughout the Cleveland area, and unlike other Cleveland poets such as Hart Crane or Langston Hughes, never left.  His overriding desire was to write the great Cleveland poem, much as had been done for Chicago by Carl Sandburg.

He was slight, quiet, and unimposing with an unremarkable voice; often seen in the centers of counter-culture life with those originally labeled "beatniks" and later "hippies".  His first poem to be read by a respectable audience, "Cleveland Undergrounds", sought to capture the dualism of his city.  It is an immature work, and derivative of many of the beat poets of the period, but shows an energy that many found compelling.

Other poems would be printed from 1962 to 1968.  These would not result in any form of mainstream recognition, but Levy would gradually become a legend in the Cleveland sub-culture that found its epicenter in the University Circle/Coventry Road area of the city and in a popular performance space located at the Episcopal cathedral.  [It's interesting that when I think back to my youth, much of the counter-cultural arts scene was introduced through the basement of Trinity Cathedral.  In those days, the Episcopal Church really was on the cutting edge of society, rather than simply believing itself to be.]

He would suffer a different type of recognition, unfortunately.  Disturbed by the movement that was consuming youth culture and creating friction with the political class, Levy and the other "hippies" would come under the aggressive scrutiny of the police, especially as their drug use and promiscuity became known.  Since Levy wrote candidly of the counter-culture experience, used sparing profanity in his art, and was recognized as a spokesman for the artists of his generation, he was targeted by local authorities and twice arrested for obscenity.  As the charges were somewhat vague and clearly designed to harass, nothing much came of them, legally.  However, they did contribute to what many of Levy's friends recognized as a growing mental disturbance.  In 1968, shortly after completing what is considered his most elaborate work, “Suburban Monastery Death Poem,” Levy took his own life.  As he was only 26-years-old, one cannot help but wonder if he would have continued to grow as an artist.

Beyond his poetry, however, Levy made another, and lasting, gift to the Cleveland literary scene. Using an old mimeograph machine, purchased from some school or church, Levy and some of this friends created the primary underground publication of its era, The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle. Beginning in the summer of 1967, its crude, blue print pages presented a collection of local poets who could not find a publisher willing to print the lyrics of hippies.  These poets, The Cleveland Beats, found local notoriety and earned an appreciation that continues to this day.  Without Levy, they would have never been known.

It wasn't simply a forum for poetry, either.  As noted in a magazine profile of Levy from a few years ago:

Paging through issues of the Junkmail Oracle, which levy first published in June 1967, is like paging through levy’s radical, rambling mind. Articles on Buddhism by Allen Ginsberg and Zen author Alan Watts, levy’s own poems and some by Charles Bukowski ran along with his wild collages, which mixed images of Buddha and Hindu gods with cutouts from newspapers, movie ads and skin magazines...When police shut down the bars and cafes at Euclid and East 115th, and fires struck the buildings, levy accused the cops and the University Circle development corporation of destroying the area to create a wall between blacks and whites. (Two parking lots and a McDonald’s sit at the corner today.) Levy also wrote about books, movies and music, even interviewing the Velvet Underground, the legendary art-rockers....

In retrospect, Levy was exactly right about the motivation behind the University Circle development, as it did create a barrier between the cultures that lasts until this day.  The development also, very gradually, destroyed the counter-cultural community through re-zoning, absurd rents, and the harassment from law enforcement.  From the late 1960's through the late 1970's, the clubs where we would play our eccentric music, the coffee houses where we could hear poetry recited, the theater company that produced experimental plays, the small bookstores, even the delicatessen that provided cheap, wholesome food on ample platters, would all evaporate.

However, there is an historic marker acknowledging the existence of the sub-culture and its artists, as if from some exotic, extinct tribe that surrendered to inevitable progress.  So there's that, I suppose.

There is also, like a brooding ghost, an image of Levy that can be spotted to this day on university bulletin boards, dormitory doors, some remaining independent bookstores, and the music clubs that have gradually moved further east and west.  His visage serves as a reminder that, behind the perpetual attempts of the city to be something other than it is, it remains the Jerusalem of the under-appreciated. And that's okay.

A video of Levy reading one of his poems may be found at the Cleveland Memory Project, which is still the most complete depository of his works.  As he was sloppy about seeking copyright protection and tended to release his poems far and wide, all of them are in the public domain.  In fact, most may be found for free on the Internet.