Mail from d.a.levy was never simply mail. Frugal, busy, impoverished, generous,
and concise as he was, the letters were usually brief, and typed on a sheet of
letterhead size paper which he'd torn in half so the remainder could be used for
something else. Even had he not been a stamp collector at one time, he probably
would have recycled stamps, gluing used stamps that had escaped cancellation
onto the envelope with what seemed to be rubber cement. The envelope, large or
small, usually included some sort of publication - often his own, but at times a
magazine or book published by someone else. His immediate mission seemed
proselytization: he thought he knew what you needed and part of his job was to
share his enthusiasms and convictions about poetry and other arts. You could see
the extras in the envelopes as postal variants on the publications he hawked on the
street, often giving them free to people he thought needed them. He also donated
some of what he read to local libraries. Immediately before his death, he sent out
packages to his friends and correspondents. Many contained books. Some
contained sheaves of images he had clipped out of glossy mainstream magazines
to use in collages, perhaps hoping, as he did with the books and magazines, that
the recipients would make active use of them in their own work.
In the autumn of 1967 (if my memory reconstruction is accurate), I received a
letter from him with copies of Le lettrisme, the official magazine of the
French Lettrist group, folded up and inserted along with the torn sheet on which
he'd typed his message. I don't recall him mentioning why he included the
magazines. He might simply have done so because I was studying French lit at
school. His reading in French poetry, philosophy, and theater was extensive,
though apparently done in English translation. He may have received the
magazines in exchange for publications he'd sent to French poets. The Lettrist
magazines were, at that time, rather crudely produced, and were more concerned
with film, sound poetry, and socio-political commentary than the visual poetry the
group would later be more strongly identified with, though levy may have thought
that the graphic nature of some pages related to my visual poetry. In retrospect, the
most unusual, and the most meaningful aspect of this mail was that Lettrism was
scarcely known in the U.S. at the time. The majority of the Americans who ran
under the banner of "concrete" poetry, even before the Emmett Williams
anthology had reduced the genre to the brittle minimalism that the overwhelming
majority of readers would overwhelmingly reject as underwhelmingly trivial, were
not looking toward Lettrism for inspiration. It is possible that levy was seriously
interested in Lettrism; yet it seems more likely that hints at Lettrist tropes in some
of his own poems came not directly from the French group, but from the European
and Latin American poets who picked up ideas from the Lettrists. The Lettrist
magazines levy sent not only introduced me to Lettrism, they gave me a glimpse
into the huge net of levy's correspondences and his attempts at finding out
everything that might be relevant and useful to him.
In the spring of the next year, a Lettrist splinter group, the Situationists, would be
a driving force for what came to be called "the student revolt" in France. The
events of the Paris Spring included the largest wildcat strike in history — over 11
million workers in a country of 55 million walked off their jobs, many to set up
barricades in streets and roads throughout France. Since this was also the largest
decentralized revolt in history, the press and the powers that were found it
incomprehensible, and had to identify it with something they could grasp. The
media successfully made the exceedingly loose coalition of everything from
teamsters' unions to eccentric philosophers fit the stereotypes of student
demonstrations happening throughout the world at the time. The Situationists
provided a vocabulary and some root ideas to a disorganized conjunction of socio-
political optimism and revulsion against the De Gaul administration, but nobody
was really in control of anything. That the Communist Party played the decisive
role in making deals with the government that returned the country to conservative
normalcy shows just how uneasy a decentralized revolution could make those on
both ends of the political spectrum, including those who previously seemed most
radical. As a student myself, I was more than happy to believe the media
deception of students taking over the country. Of the many oddities of the May
revolt of 1968, one of the strangest was that a seemingly tight-knit cadre of
æsthetes had come closer to bringing about political change (albeit in conjunction
with an odd spectrum of non-artistic groups) than any of the more somber and
dedicated revolutionary art movements of the century. For serious students of left-
wing politics, the rapid dissolution of the revolt may seem a lesson in the inability
of decentralism to succeed in maintaining a victory, even one that briefly went
beyond anybody's wildest dreams. Another political aspect of the uprising didn't
fully reveal itself for several decades. Revolutionaries from France, including
Situationist silkscreen artists, went to Mexico City to try to assist in related
demonstrations at the Olympics in October of 1968. The massacre of
demonstrators at this event was the bloodiest of the era. The official body count
was 300 dead, though most sources claim that's a laughable underestimate. Many
who took part in the protests would reemerge as more violent activists throughout
Latin America, particularly in the attempts at revolution in Central America in the
1980s.
For me personally, a curious and fruitful chain of events started with the copies of
Le lettrisme I received from levy. In 1997, 30 years later, with the cooperation of
David Seaman and Alain Satié, I set up the Lettrist movement's first official,
consecrated web site. As a participant in the mimeo revolution of the 1960s, the
opening of the web in the 1990s seemed like a return to the days of cranking
publications out on mimeo machines. My site remained Lettrism's official
electronic manifestation until November, 2004. In addition to the world's response
to the U.S. election results, it was long past time for the official site to come from
France, which was, after all, the movement's home. The Lettrists have not asked
me to take down my Lettrist site, and as I write, it is undergoing an overhaul and
expansion with their cooperation and encouragement, but the days of it being the
main Lettrist site are over. Still, one of the proudest feathers in my web master's
cap was that this quintessentially Parisian movement should have its web site
emanate from a small apartment and student grade equipment in the great French
metropolis of Kenosha, Wisconsin.
*
Simply passing art or poetry through the mail is most emphatically not
classic mail art. Definitions of mail art may be as numerous as its
practitioners, but all have one thing in common: to make use of the postal
system or of characteristics of items sent through the mail in a specific
manner that could not be achieved otherwise. As the movement grew, it took
on several broad characteristics. The most forceful was the adamant,
committed, and at times vehement or liberatory rejection of all
forms of commercialism, censorship, and hierarchies.
levy at times seems to have worked in the mail art genre proper, though this may
be deceptive. Are the books, which also resemble what later came to be called
book art, which he exchanged with Ian Hamilton Finlay part of either genre?
Whether they were or not, it's unquestionable that he and other people were
creating networks through the mail, and that in his case, given his painfully short
creative life, that his networks were immense and eclectic. It's difficult to know
whether mail art as a genre might have taken on a different character under
slightly different circumstances.
It's equally unquestionable that whether individual works that passed through the
network should be considered mail art or not, the network was the main
distribution system for visual poetry in the U.S. between the time the
Concrete Poetry fad collapsed under it trivial weight and the world wide web
gave the union of word and image a new chance at being seen outside the
network. Whether you'd like to see the politics of the late 1960s as heroic
or stale, we are now in the midst of a revolution in communication, based
on the interaction of word and image, universal participation, and immense,
global networks. Visual poets have ceased to be the Haitian Boat People of
American poetry, and the genre seems to be the fastest growing on the
literary scene today. How long that will continue and how it might change
over time is impossible to say. It is, however, difficult to imagine a
return to the complete exclusion of visual poetry from serious consideration
between the early 1970s and the beginning of the new millennium,
or the complete collapse of artistic networks which mail art
foreshadowed.
