Brooklyn had Hart Crane. Chicago had Carl Sandburg. Paterson, New Jersey, William Carlos Williams. Cleveland had Darryl Allen Levy. About 5-foot-7 and 120 pounds, Levy was a tiny man with a serious, angular face. He was moody, often sad and quiet. His voice was thin and reedy when he spoke. No one who drove past his slight figure, walking alone across the mile-long bridge, would have guessed his future. No one would have thought that his quiet energy and creativity would soon make him a central figure in Cleveland’s growing counterculture, that the Cleveland police would arrest him for the poems he published and threaten him with years in prison, that his opinions and legal battles would make newspaper headlines, or that readers would still be drawn to him and his poems decades after his death. “I almost hate it here,” the Cleveland poet would write to his friend Russell Salamon while on a trip to New York City years before. “[I] want cuddly sophisticated indifferent Cleveland...