Michael McClure [1932- ] is, along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder, the last of the surviving members of the original Beat crew which read (or was present) at the Six Gallery in 1955. His literary credentials have always been immaculate. Coming from Kansas in early youth to the San Francisco Bay Area, he has remained a towering figure of creative energy. Though primarily a poet, he's also made huge contributions towards avant garde theater, and has been involved in art, popular music and film.
Like Snyder and Whalen and Ginsberg and Kerouac, his work has always had affinities with Eastern religion and mysticism, but he brings an emphatic and declarative style to his transcendent, arching, naturalistic vision. Like Larry Eigner's, his work is immediately recognizable--aside from a handful of very minor exceptions, with its vertically line-centered form--and like Eigner, too, it's easily apprehensible, making few demands upon the reader, aside from a healthy tolerance for wide-eyed enthusiasm and an unashamedly romantic point of view.
I often think of McClure as the counterpoint--in terms of movements and groups--of Kenneth Koch--of writers who, in each case, seem somewhat the exceptional member, each rendering his respective primitivist agenda in a simplified format that belies its underlying complexity and sophisticated sensibility. In terms of a poetics, McClure has never been interested either in larger, extended forms, or in a complex, tortured syntax, or in a highly wrought intellectual surface. For a writer of his longevity and reach, he's been amazingly consistent, having come by his approach--a kind of totemistic, hieratic, dionysian lyric, at once ekstatic and deeply chthonic--and stuck with it through fifty plus years of work.
When I first read McClure in the mid-1960's, I must admit that I found him simplistic; indeed, I imagined that were I to attempt to imitate any of its effects, I would appear hopelessly naive and ridiculous, rather as if I were trying to do a belly-dance in public. Reading Hymns to St. Geryon [1959] and Dark Brown [1961], I had the impression of an adolescent mind over-impressed with its own inebriation--indeed, its "drugged-up" mood suggested the same kind of trope that Ginsberg and Kerouac and others of the Beat stream had proposed as the proper psychological condition of the artist: high, happy and oblivious to contradiction. This apprehension gradually gave way, over time and further exposure, to a realization that McClure was by no means merely a Blakean lyricist with flower-power giddiness, but a serious explorer of the senses of wildness, and an hypnotic concentration upon the dynamism of the natural world. He was like a naturalistic physicist (or philosopher), exploring sensation(s) with an empiricist's determination.
The University of California Press has just published McClure's Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems, edited by the late Leslie Scalapino [1944-2010], the occasion of my appraisal of McClure's work. There are many ways to approach his poetry. I sometimes think of his poems as small dervish-like trances in which a possessed medium transmits vital observations (or koans) of wise insight, or as performances to incite or generate higher states of being. But McClure's sense of the sacred appears to have little to do with fixed organum of any particular sect; rather, it seems to consist of a religion based upon nature, a sort of pantheistic hierarchy of species of consciousness, with the higher animals (mammals) sharing privileged position with man, whose insights are granted as a gift inherited from outer space. Such alchemical/astrophysical notions play a preeminent part in McClure's poetic universe.
The Air
for Robert [Duncan] and Jess [Collins]
Clumsy, astonished. Puzzled
as the gazelle cracked
in my forepaws/
The light body twitches/
A slight breeze moves among whiskers.
The air curves itself to song
A trace, a scent lost among whiskers.
A form carved in the air
and lost by eye or ear.
The herd's thunder or the whack
of a tail on earth
evident only in dim vibration
less than a whirr of brush (and bushes).
Not a sound in a flat stone.
(Less than a fly
about the ears.)
An object, a voice, an odor.
A grain moving before the eyes.
A rising of gases/
An object/
An instant/Tiny, brighter
than sunlight.
The sound of a herd. The sound of a rock/
A passing.
McClure's work often seems like a summoning of the archetypical spirits of animal deities, an attempt to get inside the feeling of beasts. The poet-figure of the lion is often evoked as the persona of the speaker, humorously in Ghost Tantras [1964], where McClure summons the spirit of the lion (or of the animal kingdom generally) with repeated exclamations of "GRAHR!"--the epithet becoming for some years the signature of his reputation.
from Dolphin Skull
I AM A GOD WITH A HUGE FACE. Lions
and eagles pour out of my mouth. Big white
square teeth and a red-purple tongue. These are
magenta clouds around my head and this is my throne room. Actors perform
the drama of my being inside of you,
WEARING
YOUR
SKIN.
I
am writhing and clawing.
BEG FOR MERCY.
Blackberry bramble catching
my pants leg. A tearing sound.
Deep inside in the padded car.
Garbage truck full of petroleum fantasies.
Dogs barking under the dark
tall pine trees. Hollyhocks
and a few pink roses. You are
everyone
BUT
I am nobody.
Nobody is very large
and
powerful.
Memory is naked bodies
in a battle. The war is sensuous
as a little boy's penis.
Fighter planes are guns.
I am the river god
in love with my dreams.
Not dreams but ongoing presences
spewed from the bang
through a nervous system.
At the edge of things but reaching
way back inside.
This fragment of a larger work sets out many of the parameters of McClure's preoccupations. The assumption of the power and humility of symbols or presences as deities. The interpenetration of body and the universal flux (not unlike Dylan Thomas--another poet who explored vertical centering in his work). The attempt to penetrate bodies "way back" into the subterranean fastnesses of primitive memory. The noticing of ecological despair ("petroleum fantasies"). The acknowledgment of predation and violence, and the beauty of untamed wildness.
The zoo metaphor in McClure's work is always present, that is, the harnassing and domestication of wild being. Each of us contains the functional templates of our ancient descent, which inhabit us like ghosts, deeply buried under the presumptions of culture, and the civilizing influence of our higher brains. The interposition of a present reality is nothing more than an illusion:
MUSK CRAB SHELL
roses, warm
autumn breeze
are
part
of the BIG FIRE.
We burn
pass and change.
Adagio is too fast
for this "paramecium pace,"
zinging into senses
forgotten
and reborn.
Perfumes decorate
warm flesh.
Words and sensoria
are the body
of the moment.
Remembering New York
and the artists hotel
where a Russian
poet is
mugged in
the hall.
JUST
YOU
AND
I
here
waiting
for Hermes
with
his
message
and rainbows.
He steps through
the wall.
No one denies us.
The SHELL is like a totem object used to generate a meditation about the tranformative fire dance of change. The underlying order of change, the nodes of light and energy expressed as revealed signs, the unlikely coincidence of quotidian event and awestruck surprise.
MUSCLE TISSUE TENDON
teased
into mind-waves
IS
AN
INSTANT
of incense
and candle flame
suspended in beeping
yellow truck sounds.
I would like to sleep
in the shadowed grace
of the profile
of your nose
AND BROWS.
To the deepest
pit
a hummingbird
is a giant.
I
HAVE
abandoned it
all
for a misunderstanding
of
Chivalry,
BUT
RIGHT
HERE
IN THE GLEAM
OF
THE GRAIL.
Many of McClure's poems are frankly sexual in meaning and subject, and are to my mind among the least inhibited and purely romantic ever written. The sense of transportation via a heightened sensory stimulation is expressed through both a coherence and a confusion of comprehension. The body becomes the shore upon which the untethered soul finds solace ("THE GRAIL"), and yet this is "a misunderstanding of Chivalry." McClure's admonition to the self for the vanity (or futility) of striving through the onanism of a single writing/act is repeatedly used as a quasi-religious dialectic.
Mortality becomes a window through which the animate flicker and momentum of fate is fitfully glimpsed--
A VULTURE FLIES OVER THE EDGE
of the pine
into an ancient sonata
of blue sky.
The city ceaselessly roars
in the mid-distance
and we might be lions
looking for the meaning
of things in themselves.
Secretly knowing this moment
is tentative
we put our feet
down on it
and it is as solid
as everything
ELSE.
We are dressed
in casual elegance
and our minds
melting
together are elegant.
The instant rushes
so rapidly in the citron silver car
that there is almost
NO LOVE
as it gives way to mutual
care and support.
NOT
ENOUGH
to go on living for.
THIS
HUNGER
is for itself
and only my chest
longing for you can suppress it.
You are beyond all, in your laughter
and quietness,
and the way you imitate
the expressions of animals.
McClure with Richard Brautigan: The Two Counterculture Heroes of the Era
During the late 1960's and 1970's, McClure became identified with the counterculture brewing and boiling over in San Francisco's Haight Ashbery district. In his NET poet portrait done in the late Sixties, he tours the area, pointing out places and explaining the movement. In those days, McClure was probably better known as a playwright, for his The Beard [1965] and The Sermons of Jean Harlow and the Curses of Billy the Kid [1968]. He had a sense of the public use of attention which was defining and pragmatic. Despite the distractions of those years, he kept on writing poems, and his collected would probably run to well over 750 pages at this point. This selected volume runs to just over 300 pages, but it's a broad and deep portrait of a serious poet and explorer of the unknown.
Here's a contemporary picture of the old lion with his mane of white.
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