ive been trying to figure out how al first got in touch with me, but i've come up blank... i had been estranged from the community of poets & artists levy left me with in e.cleveland for at least 4 years after a dispute over my participation in the "free clinic," and during most of those years i wasnt even answering mail unless there was a check enclosed ... i also had a reputation for being completely unapproachable, a combination of my paranoia and my feeling betrayed by friends ... i know i had been back in touch with tom, who by then had started a family, shortly after i quit working as a computer jockey at standard oil (now BP), and although i was living a long country block away from jim lowell, im not even sure if i was even printing his catalogs yet at the time... levy had told me it would be 50 years before people ever realized he had been here, and i took him literally... i never expected anyone to really be interested in what we had done in the 60s, so al's intense interest was a curiosity to me ... all i can figure is that he was persistent enough and probably sent me enough money for publications that i consented to having him visit (i've never gone anywhere to meet anyone)... the first day he visited, he told me the story of his unsuccessful attempt to steal ukanhavyrfuckinciti bak from the cleveland public library, and failing that, borrowing a copy from sue betyak, disassembling it, and xeroxing it ... those stories soured me on him immediately; we had put those copies in the libraries to be archived and used there, not to be stolen by some kid for his private collection; i was also upset that he had taken sue's copy and tore it apart; i knew we had used 14 long staples to assemble those, crossed from section to section, and realized there was no way to take a copy apart and return it in decent condition ... now cautious (how might he rip me off?) i nonetheless listened to the rest of his story... he wanted to know all the details of how levy worked and how we interacted, and i explained the details of how lev & i would pass the newspaper out at events to people who'd throw it in the garbage before they left... at a later visit, i decided to run him through a live example, as he indicated there was to be an open poetry reading at the cleveland public library later that week ... i pulled out a few of my 15 boxes of "collected crap", which was accumulated misprinted pages from cleveland & other 60s small presses (i had collected garbage sheets from edelson, blazek, et al) and found maybe 8 to 10 stacks of maybe 50 or 100 identical overrun scrap pages from old publications, and then wrote a brief cover story about what those sheets were, which al & i printed on my recently acquired multilith, and then lined up the stacks on a shelf to collate them into a loose-leaf 10 page publication, stapled on the side ... we then got in my car & drove the 30 miles downtown to the library, where at the first intermission of the reading, handed a copy of this collection to everyone there, then split without further participation, mostly because i was upset that i was recognized ... i think that throwawayhandout has since shown up in the bookstore websites as if it were a publication, titled "words on paper — poetry"... with al's offer of help, i started reprinting a few levy chapbooks which i had first printed in 1968, including a corrected version of the suburban monastery death poem, which we still had the original manuscript to, as the original mimeograph version was full of typos ... eventually i wrote to morris edelson for negatives of the madison collages, and using the solar plate maker which jim lang had built for me, burned plates for that & reprinted the gold foil cover 2nd edition ... i seriously doubt a lot of these books would have been done without al's help, because i really had no motivation of my own to restart my career as a small pressman ... more than once i roped al into garden or other work before we'd even start work on the books, and despite his obvious annoyance, he helped without question ... according to al's own account, i gave him the old mimeo that tom & i had used to print citibak, but i cant remember how that came about; i believe i'd left the mimeo with tom in e cleveland in 1970, & he had given it to vince gagnon, who used it to print at least three books before he was killed in a hit-skip accident in california... so how the mimeo came to be back in my hands is a mystery, maybe tom would know, but i seem to recall hauling it to al's apartment somewhere in or near lakewood (i always get lost west of the cuyahoga) and wrestling it up a set of stairs... initially, i had been printing on a minimal amount of paper i had around for a long time, & then bought more from a paper jobber in solon ... i think it was sandie who saw an ad in the plain dealer for american greeting's leftover paper being sold at a warehouse in downtown cleveland ... i went down there once to look around & they had all kinds of fine colored papers & fancy card stock on shelves & skids on at least a couple floors of a large warehouse building ... there was some printing going on in one room, but the top sheets of paper piles were generally covered with the orange dust from the mills that was ubiquitous in the downtown cleveland area at the time...it was three floors of virtual abandoned paper, to be had for less than cost ... of course, i immediately let tom and al know about it, and to tom's recollection i had driven him there once ... but it was al and myself who made several trips there to pick through the offcuts and exquisite cover stock for what we could use ... at times, the paper was of a size too large for our equipment, so the company running the warehouse allowed us to use their 2 ton paper cutter to chop it to our size ... i have no idea how many trips we made down there to buy paper, but when i finally decided to stop printing altogether in the aughts i still had three carloads of paper left which i passed on to bree @ green panda, and i suspect some of that paper we bought then is still being used today ... anyhow, al started printing little books in the manner that d.a., tom, & myself had before & eventually gathered a "burnt river troupe" of "dead fish poets" around him, including an amazing silkscreen artist in mike schaefer, poets dave pishnery, carol furpahs and several others, and really started producing books in earnest; first were 3 editions of the burnt river primer, including one wrapped into a loose tube, each with a burger king wrapper & rubber band binding; then a couple editions of white heap; one had a razor blade & match glued into each copy ... then the scratch #1 & scratch #2 collections, and finally a real masterful collection from cleveland readings, "cleveland — going home" with an internal "hot fuck" glued in ... he also produced individual chapbooks of his own work, and at least 4 levy collections: tombstone as a lonely charm, barking rabbit, red cat of reason, and a reprint of the praps i series, each with silkscreen print cover art... as part of our interaction through this period, we would exchange bundles of each of the publications that either of us produced; thus we became co-distributors of each others publications... i continued to sell stuff through the mail, and al would sell my books and his on the street and at readings in the akron/kent/cleveland area ... since we were still selling books for 50 cents or a buck at the time, neither of us kept a record, & there was never any accounting for the amounts involved... if im not mistaken, during this time he was working as a draftsman for h.k.ferguson, an engineering, construction & consulting firm located in a downtown cleveland skyscraper ... i believe it was an internal job offer that led to his move to the west coast, i think it was to san francisco/union city first, then to bend, oregon, where he ultimately ended up working for PG&E ... he was a draftsman, but although he'd occasionally send me pictures of utility equipment, i was never quite clear on what he did there, even though our correspondence continued unabated ... the poetry scene he had put together in cleveland seemed to fall apart without his presence; although i saw work by dave pishnery off al's press at a later date, i never heard of where the rest of them went ... im not sure when he started reprinting levy's work again, but i know i was kept up to date on the progress of each of the earliest publications he put together after settling in vancouver ... he was always turning up levy work that i'd never seen, quite a surprise to me since lev gave me the impression that he'd given me a copy of everything he wrote for the citibak mss ... al also seemed to be able to find every book review or review of levy material that was printed anywhere; i must have been getting dozens every year, xerox copies of little mags & the like ... typically i would get an envelope a week to read, answer questions about, or otherwise provide an opinion on whether some obscure work reputed to be levy's was legitimate or not ... typically, i'd make my comments in the margins, make xerox copies, and send the materials back to him within a day or two, & recalling that, it must mean i have copies of all those materials around here someplace ... after i die, & if there's still interest, someone should come & get all this stuff ... it aint gonna happen while im alive, i aint got enough historian in me to dig it all out ... the last time i saw al was in October of 2000; he had come back into cleveland and wanted to meet with tom, jim lowell & myself to discuss some of levy's work that he was unclear on ... it was late october, and al arranged to pick up tom and drive him to the asphodel, where i would meet them and jim lowell ... turned out, we had a freak early snowfall of a couple inches that day, and as my condition was already deteriorating, i was reluctant to go out ... i tried to call lowells a few times to cancel, and getting no answer, finally got in the car & drove the couple miles down there ... its hard for me to believe now, but i was in such bad shape already that tessa had to help me up their stairs ... my recollection of the discussion is fleeting, but fortunately jim lowell was able to answer most of the questions al wanted answered...it struck me odd that this guy i had known as something of a street poet was now carrying a large briefcase full of levy materials and, in contrast to my condition, seemed to have all his ducks in a row about what he was doing ... i've lost a lot of my memory of the early part of the past decade, and although i'm certain that al & i stayed in touch about the levy bibliography, i not sure i was very helpful in my deteriorating condition ... fortunately, he had kent taylor, levy's best friend in the early 60s, to work with him on that, cause i wouldnt have been much help ... and although his magnum opus, the levy bibliography, was released while i was hospitalized, i dont recall seeing a copy of it until i was released from the re-hab facility ... while i was regaining my health, i could tell by his correspondence that al was slowly losing his; — i recall him sending me a real estate ad of a rundown one bedroom home in portland selling for $900,000; in return, i sent him an ad of a youngstown mansion in good shape selling for $40,000 ... he was writing me of difficulties walking, operations on his eye to clear his vision, & sent me pictures of his arm cut for dialysis and pictures of medicines stacked on the table by his bedside ... i probably even have some of his used needles and other medical paraphernalia in a correspondence pile around here (this may seem odd, but it's the extreme art way we knew it — i once sent him 9 bloody paper towels shrink-sealed in cellophane as a concrete poem, which i believe is now housed at the SUNY Buffalo library) ... most of what he sent in those last years were articles on politics, censorship or beekeeping, or cartoons out of the local portland newspaper ...   Return to Index for Alan Horvath Memorial Return to Light and Dust Anthology