stopped by the book collector - richard & rachel hansen's book store - after work. richard is probably one of the nicest guys in the world of poetry publishing. a genuine adept of diy work ethic. i've become a virtual - literally - hermit since the birth of nicholas so i see richard only once every several months. a shame since the hombre knows poetry, politics, bad movies and more and wears his learning lightly.

richard's specialty is the mimeo-era poets. we started talking about d.a. levy, and when i mentioned that i had read on alex gildzen's blog that russell salomen reprinted levy's ukanhavyrfuckincitibak recently, he said, oh yes and pulled a couple of copies from underneath a stack.

my mouth dropped and what i could mutter was, how much. the price is cheap, 10 bucks. i've been holding it in my hands and dipping into it all night. it sits beside me as i type.

what i told richard is that somehow as i get older i seem to be regressing. when i 1st got smitten with poetry my heroes were berryman, lowell, dylan thomas and hart crane. guys who were essentially high moderns. the influence of levy was there, but i was a bit of a snob and a few of the poets i knew at the time were levy acolytes. i was not, and so i sneered at them. that was writing?

it wasn't till later that i rediscovered the mimeo-era poets and caught on to what they were doing. so much like punk rock. just pick up a pen or typewriter and go! don't bother with waiting for publishers to discover yr work, so print and distribute yr poems yrself. there is also a beauty in the anarchic spirit of bad spelling and horrible typography found in the texts. and there is a lot of concrete work. levy i think excelled at it, and i believe that was his strongest form of writing.

there is a lot to be found in levy, and other mimeo-era writers, that can nourish poets now. at least they do for this newly 40-something punk who wanted to be a high modern at 20. levy set an example for anarchic diy writing, that also was joyous in the best of his work. there is a kind of sublimity by writing fuck you to the MAN.

even a kind of divinity. not the sort conjured by many of levy admirers, that sort of 'saintly mad' cliche is not what i mean. the kind of divinity i'm talking about is the sort villon knew after a night in the tavern, with his fingers cracked and bleeding from the cold as he writes furiously before the candle sputters out to the vast blackness of night each of us face on our own.