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Notes on Alan Horvath
In July 2008 I got a chance to drive north toward Seattle with several stops along the way, including Crescent City where my younger brother lives. I visited my favorite redwood groves. Then crossing the Columbia River at Portland I found Vancouver, Washington, a village really, suburb of Portland, Oregon, where Alan Horvath lived with his executive of a company wife, Kathy. He received me with enthusiasm, glad that we finally met after some years of correspondence. I knew he had problems with his body's health, and he did not look that well, but stayed cheerful as we spoke about his work of tracking down the work of d.a. levy and republishing it in a series of "random sightings." Kathy had studied opera singing in Europe and I talked her into singing a few bars, and sure enough that kind of music moved us. I could see the art purposes in Alan Horvath's eyes as Kathy grew luminous in her song.
And that is the echo that remains of Alan — the attempt to make the world beautiful, to relay truth and beauty, to add d.a. levy to the world's conversation which needs to hear artists if it plans to live past the fear and chaos of manufactured madness. levy said "I am civilizing Cleveland and his main way was to attack illiteracy of the soul and where it might be located. He took the "third eye" in the forehead as the symbol of its location. Alan knew that souls have no location, except by choice to BE somewhere. Most choose "here." He knew about being able to operate outside the body; his needed dialysis for kidneys and it also gave him vision problems. But that was the body; his own mood and purposes were high.
Because of his work we have several hundred found and collected d.a. levy poems and several The Clevelanders books, and his own poems. In the Seventies while in San Francisco he published mimeographed magazines just as d.a. levy did in Cleveland in the Sixties. A civilization must have art for souls to stay connected with their own native qualities. The creation line — really a communication line — must stay open. Alan Horvath and d.a. levy, Ingrid Swanberg, Joanne Cornelius, Mark Kuhar, Larry Smith, and the other Cleveland poets are the burning edges of this fire.
The body finally evicted Alan Horvath but the beautiful purpose continues. All who knew him and those who knew d.a. levy glow with the same light. Somewhere he is getting ready to operate language and a press — probably the Internet. I slept overnight on the couch and next morning continued to Seattle, then for a hike among clouds on the Hurricane Ridge of the Olympic National Park. Great white spheres ran up slopes on little white ankles.
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