Beat poet, playwright, novelist, and documentary filmmaker Michael McClure was born in Marysville, Kansas, and raised there and in Seattle. I KNOW EVERYTHING! I didnt know Michael very well, Ferlinghetti said. The majority of people insist on having a line drawn in their mind and in their writing between a human being and a nonhuman being. He started college there as well before switching to the University of Arizona, but an interest in art took him to San Francisco in 1954. His awards, include a Guggenheim Felowship, the Obie Award for Best Play, the Alfred Jarry Award, and a Rockefeller grant for playwriting. Alchetron A Buddhist, McClure experimented with poems that were self-conscious of the form itself. McClure would later court controversy as a playwright with his play The Beard. 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. In addition, he was inducted into the San Francisco State University Alumni Hall of Fame in 2014. No answers. McClure has since published eight books of plays and four collections of essays, including essays on Bob Dylan and the environment. It is these small thingsand the secret behind them That fill the heart. Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video! McClures songs include Mercedes Benz, popularized by Janis Joplin. And hes learned from musicians. complex. I loved the old guy and knew him as well as I was able, but I dont know that I knew him well. He was so good-looking, he should have been a movie star instead of a poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti told The Times by phone. The painis many pointed, without anguish.Light changes the room from yellows to violet!The dark brown space behind the door is preciousintimate, silent and still. In Jack Kerouac's autobiographical novel Big Sur, he based the character Pat McLear on McClure. McClure published eight books of plays and four collections of essays, including essays on Bob Dylan and the environment. Michael McClure Albums: songs, discography, biography, and listening I close my eyes in divinity and pain.I blink in solemnity and unsolemn joy.I smile at myself in my movements. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Michael McClure, one of the famed Beat poets of San Francisco whose career as a poet eclipsed many others in popular culture, has died. If we take the book at its wordand he speaks of it in his Authors Note as an attempt to show that [his] memory was still intactthe overwhelming impression it leaves is of self-consciousness as a major motivating force in his life. (His final book, Mule Kick Blues, will appear in the spring from City Lights.) Distinct.I am separate from gloom and beauty. WE HAVE GONE GONE. McClure reads with an actors command and a singers timing, his impact transports audiences to a very different and intriguing place. He has given hundreds of reading in venues as varied as the Fillmore Ballroom, Yale University, Stanford, The National Biodiversity Conference at the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress. His most recent collections are Mysteriosos and other Poems (New Directions) and Of Indigo and Saffron: Selected and New Poems (University of California Press). Selected poems by Michael McClure . Dream: The Night of December 23rd they turned and walked away from us It is these small things That when brought into vision become an inferno. The room is a multicolored cherub of air and bright colors. Distinct. She mocks his masculinity, and he tells her she is envious of his beauty. He took us inside and he played an instrument like a guitar and he danced as he played it. "The poems dive through time and space like dolphins through the waves," McClure said at the time of publication of "Mephistos," released by City Lights. Beat poet Michael McClure, RIP | Boing Boing ). McClure created two television documentaries The Maze and September Blackberries. The San Francisco. A second performance followed at Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium on the July 24, 1966. He has published four collections of essays, which include notes on Bob Dylan and environmental issues. Anne Waldman, McClures poetry is a blob of protoplasmic energy. The rooms not important but like divisions of all space of all hideousness and beauty. There is no hurry. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and is immortalized as "Pat McLear" in Kerouac's Big Sur. Michaels use of centering is as singular as it is signature; I know of only a few poets who have made use of this formhis near-contemporaries Ronald Johnson and Gustaf Sobin, for example, or more recently Ish Kleinbut none who have made it so fundamental a part of their work as McClure. Please try again. It's the mystery of the hunt that intrigues me, That drives us like lemmings, but cautiously The search for a bright square cloudthe scent of lemon verbena Or to learn rules for the game the sea otters Mr. McClure in 1972. On the other hand, the gestural conception of abstract expressionism identified by Harold Rosenberg as action painting mirrors the breath-as-unit conception of projective verse, and Lamantia in his selected prose Preserving Fire (2018) indeed calls McClure an action painter in words. Centering allows a freedom of line length unavailable to left-justification, as we see in 100 Whales when he follows the one-word line Incense with the six-word Gnashed at their tails and brothers. As a response to the question of open-field composition, centering satisfied an aesthetic need as well as a philosophical one for an artist in pursuit of the unity of existence, both in terms of consciousness and natural world. Hosted by Al Filreis and featuring Jerome Rothenberg, Selena Dyer, and Jonathan Dick. The play has played a role in U.S. censorship and free speech battles since 1966 when it won the first lawsuit. I pass fantasies as theysing to me with Circe-Voices. Ferlinghetti supported the Beats, publishing their works, including Howl and Other Poems, but he doesnt consider himself a Beat poet. His words could easily be magnified in print, and he was much interviewed. 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. In 1966, McClure went so far as to read one of his poems to lions at the San Francisco Zoo. He lived in Oakland with his wife, the sculptor Amy Evans McClure, before his death in 2020. And thats the first I had ever heard of Wichita, he added with a laugh. Yet he grew warm, wending lyrical words around the air and across the hall, The coolness fell away with his simple elegance in word and presentation McClure was controlled and read with steady jazz rhythms, a perfect, minimal chart of spoken words.. Norman Mailer); and, most prominently, The Hired Hand (dir. . His audiences have ranged from an intimate dozen at a tiny Maui bookstore, to tens of thousands at San Franciscos Human Be-in in San Francisco, and to multitudes at Airlift Africa. There were acting roles too: McClure played a Hells Angel in Norman Mailers Beyond the Law (1968) and had a cameo in Peter Fondas The Hired Hand (1971). 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. His play The Beard provoked numerous censorship battles in Los Angeles; the cast was arrested after each performance for fourteen nights in a row. 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 is the author of the Afterword in Jerry Hopkins's and Danny Sugerman's seminal Doors biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive. He had one daughter from his first marriage to Joanna McClure. McClure has also released CDs of his work with minimalist composer Terry Riley. Of Indigo and Saffron: Selected and New Poems (University of California Press). They appeared with saxophonist David Sanborn on NBC-TV performing a jazz version of McClures Love Lion Blues. Mystic Fire released a 70-minute video of the duo and a compact disk, Love Lion, followed. Saunders would collaborate with McClure a second time in 2008 on the award-winning short film Curses and Sermons, which would mark the first time McClure had authorized a filmed adaptation of one of his poems. Full content visible, double tap to read brief content. Publishers Weekly noted of his work, McClure infuses ecstatic direct address and colloquial diction with an exquisite sensibility, one that reveals the world in its ordinary complex gorgeousness. He frequently performed his poetry with musical collaborators, including composer Terry Riley, and recorded several CDs with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. Michael McClure, who took part in a 1955 San Francisco poetry reading that is considered the founding moment of the Beat generation and who went on to collaborate with rock musicians such as. Even in the semi-darkness the softness of their brown feathers made curls pliant as a young mother's hair. Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. Anyone can read what you share. But over drinks, we started talking. WinterI will studythe whiteness of plum blossomsand look for knots in an old trunkat the edge of the forest firenear some deer bones. Down on the bone there were indentations like rivulets like the flowing patterns of little rivers. Trees with white trunks make plumes on rock ridges. Ferlinghetti said he met McClure in the 1950s, when the latter was in his early 20s. McClures poetry is a blob of protoplasmic energy. Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure shares a place with the great William Blake, with the visionary Shelley, with the passionate D.H. Lawrence Robert Creeley, What appeals to me most about Michaels poems is the fury and imagery of them. 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 . WITHINendless spacein tiny explosions of gasolinemy consciousness hardens into a wall.I AM SEPARATEfrom plum blossoms and mountains:aching teeth become moviesas I growyoung again. But writing "O Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes . 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. There are 0 customer reviews and 10 customer ratings. Not that he was trying to be impressive, he was well beyond that, but that there was a certain amount of performance involved, that even casual socializing cost him effort. Gloria Graham 2004 during the taping of Add-Verse. After success at the Fillmore, the following month the play opened at The Committee, a theatre nightclub in the North Beach area of the city, where it was hoped it would enjoy a lengthy run. I smile at myself in my movements. An erotic serial poem in three major movements, Dark Brown finds McClure reveling in the freedom of expression newly won for poetry by Howl and Other Poems (1956), applying his philosophical monism to the union of self and other in the act of making love. A full body orgasm at the L.A. Phil? Analysis of Michael McClure's Poems - Literary Theory and Criticism Concurrently with The Mad Cub, I was reading his long poem Dark Brown (1961), in the 1967 Dave Haselwood Books edition, whose offhandedly titled INTRO FOR DARK BROWN begins: I am told that personalities must interact, and yet interaction is a process of the mind. He made two television documentaries The Maze and September Blackberries and was featured in several films, including Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1978), where he recites from The Canterbury Tales; Norman Mailer's Beyond the Law (1968); and, most prominently, Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand (1971). What the Six Gallery really did was show us that there was an audience out there that really wanted to hear poetry off the page, he told The Washington Post in 2017. Obviously, its impossible to know how his legacy will be viewed in the fullness of time, but its equally obvious the story of 20th Century American poetry cannot be told without him. Michael McClure at his home in Oakland in 2010. But when I began visiting Michael at home, I had a sense that he was still on even in private. 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. This cool cat in a natty vest, cigarette in hand, was in the right place at the right time. On Facebook, SAN FRANCISCO Michael McClure, one of the famed Beat poets of San Francisco whose career as a poet eclipsed many of his counterculture contemporaries in popular culture, has died. His battles with the church arent over, How Palm Springs ran out Black and Latino families to build a fantasy for rich, white people, 17 SoCal hiking trails that are blooming with wildflowers (but probably not for long! In 1968, actor Rip Torn directed a notable production at The Royal Court Theatre and it has most recently been revived at a smaller venue, the Old Red Lion Theatre in 2006 under the direction of Nic Saunders with new music by Terry Riley. Now aware of the play's controversial elements, the San Francisco Police Department secretly tape-recorded the first two performances and secretly filmed the third performance. McClures songs include "Mercedes Benz," popularized by Janis Joplin, and new songs which were performed by Riders on the Storm, a band that consisted of original Doors members Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger. for Jane ALL HUGE LIKE GIANT FLIGHTLESS KIWIS TWICE THE SIZE OF OSTRICHES, 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 surrounded by a copse of cottonwoods. He was 87 years old. California College of the Arts for over 40 years. As Scalapino writes, though the vast majority of his poems over more than 60 years hew to the vertical centerline of the page, this arrangement is a sensitive instrument making different inventions in different poems. Sometimes the lines are all dead center, as in 100 Whales, but often enough they quiver around the meridian, deliberately imperfect and quite alive, in a way that centered fails to convey. R.I.P. Michael McClure (1932-2020) - Poetry Foundation 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, playwright, novelist and lyricist, died on Monday at his home in Oakland, Calif. He has given readings in venues as varied as the Fillmore Ballroom, Yale, Stanford and The National Biodiversity Conference. The Mystery of the Hunt It's the mystery of the hunt that intrigues me, That drives us like lemmings, but cautiously The search for a bright square cloudthe scent of lemon verbena Or to learn rules for the game the sea otters . There was a sweet submission in the power of their enormous legs (giant drumsticks). A well-heeled theatrical angel would post bail, and the ritual would be repeated the next night. It has since played successfully all over the world and is a favorite with American university drama groups. His play The Beard, first performed in 1965 in San Francisco, caused censorship uproars there and in other cities where it was staged over the next decade, for its obscenity-filled dialogue and a scene of simulated cunnilingus. Michael McClure, the poet whose roar helped launch the '60s, dies at 87 We followed the Aepyorni across the old wooden bridge made of huge timbers. Need a transcript of this episode? A last CD, Piano Poems, recorded in San Francisco, was released in 2012. There is no Time!No answers. McClure performed spoken word poetry concerts with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek until the latter's death in 2013; several albums of their work have been released. On a lighter note, a fragment of a ditty that Mr. McClure would sing in gatherings with friends, improvising new lyrics each time, found its way to Janis Joplin. His journalism has been featured in The Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, the L.A. Times and San Francisco Chronicle. A $300-million (minimum) gondola to Dodger Stadium? Michael McClure's (October 20, 1932 - May 4, 2020) first published poems were two villanelles dedicated to Theodore Roethke published in the January, 1956, issue of Poetry. I am a snake and a tiptoe feather at opposite ends of the scales as they balance themselves against each other. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Obie Award for Best Play, an NEA grant, the Alfred Jarry Award, and a Rockefeller grant for playwriting. Remembering Michael McClure, Beat Poet And Counterculture Icon - Forbes Other plays include Josephine The Mouse Singer and VKTMS. Poet Michael McClure, who helped launch the 60s, dies at 87 - Los Mr. McClures play The Beard, first performed in 1965 in San Francisco, caused censorship uproars there and in other cities where it was staged over the next decade. Dark hairand eyebrowsSWIRLin delighted delusionBIG MEMORIES OF PLEASUREenwrap a mindas substantial. Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking. Black-and-white photographs of the gathering only added to McClures aura. Simple Eyes and Other Poems by Michael McClure - Publishers Weekly SELECTED POEMS OF MCCLURE PA: McClure, Michael: 9780811209519: Amazon Mr. McClure, whose circle of friends and acquaintances included Beat figures and many others in the San Francisco counterculture, makes a brief appearance in The Last Waltz, Martin Scorseses 1978 documentary about the final concert of the Band. McClure played a Hells Angel in Norman Mailers film Beyond the Law. Simple Eyes and Other Poems Michael McClure. Michael McClure - Poet Michael McClure Poems - Poem Hunter McClure worked extensively with his friend Ray Manzarek, the Doors keyboardist, at festivals, colleges and clubs. The birthplaceof Brahms. [3] Stan Brakhage, a friend of McClure, stated in the Chicago Review that: McClure always, and more and more as he grows older, gives his reader access to the verbal impulses of his whole body's thought (as distinct from simply and only brain-think, as it is with most who write). and filled with dark chocolate cake. The friendships, the harmonies, the hijinks, and the wear and tear add up to a last waltz. Discounts, promotions, and special offers on best-selling magazines. He spent much of his childhood in Seattle but returned to Kansas with his mother and stepfather, finishing high school in Wichita. I am smiling. I see all there is to feel. Michael McClure | Poetry Foundation He had an eleven-year run as playwright-in-residence with San Francisco's Magic Theatre where his operetta "Minnie Mouse and the Tap-Dancing Buddha" had an extended run. 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, which was rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. The torrent of their unleashed passions leads to a final scene of great controversy, as the play comes to a climax with an act of explicit sexual intimacy between the cowboy and the starlet. Michael McClure, Animal Poet : Literary Kicks Beat poet, playwright, novelist, and documentary filmmaker Michael McClure was born in Marysville, Kansas, and raised there and in Seattle. What Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in his rather begrudging editorial note to the first edition of McClures Meat Science Essays (1963), refers to as an anti-intellectual perspective is perhaps best understood in the context of Michaels desire to eliminate self-consciousness. Michael McClure, a famed San Francisco Beat poet, dies at age 87 [2] McClure remained active as a poet, essayist and playwright until his death and lived with his second wife, Amy, in the San Francisco Bay Area. His wife, Amy Evans McClure, said the cause was complications of a stroke he had last year. Amy arranged for me to call Michaels fellow Six Gallery reader Gary Snyder, himself just turned 90. 1996-2023, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. This seemingly anti-mind, anti-soul statement is curious coming from a poet of such obvious erudition and mysticism as Michael, and I didnt get what he was driving at while he was still alive. 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. Grahhr! the free-spirited poet repeatedly roars at the beasts in a video documenting the event. I am separate. "McClure manages a series of discoveries, and his language strikes with almost flintlike suddenness and brilliance. Its opening section gives us a rare view into his thoughts about his own mortality, particularly in the moving sequence "Death Poems." The poems helped fuel the eco-poetics movement, which addresses environmental concerns. Michael McClure (born October 20, 1932) is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. McClure has written twenty plays and musicals which are performed in the U.S. and abroad. He showed up from Wichita, with a couple of other poets from Wichita, Ferlinghetti said. If you read his own instructions, he says, if you see all capital letters, it doesnt mean youre supposed to be louder. With his steely eyes and long, flowing hair, the poet Michael McClure somewhat resembled a lion, a creature with which he felt an affinity. McClure later courted controversy as a playwright with his play The Beard. All the charges were dropped and the subsequent appeal lost. Michael McClure died from complications following a stroke last year, so it does not appear that his death was caused by coronavirus, but I do wish to know what he thought about the current pandemic, since his entire poetic career was suffused with awareness of the power of the wide natural world. This battle diminishes as they realize that since they are alone together, they are free to shed their burdening facades and give in to what they are truly feeling. Later The Beard received Obies in N.Y.C. He has a cameo in Peter Fondas Hired Hand. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. A reviewer of a recent London reading wrote, McClures West Coast delivery was deliberate, cool, spacious The Journal-World in Lawrence Kansas offered these observations of McClure at the William Burroughs celebration, McClure looked cool. Actors were sometimes arrested, along with the occasional director or producer. Intimacies! The Beat Goes On / Poet Michael McClure finds plenty of - SFGATE There was a problem loading your book clubs. Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon, New Directions; First Edition (March 17, 1986). The Rolling Stone, One of our best and wisest bard/scholars. I dont mean to overstress Michaels self-consciousness, but reading The Mad Cub after his death hit me with the force of revelation, by which I mean the light it cast on my experience of him as a person illuminated my sense of his poetry, which despite his success in other fields is the art on which he staked his greatest claim. Were all sentient beings, equally constructed of the same kind of chemistries and the same kinds of dynamics. (As Michael himself puts it in Wolf Net, WHEN A MAN DOES NOT ADMIT THAT HE IS AN ANIMAL, he is less than an animal.). The drama has played a role in U.S. censorship and free speech battles since it won the first lawsuit. Not only an awareness of nature, but the poems are organized in an organic fashion, continuing with his appreciation of nature's purity. Reprinted with permission of City Lights Books. It debuted at the Actor's Workshop Theatre in San Francisco on the December 18, 1965. Hes an expert reader too, with an actors voice, sensual and attuned finely to cadence and energies of enunciation. With singers Janis Joplin and Bob Neuwirth, McClure wrote the song Mercedes Benz, in which Joplin sings, Oh, Lord, wont you buy me a Mercedes Benz? The charges didnt stick. The CD explores spontaneous music and voice (working together) expressing the outrageous and mystical in both artists. The truth is we were never in a different category at all. A London reviewer wrote, McClures West Coast delivery was deliberate, cool, spacious The Journal-World in Lawrence Kansas wrote of McClure at the William Burroughs celebration, McClure looked cool. . A powerful collection of new work written during the last years of McClure's life, Mule Kick Blues was readied for publication before the poet's death in May 2020. McMurtrie is the former books editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. THERE ARE HILLS LIKE SHARKFINS and clods of mud. He sort of joined the Beats, Ferlinghetti said. 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. It was getting dark and the trees around the bridge almost glowed like a scene by Palmer. Robert Hunter, As the vocabulary of freedom becomes day by day more thickly encrusted with the shit of American foreign policy, its salutary to hear the voice of Michael McClure, a poet who (for fifty years in print) has explored states of freedom with candor and athletic intelligence. As his Beat associate Jack Kerouac might have noted, McClure knows time Peter Fonda). An introduction to themid-century countercultural poets who helped define a generation. His play The Beard provoked numerous censorship battles, in Los Angeles, the cast was arrested after each performance for fourteen nights in a row. The poet is featured in Scorcese's Last Waltz, in which he recites a poem by Chaucer in Middle English" McClure created two television documentaries - The Maze and September Blackberries. Ginsberg, in his singular phrasing, praised McClures work as a blob of protoplasmic energy.. 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. The stream was dimpled with flashing moonlight and I think it had a little song. The play tells of a fictional encounter between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow and is a theatrical exploration of his "Meat Politics" theory, in which all human beings are "bags of meat".