The Clevelanders

by Kirpan Press. 48 pages. Kirpan Press, PO Box 2943 Vancouver WA

Book Review by Michael Basinski

A. Horvath, publisher for more than 35 years, has got it in his blood. It is his blood. He has hear here with heart pumping wildly assembled The Clevelanders being James R. Lowell, d.a. levy, rjs, Geoffrey Cook, Kent Taylor and Tom Kryss. Those who were there then, when it was born, a poetry that belonged to all people. They were there, like the Three Kings and the shepherds. Now when you think of the history, when you study the history that is of what is THE HOLD today, a first major manifestation of that power, that sociology off the island of Manhattan, below the towers of the academy, away from that peninsula called San F., first came bursting up in Cleveland like volcanoes of marching to sneakers on concrete and tuba notes of the French Revolution. I think Rimbaud was there. I think Bakunin was there. What a place of the Gods! What a time of endless spring! The 1960s and the burgeoning of the small press, the radical press, the revolutionary press, the press in opposition to the corporate and against the poetry of poodles and rich kids. I am with you in Cleveland. Holy, holy, holy, holy. It is so comfortable and proper and correct to have the senior members of this small press world of ours so cherished in this beautiful book by Alan Horvath, which features the not enough published words of James Lowell (Asphodel bookshop) and his work in this book called Letter to Margaret Randall frames the era when poetry was busted, not ignored and poets were in fact still dangerous (not to each other -as we slash and burn each other with tired gossip, but dangerous to government and police and the right-wing!). Bush you wouldn’t last a minute! And d. a. levy collages here and collages of Kent Taylor harvesting of popular culture and juxtapositioning with cartoon and those of rjs, which are then poems more mod contemporary for their proposal of multiple entry points and the reading of vis-pictures in the context of poem (word and visual are equal in them) and the poems of Cook, Taylor and Kryss breaking the sleeping stone with dinosaur poem fire power. Here the pure pleasure of the roots of the great tree. Here that rain beating in time on tin roofs and in gutters feeding those wells from which we still drink and gorge. Here we become intoxicated the sheer force of poetry and poems from the pure place of poetry and poems. Poems, yes poems, poems without the shit!