A Day Trip with a Geiger Counter:
Andrew Levy’s Artifice in the Calm Damages and Its Authenticity of Crazed Doctorings
by Kimo RedeR
A skilled dinner-host knows where to seat guests who’ll mutually catalyze one another’s discussions, just as a good museum curator knows how to position artworks that will enhance each other’s object-aura. Andrew Levy’s new volume, Artifice in the Calm Damages (Chax Press, 2021) hosts and curates a transgenerational and intergeneric Feast of Fellows and Gallery of Mirrors, inviting in a vast, luminary roster of characters and using their voices to debate and harmonize as needed.
Mining his own peculiar vein of poetic ore on a frontier where labels like “post- Language” and “pre-Conceptual” lose their adhesiveness, Levy has managed a long and prolific career as an edge-working poet and a committed professor of journalism. The surname “Levy” (from the Hebrew לוי) refers to a “joining”—appropriately there is much bricolage and admixture at play here. “Juxtapositions can speed up our comprehension of change” and indeed the domestic and the far-flung intersect within the fractal geography of this book, while the most primeval of epochs and most futuristic of dytopian days overlap on its atemporal events-calendar.
Levy refers to assemblage as a “put things in front of your attention machine,” a this-benefits-that device that reveals by rearranging. This fondness for montage often plays out in transhistoric scenarios: when Martin Buber is consulted on the construction of an ark, Sun Ra nods in subliminal appreciation from the wings and when Alice Coltrane plucks at her harp, Vaclav Havel, Hélène Cixous, and E.F. Schumacher perk up their ears. Levy’s epigraphs sandwich Chaucer in between MLK and Rosa Luxembourg, but his sense of “Middle English” is more mediumistic and liminal than his medieval forebears.
Many of these poems are dedicated to (and “contested by”) fellow poets and performers, as a constellation of camraderie is spun out of allusion and direct (and occasionally telepathic) address. Without tumbling down the meta- rabbithole, several of these pieces engage with the issue of “the poem” as a grizzled survivor in an ever-more-Darwinian media bioregion. In Levy’s own embattled account, poetry is an engine still worth kicking over and driving into the sociopolitical maelstrom. The temporal milieu here is late-capitalist/early-apocalypse, while the home-court geopolitical coordinates signal New York City as both pandemic epicenter and hub of global privilege.
Levy’s personal and professional lives in lower Manhattan give him some geographic leverage when engaging in the practice of summoning Whitman’s ghost. While these democratic vistas are less sweeping and more shadowed by climate-change, Levy’s political engagements show a bruised bardic exuberance even at their most skeptical. Whitman infamously counterfeited self-reviews (and stuffed a blurb from Emerson onto the spine of Leaves of Grass’ second edition)—Levy forges letters from former U.S. presidents, catalogues book-titles never to be written, and stirs the page into an intertextual stewpot. Where Frank O’Hara’s midtown lunch-break narratives now seem practically sepia-tinged in their urban pastoralism, Levy’s surveys traverse a more haunted and contested New York terrain.
Despite its hard-earned avant pedigree, this book does not engage in some modish assault on the idea of authorial identity (as one title puts it, “Nothing is Free of Presence”). Levy refuses to fully evaporate or ironize his “I,” instead assembling and recording a provisional Self—husband/father, union rep, riverfront flaneur, drummer—wholly aware of the precarious undercarriage of that Self’s mechanism. “The idea of great poetry in the vernacular, the possibility of abandoning nothing” is not some naïve romanticizing of a colloquial tongue, but a “Cervantian” aspiration, a longing to redeem detritus, frame trivia, and revitalize cliché.
Some claim that the most venal of neo-conservatives have been the main recipients of postmodernism’s relativizing, as if Post-Truth politics sprang fully formed from the creases in Jacques Derrida’s handsome Algerian brow, or from a smouldering cauldron in a sub-basement below Lacan’s seminar room. Levy sidesteps such blame-taking and self-flagellating, referring to his ongoing belief in a “Prayer-like subterranean dispatch” and assembling poems capable of radical experiment and humanistic engagement at once.
Levy’s ever-contingent “solution” to the various style-wars of recent decades is a poetry that serves as a media séance, a channeling of sundry spirits: trotting out canards only to impale them, shredding press-releases into confetti and folding hymnals into origami, gargling with the bad-faith rhetoric of current politics and spitting out tongues of flame. A poem is a “smudge of conjunction,” and such smudging is where this writing finds its most febrile energies. This book often feels like a series of guerrilla dispatches from a Reality Studio stormed by a lyric saboteur or a newsfeed derailed by a vandal with access to the Akashic records.
The cover art to this volume features an obliquely rendered depiction of the (justly) infamous and (gratefully) unfinished Mexican Border Wall. Considering the basic function of borders, having this figure wrapped around the contents of this barricade-storming book is self-deprecatingly ironic. Tyrone Williams, in his foreword, calls attention to Artifice in the Calm Damages’ polarity between “just text” and “Justice,” between its verbal frolic and its political rage.
The still-rumbling spirit of free jazz undergirds much of that polarity. The book’s poems often appear as long, unrelieved blocks of print that recall John Coltrane’s sheets-of-sound approach to the saxophone solo, in which each note (or word) gains in intensity from its swarming neighbors’ proximity. Cecil Taylor was said to play the piano like an 88-piece drum kit, and Levy-the-drummer plays percussive havoc on these pages, press-rolling with an ellipsis and cymbal-crashing with an excalamtion mark when the verbal cadences need a percussive supplement.
A poem is most fundamentally and etymologically “something-made,” but these poems are also things-crossbred and things-discovered, swelling the bounds and testing the seam-work of Genre’s slimming corset. Picasso pasted bits of chair-backing and scraps of torn menu to his painterly collages—Levy’s own glue-gun applies subclauses from a CUNY contract, snippets of productively mangled critical theory, oddly minted coinages, picked-up eavesdroppings, and jargons from countless toppled and leaning Babels and “digital Edens.”
A long composite poem titled “Faulty Writing” does not necessarily refer to “faulty” as error-prone but to a text dancing nimbly on the fault-lines where our concepts shift and tectonically readjust. Still, these poems do often seem happiest in their nearness to a pending, productive glitch. Levy quotes Marshall McLuhan’s remark that “there is no inevitabllity,” and every sentence and line here ends someplace very different than its initial approach would “suggest,” except on those rare but fully recognized occasions when a flatly delivered cliché would provide more surprise.
Other poems take flight (or tunnel under) from more whimsical materials. One piece grows like an earwig out of the cracked chrysalis of a misheard Bee Gees lyric while another cops its title from an Eddie Cochran song before warning us of “the reign of an intellectual personality rendered banal,” wedding rockabilly to Hannah Arendt in a single allusive swipe. A poem titled after a John Lennon anthem features a “10 commandments magnetized board,” reducing scripture to commodity and ironically lamenting those moments when we “suffer this monotheistic sunshine” rather than exult in the opportunities for a more inclusive high-tech paganism all around us.
Levy tears up his application for the “Membership in the Masters of the Universe Club” by revealing some of the giddy pleasure that result from mastery forfeited. Still, all too many “malevolent genies are already out of the bottle,” demons that can be only be combatted by the deftest and most tactical of means. Identity Politics occur across demographic and national lines in this writing, but also within the daily, second-to-second formation, retention, and dissolution of a single identity bobbing on the troubled currents of the contemporary data-storm.
An English professor entitling a poem “The Questions You Raise Have Already Been Asked” may sound like vocational weariness, but much of this material interrogates the corporatization of higher learning from a frontline perspective. Levy teaches at a college whose literal foundation was tremored by the 9/11 attacks—a tire from a one of the commandeered jets was recently discovered wedged in a narrow gap between two buildings across the street from his particular CUNY campus. From his crow’s-nest view of the Financial District, Levy experimentally tugs at several loose threads from the fraying “commodity form” of the poem but also engages in a bluntly confrontational verse journalism that often lapses into lists and statistics at its most aggrieved. George Steiner defined an intellectual as someone who reads with a pencil in his hand, and Levy’s most socially engaged labors demonstrate an intense feedback loop between his quotidian intake as a citizen and his output as a writer.
When everyday politics out-surrealizes what passes for “active imagination,” experimental poetry seems as suitable a means of intervention as any. Instead of well-wrought poetic urns with each feature gleaming in absolute symmetry, Levy crafts Swiss Army contraptions with multiple attachments capable of drilling, severing, and reconnecting as the circumstance demands. In terms of format, these works take their metrical and phrasal cues from a wide range of unlikely sources. In one tongue-in-cheek ars poetica, Levy claims the “Reynolds diagram” of starling-flight as a primary “poetic model,” as if the spacing-patterns followed by flocks of birds and schools of fish could be used as strategies for human democracy.
Julie Patton’s back-cover blurb calls attention to the “nesting-dolls” quality to many of these poems, the feeling of a fractal plummeting into onion-layers of cross-reference and half-free association. Much of this is achieved with a “pen dipped in acid,” but an acid that not only corrodes-to-critique but also dissolves-to-liberate. Levy seems to be performing salvage-work at the wreckage-sites of several collapsed “movements” but also scouring the horizon for a new prospect: a poem that can not only (barely) survive as commodity but (more giddily) flourish as organism in the Information Age’s ongoing Reign of Error. If “The first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony migrates/By means of natural selection,” these poems mutate by means of lateral gene transfer and cross-splicing.
An only-apparent oxymoron like “calm damages” suggests the gradually eroding pace of our largest social woes: Levy doesn’t shy away from Prophet of Doom, excoriating-jeremiad mode, using the Book of Proverbs to threaten the wicked with their own eventual rot. Poets shouldn’t “cede the real” –while Verse has never fully enrolled in a coherent school of Realism like its uptown cousin Fiction has, Levy makes sifting the babbling stream of one’s consciousness (in all its pestered, invaded impurity) seem like a Naturalism worth pursuing.
If “Only a debased/Class believes one owns words,” then each of us can partly escape such debasement by understanding how much we “owe” words, and comprehending how those empowering obligations come due at every social turn. In one of this book’s many concocted attibutions, Franz Kline is credited with “Whenever a girl whistles/In a bathing suit, the Virgin Mary cries”--perhaps whenever one of these poems is read, the gatekeepers of artistic monoculture and perpetrators of political trickery should raise a concerned eyebrow or perspire a worried bead of sweat or two.
Mining his own peculiar vein of poetic ore on a frontier where labels like “post- Language” and “pre-Conceptual” lose their adhesiveness, Levy has managed a long and prolific career as an edge-working poet and a committed professor of journalism. The surname “Levy” (from the Hebrew לוי) refers to a “joining”—appropriately there is much bricolage and admixture at play here. “Juxtapositions can speed up our comprehension of change” and indeed the domestic and the far-flung intersect within the fractal geography of this book, while the most primeval of epochs and most futuristic of dytopian days overlap on its atemporal events-calendar.
Levy refers to assemblage as a “put things in front of your attention machine,” a this-benefits-that device that reveals by rearranging. This fondness for montage often plays out in transhistoric scenarios: when Martin Buber is consulted on the construction of an ark, Sun Ra nods in subliminal appreciation from the wings and when Alice Coltrane plucks at her harp, Vaclav Havel, Hélène Cixous, and E.F. Schumacher perk up their ears. Levy’s epigraphs sandwich Chaucer in between MLK and Rosa Luxembourg, but his sense of “Middle English” is more mediumistic and liminal than his medieval forebears.
Many of these poems are dedicated to (and “contested by”) fellow poets and performers, as a constellation of camraderie is spun out of allusion and direct (and occasionally telepathic) address. Without tumbling down the meta- rabbithole, several of these pieces engage with the issue of “the poem” as a grizzled survivor in an ever-more-Darwinian media bioregion. In Levy’s own embattled account, poetry is an engine still worth kicking over and driving into the sociopolitical maelstrom. The temporal milieu here is late-capitalist/early-apocalypse, while the home-court geopolitical coordinates signal New York City as both pandemic epicenter and hub of global privilege.
Levy’s personal and professional lives in lower Manhattan give him some geographic leverage when engaging in the practice of summoning Whitman’s ghost. While these democratic vistas are less sweeping and more shadowed by climate-change, Levy’s political engagements show a bruised bardic exuberance even at their most skeptical. Whitman infamously counterfeited self-reviews (and stuffed a blurb from Emerson onto the spine of Leaves of Grass’ second edition)—Levy forges letters from former U.S. presidents, catalogues book-titles never to be written, and stirs the page into an intertextual stewpot. Where Frank O’Hara’s midtown lunch-break narratives now seem practically sepia-tinged in their urban pastoralism, Levy’s surveys traverse a more haunted and contested New York terrain.
Despite its hard-earned avant pedigree, this book does not engage in some modish assault on the idea of authorial identity (as one title puts it, “Nothing is Free of Presence”). Levy refuses to fully evaporate or ironize his “I,” instead assembling and recording a provisional Self—husband/father, union rep, riverfront flaneur, drummer—wholly aware of the precarious undercarriage of that Self’s mechanism. “The idea of great poetry in the vernacular, the possibility of abandoning nothing” is not some naïve romanticizing of a colloquial tongue, but a “Cervantian” aspiration, a longing to redeem detritus, frame trivia, and revitalize cliché.
Some claim that the most venal of neo-conservatives have been the main recipients of postmodernism’s relativizing, as if Post-Truth politics sprang fully formed from the creases in Jacques Derrida’s handsome Algerian brow, or from a smouldering cauldron in a sub-basement below Lacan’s seminar room. Levy sidesteps such blame-taking and self-flagellating, referring to his ongoing belief in a “Prayer-like subterranean dispatch” and assembling poems capable of radical experiment and humanistic engagement at once.
Levy’s ever-contingent “solution” to the various style-wars of recent decades is a poetry that serves as a media séance, a channeling of sundry spirits: trotting out canards only to impale them, shredding press-releases into confetti and folding hymnals into origami, gargling with the bad-faith rhetoric of current politics and spitting out tongues of flame. A poem is a “smudge of conjunction,” and such smudging is where this writing finds its most febrile energies. This book often feels like a series of guerrilla dispatches from a Reality Studio stormed by a lyric saboteur or a newsfeed derailed by a vandal with access to the Akashic records.
The cover art to this volume features an obliquely rendered depiction of the (justly) infamous and (gratefully) unfinished Mexican Border Wall. Considering the basic function of borders, having this figure wrapped around the contents of this barricade-storming book is self-deprecatingly ironic. Tyrone Williams, in his foreword, calls attention to Artifice in the Calm Damages’ polarity between “just text” and “Justice,” between its verbal frolic and its political rage.
The still-rumbling spirit of free jazz undergirds much of that polarity. The book’s poems often appear as long, unrelieved blocks of print that recall John Coltrane’s sheets-of-sound approach to the saxophone solo, in which each note (or word) gains in intensity from its swarming neighbors’ proximity. Cecil Taylor was said to play the piano like an 88-piece drum kit, and Levy-the-drummer plays percussive havoc on these pages, press-rolling with an ellipsis and cymbal-crashing with an excalamtion mark when the verbal cadences need a percussive supplement.
A poem is most fundamentally and etymologically “something-made,” but these poems are also things-crossbred and things-discovered, swelling the bounds and testing the seam-work of Genre’s slimming corset. Picasso pasted bits of chair-backing and scraps of torn menu to his painterly collages—Levy’s own glue-gun applies subclauses from a CUNY contract, snippets of productively mangled critical theory, oddly minted coinages, picked-up eavesdroppings, and jargons from countless toppled and leaning Babels and “digital Edens.”
A long composite poem titled “Faulty Writing” does not necessarily refer to “faulty” as error-prone but to a text dancing nimbly on the fault-lines where our concepts shift and tectonically readjust. Still, these poems do often seem happiest in their nearness to a pending, productive glitch. Levy quotes Marshall McLuhan’s remark that “there is no inevitabllity,” and every sentence and line here ends someplace very different than its initial approach would “suggest,” except on those rare but fully recognized occasions when a flatly delivered cliché would provide more surprise.
Other poems take flight (or tunnel under) from more whimsical materials. One piece grows like an earwig out of the cracked chrysalis of a misheard Bee Gees lyric while another cops its title from an Eddie Cochran song before warning us of “the reign of an intellectual personality rendered banal,” wedding rockabilly to Hannah Arendt in a single allusive swipe. A poem titled after a John Lennon anthem features a “10 commandments magnetized board,” reducing scripture to commodity and ironically lamenting those moments when we “suffer this monotheistic sunshine” rather than exult in the opportunities for a more inclusive high-tech paganism all around us.
Levy tears up his application for the “Membership in the Masters of the Universe Club” by revealing some of the giddy pleasure that result from mastery forfeited. Still, all too many “malevolent genies are already out of the bottle,” demons that can be only be combatted by the deftest and most tactical of means. Identity Politics occur across demographic and national lines in this writing, but also within the daily, second-to-second formation, retention, and dissolution of a single identity bobbing on the troubled currents of the contemporary data-storm.
An English professor entitling a poem “The Questions You Raise Have Already Been Asked” may sound like vocational weariness, but much of this material interrogates the corporatization of higher learning from a frontline perspective. Levy teaches at a college whose literal foundation was tremored by the 9/11 attacks—a tire from a one of the commandeered jets was recently discovered wedged in a narrow gap between two buildings across the street from his particular CUNY campus. From his crow’s-nest view of the Financial District, Levy experimentally tugs at several loose threads from the fraying “commodity form” of the poem but also engages in a bluntly confrontational verse journalism that often lapses into lists and statistics at its most aggrieved. George Steiner defined an intellectual as someone who reads with a pencil in his hand, and Levy’s most socially engaged labors demonstrate an intense feedback loop between his quotidian intake as a citizen and his output as a writer.
When everyday politics out-surrealizes what passes for “active imagination,” experimental poetry seems as suitable a means of intervention as any. Instead of well-wrought poetic urns with each feature gleaming in absolute symmetry, Levy crafts Swiss Army contraptions with multiple attachments capable of drilling, severing, and reconnecting as the circumstance demands. In terms of format, these works take their metrical and phrasal cues from a wide range of unlikely sources. In one tongue-in-cheek ars poetica, Levy claims the “Reynolds diagram” of starling-flight as a primary “poetic model,” as if the spacing-patterns followed by flocks of birds and schools of fish could be used as strategies for human democracy.
Julie Patton’s back-cover blurb calls attention to the “nesting-dolls” quality to many of these poems, the feeling of a fractal plummeting into onion-layers of cross-reference and half-free association. Much of this is achieved with a “pen dipped in acid,” but an acid that not only corrodes-to-critique but also dissolves-to-liberate. Levy seems to be performing salvage-work at the wreckage-sites of several collapsed “movements” but also scouring the horizon for a new prospect: a poem that can not only (barely) survive as commodity but (more giddily) flourish as organism in the Information Age’s ongoing Reign of Error. If “The first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony migrates/By means of natural selection,” these poems mutate by means of lateral gene transfer and cross-splicing.
An only-apparent oxymoron like “calm damages” suggests the gradually eroding pace of our largest social woes: Levy doesn’t shy away from Prophet of Doom, excoriating-jeremiad mode, using the Book of Proverbs to threaten the wicked with their own eventual rot. Poets shouldn’t “cede the real” –while Verse has never fully enrolled in a coherent school of Realism like its uptown cousin Fiction has, Levy makes sifting the babbling stream of one’s consciousness (in all its pestered, invaded impurity) seem like a Naturalism worth pursuing.
If “Only a debased/Class believes one owns words,” then each of us can partly escape such debasement by understanding how much we “owe” words, and comprehending how those empowering obligations come due at every social turn. In one of this book’s many concocted attibutions, Franz Kline is credited with “Whenever a girl whistles/In a bathing suit, the Virgin Mary cries”--perhaps whenever one of these poems is read, the gatekeepers of artistic monoculture and perpetrators of political trickery should raise a concerned eyebrow or perspire a worried bead of sweat or two.