I found you on Google. This is Russell Salamon in person on June 9, 2006. I live in North Hollywood which is part of Los Angeles. I have a book of poems, Woodsmoke and Green Tea, freshly published by Mark Kuhar of deep cleveland press You can see it on his web site: deepcleveland.com. I have written more than eleven books of poetry along with Descent into Cleveland, a poetic novel, which has to do with events in Cleveland, Ohio during the sixties. One of the three major characters is d.a. levy who was my roommate for almost a year. I let him stay rent-free while he worked at a mad rate, printing, publishing, writing, painting. These are described in Descent into Cleveland. I was born in the former Yugoslavia on December 6, 1941 and came to Kent, Ohio in October 1953. Soon after, my family moved to Cleveland. I went to Benedictine High School and graduated in 1959, then I attended Fenn College (which became Cleveland State University in 1965) where I became interested in the writing of poetry with the help of Lewis Turco who, with Dave French, founded the Cleveland Poetry Center which held a weekly poetry workshop on Friday evenings. It was at one of these evenings in 1963 I met d.a. levy. We went for walks along downtown streets, freeway overpasses, and through the Flats (industrial section with steel mills, factories, and many bridges over the Cuyahoga river) and we discussed poetry, philosophy, Eastern religions, surrealism, politics, social reform, beingness, art, music. When he stayed at my apartment on the near West Side near the West Side Market he said, "I have six more books to read and then I am going to kill myself." (He had a .22 caliber rifle mounted on the wall above his bed for that purpose and had once demonstrated to me how he was going to use it.) Accidentally, I bought 20 paperback books on poetry, zen philosophy, French poets, etc. He started to read those and delayed his suicide plans. I did not notice this was happening until I bought fifty more, which he also read. We had lively discussions about what was in those books. (Saved me the problem of reading them.) In all, I there were about 200 books to go along with the 3,608 he had already read by the age of 22. I was working at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation in the Cold Roll Finishing Division (thus good pay) where I wrote Parenthetical Poppies which he published. Descent into Cleveland is available from deepcleveland.com or from me at thesalamons@earthlink.net, or form Macs Backs Books on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Thank you for reading. --Russell Salamon