At left, Mr. McClure in 1972. Mr. McClure in 1972. Having failed in their attempts to censor Allen Ginsberg's Howl, the performances of Lenny Bruce and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the police department was intent to succeed this time. Under Penal Code Section 647(a) the pair were initially charged with "obscenity", then "conspiracy to commit a felony" and ultimately with "lewd or dissolute conduct in a public place". The rejection of this humanism in favor of what Ferlinghetti terms mammalism finds its idealized totemic expression in McClures veneration of the lion, seen as a creature with no separation between thought and action, coupled with the sheer muscular power to successfully execute the intent manifest in its actions. A well-heeled theatrical angel would post bail, and the ritual would be repeated the next night. We are sorry. Obviously the more I knew him the less pronounced this sense became, but it didnt by any means disappear. "This essential collection of Michael McClure's poetry contains the most original, radical, and visionary work of a major poet who has been garnering acclaim and generating controversy for more than fifty years. On the one hand, Michaels poems never disappear visually, the way a left-justified poem arguably does. Reprinted with permission of City Lights Books. Twitter, I had to punch up the laundry list of why he was famous, and in his case, over a 60-year career as a poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, and performer, the scroll is long: he participated in the 1955 Six Gallery reading at which Allen Ginsberg debuted Howl; appears in two Kerouac novels as Pat McLear; collaborated with seminal artists Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner; roared at lions in an episode of poet/filmmaker Richard O. Moores public TV documentary series USA: Poetry (1965); wrote and staged the controversial play The Beard (1965); read to tens of thousands of people at the Human Be-In (1967); became tight with Jim Morrison; co-wrote Janis Joplins Mercedes Benz (1970); appeared in films like Peter Fondas The Hired Hand (1971) and Martin Scorseses The Last Waltz (1978); won two Obie awards for his Off-Broadway plays; performed and recorded with musicians like Ray Manzarek and Terry Riley; and published dozens of books, poetry and otherwise. McClure published eight books of plays and four collections of essays, including essays on Bob Dylan and the environment. Diane di Prima, McClure is grounded in an informed Zen mode of perception, focused at ease within the moment. I say Love is not a dream or mind-invention. It is these small thingsand the secret behind them
That fill the heart. A modern-day romantic in the mode of Shelley, McClure had to look the part, and he did. Michael McClure reads a brief excerpt from Geoffrey Chaucer's General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. He has given readings in venues as varied as the Fillmore Ballroom, Yale, Stanford and The National Biodiversity Conference. McClure had the good fortune, though, to be at City Lights in 1965 with Ginsberg and musicians Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson. McClure's journalism has been featured in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The L.A. Times and The San Francisco Chronicle. I inspired him to publish his poetry books., Michael McClure, Present at Beat Poetrys Birth, Dies at 87, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/books/michael-mcclure-dead.html. Ferlinghetti attended, but didnt read. Michael McClure, who at 22 helped usher in the Beat movement as part of a famed poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, then went on to a long and varied career as a poet,. Third Mind, a film of Michael and Rays conversations and performances, was premiered by the Sundance Channel. As his Beat associate Jack Kerouac might have noted, McClure knows time His work was inspired, too, by the hills in Oakland where he hiked with his wife, the sculptor Amy Evans McClure. He has one daughter from his first marriage to Joanna McClure.). They began enacting the play and I began typing it up. One of the poets readings was to, and with, four lions at the San Francisco Zoo a film of it is is sometimes shown on TV. Gary Snyder, Without McClures roar there would have been no Sixties. I PASS INTO THE ROOMthere is a golden bed radiating all lightthe air is full of silver hangings and sheathesI smile to myself. There was a problem loading your book clubs. A selection of his papers is held at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley and at the Special Collections & Rare Books at Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. A full body orgasm at the L.A. Phil? Dennis Hopper, Michael McClures poetry and prose is one of the more remarkable achievements in recent American literature. We took one look at each other, and we didnt like each other, Mr. McClure told Las Vegas Weekly in 2016. A round brown leaf whirls at the tip. The night, Mr. McClure wrote in Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision From Blake to Kerouac (1982), constituted a collective throwing down of the gauntlet. Other plays include Josephine The Mouse Singer and VKTMS. Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video! McClure performed spoken word poetry concerts with Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek up until Ray's death and several CDs of their work have been released.
In 1966, McClure went so far as to read one of his poems to lions at the San Francisco Zoo. Intimacies! The Beard eventually transferred to New York where at the 19671968 Obie Theatre Awards, it won Best Director and Best Actress. I fill
space with myself. The pain in my stomach
is warm and tender. They are attracted to each other, but their egos get in the way. He was also friends with Jim Morrison, that bands lead singer, although when they first met they did not instantly bond. The day Michael was cremated, I read his copy of his autobiographical novel The Mad Cub (1970), on the second page of which he writes, I can hardly walk or hold a coffee cup I am so eaten by self-consciousness. I was struck by this sentence because it accorded so thoroughly with my sense of him. By the next day, Michael was standing next to Bob Dylan and competing with him in dandiacal splendor in a Larry Keenan photograph in the New York Times obituary section. were overshadowed by the sixth man on the bill, Allen Ginsberg. The youngest member of the Beats, McClure authored over thirty books of poetry, plays, and prose, and is considered a key literary figure of the second half of the twentieth century. His fame grew because of another poet in attendance: Its where Allen Ginsberg gave his first reading of his ground-breaking poem Howl. The last remaining living poet who read there is Gary Snyder, who turns 90 on May 8. He had a hammer head and curled beak, and after my
initial surge of fear to see the field was dotted,
populated, by his brethren, each standing in the setting
sun, I saw their stately nobility
and again
the self-involvement. Hosted by Al Filreis and featuring Jerome Rothenberg, Selena Dyer, and Jonathan Dick. He once told me, around the time City Lights was republishing his 1964 beast language classic Ghost Tantras, that his use of centering developed from his attempt to find a poetic analog for abstract expressionism; he had, in fact, come to San Francisco to study painting at the California School of Fine Arts, but immediately decamped for SF State to study poetry with Robert Duncan, who encouraged his interest in Charles Olson and projective verse. The play has enjoyed particular success in London, having been produced there twice. His novels are The Mad Cub and The Adept. Please try again. Before he began to write, he went to the printer that created boxing posters in San Francisco and had the poster of his vision printed up. GONEin the hole wheresoul swellsintonothingleaving solid spacewhere profilesof gods and fairiesare carvedandfinelypolishedby the clanking of trucks,thunder-shakingwaves,and the taste of mangos. As his editor for Mephistos & Other Poems (2016), I can attest to how deliberate his placement of lines could be: a series of tabs and spacebars nightmarish to prepare to import into InDesign. The author turns his phrases around and around, he wrote, like animals wearily pacing up and down a sweating cage. Today McClure is more active than ever, writing and performing his poetry at festivals, and colleges and clubs across the country. The Times once called him a role model for Jim Morrison. But failing that, any edition will do, to experience Michaels poetry at its transcendent heights. As he wrote in his 1963 poem The Child, Who were the lion men with faces of fur / and manes / who bent by my crib to bless me?. I didnt know Michael very well, Ferlinghetti said. Every night the actors got two ovations from the enthusiastic packed house, The Edmonton Journal of Canada recalled in 2005 when The Beard was being revived there, one when the play ended and one when they were escorted out the door and into the paddy wagon to be booked.. Rare Book & Manuscript Library. But over drinks, we started talking. Michael McClure, famed Beat poet who helped launch the SF Renaissance, dead at 87 Sam Whiting May 5, 2020 Updated: May 7, 2020, 8:57 am Beat poet Michael McClure is seen on his deck with. Educated at the University of Wichita, the University of Arizona, and San Francisco State Collegewhere he studied with poet Robert Duncan. ). His books of poetry include Jaguar Skies, Dark Brown, Huge Dreams, Rebel Lions, Mysteriosos, and Of Indigo and Saffron. Light changes the room from yellows to violet! He has published four collections of essays, which include notes on Bob Dylan and environmental issues. He took us inside and he played an instrument
like a guitar and he danced as he played it. McClure is the author of the Afterword in Jerry Hopkins's and Danny Sugerman's seminal Doors biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive. To an audience of perhaps 150 people (the number varies in the tellings), Mr. McClure read a poem called For the Death of 100 Whales, said to have been inspired by a report that bored American soldiers stationed in Iceland had amused themselves by shooting a pod of whales. Ferlinghetti said he met McClure in the 1950s, when the latter was in his early 20s. Barry Miles famously referred to McClure as "the Prince of the San Francisco Scene". After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. It became a theatrical cause clbre, until finally, after months of legal deliberation, Judge Joseph Karesh of the San Francisco Superior Court ruled that while the play did contain material of a troublesome nature, it was not appropriate to prosecute such work under the law. But its a way of changing your mindset when you come to it.. His first public reading, at 22, "was overshadowed by the introduction of Howl by Allen Ginsberg," but McClure's career ultimately spanned more than 60 years, during which he . Michael McClure, "the young poet recruited to put together the famed Six Gallery readings in 1955 that launched the San Francisco Renaissance and the legend of the Beats," died May 4, the Chronicle reported. Michael McClure (October 20, 1932 May 4, 2020) was an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. His work as a novelist includes the autobiographical The Mad Cub and The Adept. He has a cameo in Peter Fondas Hired Hand. Four A.M. - OUT THERE, Michael McClure was born on October 20, 1932. Clive Barnes of The New York Times, reviewing a 1967 production in Manhattan, did not find the play obscene but did find it tedious. DEATH IS COMPRISED OF DEEP BLUE TORTURES. For McClure, I think, centering his poems paralleled the competing but not necessarily contradictory paradigms of abstract expressionism: art as an expression of its own objecthood and art as a record of its own creation. McClure famously read selections of his Ghost Tantra poetry series to the caged lions in the San Francisco Zoo. McClure's journalism has been featured in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. McClure also contributed the afterword to No One Here Gets Out Alive, Jerry Hopkins's and Danny Sugerman's seminal Doors biography. The poet also collaborated with Ray Manzarek, the late keyboardist for the Doors. Read Poem 2. they turned and walked away from us
and you were there Jane and you were twenty-two
but this was the nineteen-forties,
in Wichita, near the edge of town, in a field
Norman Mailer); and, most prominently, The Hired Hand (dir. Anne Waldman, McClures poetry is a blob of protoplasmic energy. His most recent collections are Mysteriosos and other Poems (New Directions) and I stared at them
wondering how they could all be one piece. I visitamong the peoples of myself and know allI need to know.I KNOW EVERYTHING! We became close friends. It is these small things
That when brought into vision become an inferno. With the help of her friend Bob Neuwirth, she gave it her own tongue-in-cheek spin, called it Mercedes Benz and recorded it a cappella on her album Pearl, which was released posthumously in 1971. I see the secret and distinctpatterns of smoke from my mouthI am without care part of all. The origin story of the famed reading varies depending on the teller, but Mr. McClure said he had initially been asked to organize the event. I could feel the presence of Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow broadcasting from the beautiful poster to the back of my head out towards the ocean. I close my eyes in divinity and pain.I blink in solemnity and unsolemn joy.I smile at myself in my movements. I see all there
is to feel. The pattern, the spirit, the fiery demon
That link them together
And pull their freedom into our senses,
The smell of a shrub, a cloud, the action of animals
The rising, the exuberance, when the mystery is unveiled. Or else, knowing him was simply unlike knowing other poets Id known. He holds his book in one hand while another is stretched heavenward, not unlike a preachers. of a spider thread. McClures advantage is Sheer Scope One was two feet awayturned toward me
looking me eye-into-eye.
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