The central figure in Cleveland’s growing counterculture/underground poetry scene in the early 1960s was a young man named Darryl Allen Levy (he used the pen name d.a.levy). Levy wanted to write the epic Cleveland poem to give his home city what it lacked: great poems about itself. In 1964-1965, he wrote Cleveland Undercovers, a wild, surreal, sometimes profane travelogue that runs from Short Vincent Street to Karamu House, Public Square to the Bay Village police station, and which is packed with allusions to Cleveland’s history.

This exhibit draws on the rich 20th century poetry holdings in Special Collections & Archives to provide a glimpse of Levy’s work, along with that of some of his contemporaries and followers, all part of the Cleveland poetry scene during this period. (Curated by Kathleen Siebert Medicus and Abby Fife)