If you happen to be in Seattle
this is Rob's show (as mentioned in
The Journal of The Mermaid Translation #1,#2).
Listen closely to the filing cabinets
and hear the novel murmuring.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Saturday, February 5, 2011
d.a. levy in A Certain Strange Memory
During the writing of an essay on Cleveland poet d.a. levy (which appeared in d.a. levy & the mimeograph
revolution, Bottom Dog Press, 2007), a certain strange
memory came my way. On the Mother’s Day of 1967,
a benefit was held in Cleveland to raise money for levy’s
defense fund. Allen Ginsberg was a featured attraction
there, but could another star on the American scene
just as busy and planted in print as Ginsberg have
come to Ohio without a word?
“naturally I became interested in the intellectual type”
Larry Smith, Ohio poet and publisher relates:
"The story I heard about 8 years ago involved the
legal aid fund for levy...It was told to me by Dinsmoor
Wheeler, friend of James Lowell and the arts.
According to Dinsmoor, Jayne Mansfield came into
town for the defense fund reading...She did it as a
special thing for free speech." Further, "I once sat
with Dinsmoor Wheeler when he was in his 80's
and living at his family home in Milan, Ohio.
He was very cordial as we sat in his living room
with loads of wonderful old books on the shelf.
He told of starting the first foreign film series
in Cleveland, together with bookseller James
Lowell and others. They often were attacked by
censors. Then he recalled a time when Jayne
Mansfield came to town to speak for d.a. levy
and James Lowell's Defense Fund...He said
he drove out to the airport to pick up Jayne
Mansfield as part of the May 14th program.
He said he enjoyed the ride and that she was
a very bright person, unlike her film persona.
That's what I remember." (1)
Like Allen Ginsberg, Jayne Mansfield was
in the midst of a busy Spring tour that scheduled
her in Britain and Ireland. From her arrival in
England her troubles with authorities began.
Smuggling Chihuahuas was just the beginning.
Lasting only weeks overseas, on May 14th,
Mothers’ Day, aghast Roman Catholics
terminated her tour in Tralee.
So the question is, could she suddenly,
clandestinely, have flown back to the States,
to Cleveland, to witness the benefit for an
underground poet?
And why would she?
“naturally I became interested in the intellectual type” Hunter? (1957)
Since d.a levy’s secret indictment by jury in
In 1963, the album Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky
and Me was recorded. Jayne Mansfield purrs over
her favorite poems and sonnets with lush
accompaniment. Her material includes selections
from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Percy Shelley,
Marlowe, Yeats, Wordsworth and Tennyson as
well as Shakespeare and others. She had followed
in the footsteps of Dylan Thomas and
Caedmon Records.
So with an interest in poetry, and always
an eye on the papers, Mansfield would have read
about Allen Ginsberg. She would have taken
notice when Ginsberg praised harassed poet
d.a. levy, commending his poetry, “It has obvious
literary intent. I dig his poetry. He is learned
and sincere, but he is being made to suffer in
the classic American way.” (2)
Since d.a levy’s secret indictment by jury in December 1966, on charges of filth and obscenity,
levy had been victimized for his poetic vision.
There was police seizure of his mimeograph and
writings, an arrest, trial, jail and release on bail,
then a second arrest in March 1967 along with
Jim Lowell, owner of the Asphodel Bookshop.
Allen Ginsberg had been through similar
treatment with his Howl in 1957.
He arrived in Cleveland to lend his support.
The story would have been familiar to Jayne
The story would have been familiar to Jayne Mansfield. But would she have stormed across
the sea for poetry? Why would she call Dinsmoor
Wheeler anyway? Secrecy? Was he her connection
to the underground? Was she afraid of attracting
attention traveling by cab? Did she hide in some
phone booth for him to arrive? And what if
Dinsmoor Wheeler was mistaken? (Nervous
looks at a movie-star.) What if it wasn’t
Jayne Mansfield? Could she have been
another Hollywood bombshell, incognito,
a substitute, with enough resemblance to
Jayne Mansfield to pass as her?
If she wasn’t Jayne Mansfield, she could
If she wasn’t Jayne Mansfield, she could have been Mamie Van Doren. She was in America
at the time, filmingVoyage to the Planet of
Prehistoric Women. And she knew about the
Beat movement, even if cartoonishly, she had
been featured in the 1959 exploitation film
The Beat Generation. (3) She was also a friend
of Jayne Mansfield who could double for her.
Mamie Van Doren’s autobiography provides
more:
“In the summer of 1967…I was again booked
to do Gentlemen Prefer Blondes…Afterward I was
scheduled for a ten-day engagement in Biloxi,
Mississippi…I was due in Biloxi in July, but a
complication arose…I was afraid I would have
to return the money…Fortunately, Bill Loeb
was able to schedule Jayne Mansfield to take
my place, and reschedule me for later in the
summer…now they were getting Jayne
Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren the same
summer.” (4)
But it wouldn’t happen that way, try as
she might to imagine it. Both these women
appearing on the stage in a play production
of a film forever identified with Marilyn
Monroe…It could only have been written
that way.
Mamie Van Doren continued, “Jayne’s
death sharply brought home the many
connections in the lives of Marilyn, Jayne
Mansfield, and me, the three M’s. We had
become identified with an era because we
made more movies and lived more flamboyant
lives than many of the rest. They were
connections that I’d tried to push out of my
mind at the time of Marilyn’s death.
I continued to ignore them even more
when I made The Las Vegas Hillbillys
with Jayne Mansfield because I found it
a constant reminder of how we seemed
to be running out of time.” (5)
Jayne Mansfield felt that too. Her last
television appearance was to become
apocryphal. On June 19, 1967, a month after
levy’s benefit and ten days before she would
die, she was a guest on The Joey Bishop
Show where she read poetry, Robert
Herrick’s ‘To The Virgins, To Make Much
of Time’ which begins famously:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
“There is a history of calamitous and
violent deaths among the glamour girls that
boggles the mind and chills the blood,” Mamie
Van Doren writes, “If you make your living
being beautiful, you’ve got to be willing to
pay that price. You must realize that there
is also something deep inside that is as
beautiful as the outside; and that the
beauty inside will neverchange for as
long as you live.” (6)
This was the same realization that levy
points out in his Buddhist Oracle, that
ultimately: “the greatest revolutionary
‘game’ is learning to live with, survive for,
& love yourself and then to really
know – you are other people.” (7)
Like the collage artwork levy had been creating for the Cleveland underground press,
where he joined erotic imagery with Buddhist
iconography to create a revolutionary picture,
levy went beyond the surface level to draw on
that power of the Hollywood Bombshell for
his writing. This would become especially
clear in his two short stories The Beginning
of Sunny Dawn and Red Lady. (8)
“I played games in the sun,” Marilyn Monroe
“I played games in the sun,” Marilyn Monroe writes in My Story. “I daydreamed chiefly about
beauty. I dreamed of myself becoming so
beautiful that people would turn to look at
me when I passed. And I dreamed of
Like Marilyn Monroe, “there was almost
no one alive to teach her how to wait or what
it meant if she saw the sunlight of herself.”
When Marilyn Monroe took acting lessons,
her teacher realized, “You are a young
woman who gives off sex vibrations—no
matter what you are doing or thinking.”
So, “I realized that just as I had once fought
to get into the movies and become an actress,
I would now have to fight to become myself
and to be able to use my talents.” (10)
(written with slide show images of William
Burroughs, Charlie Chaplin, J. Edgar Hoover,
flashcards, film clips and ads for bird seed,
like one of those experimental films levy
would watch every Saturday midnight at
the Continental Theatre on Euclid Avenue).
Time moves her from fairy tale to modern
drive-in screen, “but she wanted something
else, not to just get laid, she wanted
something else,/hungry ghosts in the
shadows of her brain…Red Lady said
within her ‘i am going’” like Sunny Dawn
beyond and in the morning when she is
gone, “there were rumors of a woman who
changed shapes in the darkness and
whispered light in sleeping ears, a
woman who left one thinking of the sun.”
What comes to light will happen: “She
knew she was forever & the day would come
when the others would understand her ways
and leave her alone to fulfill her own destiny.
(crowds of people shouting before giant
posters of jean harlow, marilyn Monroe,
jane mansfield, jane fonda & faye dunaway
—they are firing guns in the air & scream-
ing FREEDOM NOW)”
Jayne Mansfield was included in his vision
of revolution, but if she came to Cleveland to
join him, it would have been done in the
underground, the war was on, and bombshells
and burning poets don’t last long.
Anyway, on Mother’s Day, the benefit
really did happen, Allen Ginsberg was there,
newspaper records were left behind. 600 people
watched from the crowd. It’s hard to imagine
that Jayne Mansfield could have been there
secretly (in sunglasses, hair under kerchief,
made shadowy in long black coat) when
everywhere she went she was falling out of
pink, photos flashing. All we have of her
there is a memory in a car.
In a 2006 phone conversation with
Continental Theatre manager George
Fitzpatrick, I asked about Jayne Mansfield.
He confirmed, “She was in Cleveland in
Summer 1963 or 1964. She was pregnant
at the time and she came to the theatre in
full length pink mink coat.” But he assured
me the rumor of her appearing at the 1967
benefit never happened, and, “I don’t know
how these stories get started.” (11)
Footnotes:
1) Letter from Larry Smith, May 18, 2006, used with permission
2) Cleveland Press, April 12, 1967
3) In a 1993 episode of L.A Law entitled “Rhyme & Punishment,” Mamie Van Doren read from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” while Jayne Mansfield’s daughter Mariska Hargitay can currently be seen on television’s Law and Order
4) Playing the Field: My Story; Mamie Van Doren; G P Putnam’s Sons; New York; 1987; p.226
5) Ibid; p.227
6) Ibid; p.231-32
7) The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle; Volume 2 #3; August-Sept 1968
8) I couldn’t have written about d.a. levy without the help of his friend, Tom Kryss. He provided me with the 1969 Open Skull Press Edition of The Beginning of Sunny Dawn & Red Lady with the note:
“This was the first printing of “Red Lady,” but the second appearance of “Sunny Dawn,” which was first published by levy in Cleveland, March, 1968, under the Ghostflower Press imprint…I do believe the “Sunny Dawn” story was written before “Red Lady” but not by more than a few months, and in both cases the stories seemed to have gone into print shortly after they were written…Neither story, to the best of my knowledge, has appeared in print since 1970. Just a hunch—“Red Lady” always strikes me as something he brought back in his head from Madison, Wisconsin, and I suspect someone he met there lies at the core.”
**Letter from Tom Kryss to author, May 25, 2006
9) My Story; Marilyn Monroe; Cooper Square Press; New York, New York; 1974/2000; p.19
10) Ibid; p.135
11) Author’s phone call conversation with George Fitzpatrick conducted 4:35 PM, June 14, 2006.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Animals, Ghosts & Outer Space
Deer Poem #1
Deer Poem #2
Deer Poem #3
This Halloween
The Old House
The Astronomer
Deer Poem #4
Nothingness
32nd & Seagull
Who Wouldn’t Want A Gorilla Mask?
Raking Leaves
The Lepidopterist
Deer Poem #5
Short Wave Radio
Salmon Candles
The Mechanic
The Brooklyn Deer
The ½ Creature
The Gardenia
December Sun
The Peach Can
Deer Poem #1
Spied a deer
across the ditch
behind the branches
in someone’s yard
just standing there
When they freeze
they go back
hundreds of years
you can almost
watch them disappear
Through this century
the walls we put up
the motorized age
our time is temporary
The deer fade
further and further
to a place where
they know
we don’t remember
Deer Poem #2
Walking along
the museum of 7 AM
a deer painting
in the trees
above the wall
Deer Poem #3
The second day
noticing the deer
in the corner
Their yard is calm
He waits for
houselights to go on
This Halloween
I knocked on our window
with a ghost on a stick
Rustle met me at the door
laughing, looking to see what
I held behind my back
The Old House
It’s been repainted
dark gray, not green anymore.
The lights are on as we go past
there’s still a pumpkin on the steps,
someone else lives there now.
The Astronomer
The only time he phoned her
it was a comedy nightmare.
Loving her wasn’t meant to be
but that truth was never clear
like a song by the Clovers
until one day after school
when he spotted her sister.
She missed the bus.
He went over to her,
and offered a ride.
His mother drove them.
By the time they got to her house
it was obvious. She was the one
he would climb a ladder for
and throw a rope around the moon.
Deer Poem #4
Before I got there
I was thinking I’d like
to bring a present.
What would a deer want?
I could bring an apple
but they already have
their share off the trees.
Maybe a tangerine, or
some supermarket fruit
flown here from overseas?
One taste of that and
he would never forget.
For the rest of his life
that deer would be looking
for another pineapple.
Nothingness
Where the road valleys out
with the little pond on the right
and the cluster of houses on the left
there’s a fog laying down like a blanket
I wonder if there’s some bird
a stork or heron that gathers
the early morning mist and
twigs it together into a big nest
I was so intent walking into it
trying to see if I could tell
I was in nothingness
where cars disappear
and people wander aimlessly
32nd & Seagull
Along 32nd Street
there’s a little house
sometimes with a seagull
standing on the rooftop.
When it’s there it makes noise
turning and shaking its wings out.
Sometimes another gull appears.
I only see these things if I’m out
walking the dog, or going to the store.
With the whole town to nest on,
it’s odd for a bird to choose there.
There’s nothing about the place
to notice. Sometimes I forget
which house has the seagull on it.
One day as I walked past
a man was kneeling on the sidewalk.
He was digging dandelions.
I stopped and said hello.
He looked up and cupped his ear
as I asked, “What’s the story with
that seagull on top of your house?”
He didn’t mind telling me,
“It started showing up three years ago.”
“Do you feed it anything?”
I pictured him throwing fish up there.
At my bus stop once I saw a woman
wearing a bright pink bathrobe
tossing bread on the roof of her house.
Seagulls and crows were perched
all around, waiting for her to leave.
“No,” he said. “He just likes it here.”
Who Wouldn’t Want
A Gorilla Mask?
One warm summer evening in Ohio
I was at Goodwill and saw a gorilla mask.
I didn’t have any money on me,
I was wearing a tourist costume
shorts and a t-shirt
but I thought I could return
in the morning to buy it.
So I stepped back into the crickets
and twilight, thinking of all the things
I could do with that gorilla mask.
It never occurred to me there was
someone else, someone with $5
entering the store at that moment.
As I was crossing the wide parking lot
walking in the weeds next to the road
someone was pulling that mask down
off the wall and holding it like a flower.
Raking Leaves
maple, alder
oak, poplar
and a red
soy sauce packet
someone dropped
The Lepidopterist
When he went to work
he would leave his wife
notes in the kitchen
he would long to stay
in their warm bed
but he would go
into a cold new day
without her.
Over the years
his letters dried
into things like grocery lists
or simplicities, reminders
like where are the keys?
things that said so much
like the car needs gas.
Deer Poem #5
I told Rustle about the deer and asked,
“What do you think he’s doing in their yard?”
as we passed that spot in our car.
Rustle said, “He’s a spy deer.
He spies on whatever goes by.”
Of course. I never considered
I’m not the only one watching
he’s wearing the slouch hat and raincoat
disguised, taking notes and melting back
into the forest to report on us.
As if to lend truth to this 6 year olds’ theory,
I haven’t seen the deer since then,
his cover is blown.
Short Wave Radio
A rusted box
full of hum
and orange light
bringing him
the world
at night
Salmon Candles
They are timing out
to the last sway
intent on the current
pointed upstream, knowing
the place they are going
their death shows
on fins and blotched
along their skin
white growing on them
in patches the way age
grows on us too
turned into ghosts
tossed out on the stones
along the curb of creek
even from a distance
up on the bluff
looking down the cliff
through the layers of trees
you can see the flow
the salmon shipwrecked
like pale yellow candles
waiting for nighttime
to glow in the dark
The Mechanic
Seeing everything
belonging to something
larger, connection to
a thing that will work
The Brooklyn Deer
Once upon a Brooklyn
we found a deer head
propped on the street.
Of course we carried it
down stairs into the station.
It was between trains
we climbed the wall and
stuck it in the rafters.
Glassy eyes watching
from the shadows
window lights flickering
the people come and go
from the city to the city.
It was a good hiding place
lasting there several days
until someone spotted it
or maybe it took
the subway home.
The ½ Creature
It was prairie, all yellow colors.
The highway exits onto a road
that turns into dirt that leads
to a gas station.
We were on the way
back from Ohio.
I got out of the cab.
It was cold and quiet
except for the rush of traffic
on the interstate beyond.
Inside the store I paid
for a full tank and also
bought a refrigerator magnet,
a jackelope, that creature
native to this land
half rabbit/half antelope.
Carrying it, staring at it,
I half believe it’s real.
The Gardenia
Yes, of course she looks
like a knockout in her green
and white caped uniform
but she sticks to the little yard
she tends growing vegetables
and some flowers. “What about
all the crime out there?” I ask her.
We were sharing tea on the porch
the sun was climbing gently down
the branches of the apple tree.
She made a kind of flat tire sound
and smiled, her hands tipped
the way they talk in Italy.
December Sun
listening
ice is melting
off the white
alder trees
tapping onto
blackberry leaves
The Peach Can
filled up
outside with
three day’s ice
riding in it
overnight
it turns to water
waiting for winter
to be over
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