The pain is many pointed, without anguish. He has a cameo in Peter Fondas Hired Hand. Mad Sonnet ("When spirit has no edge"). But the actual interview would be a combination of him talking and reading prewritten passages that formulated what he wanted to say with some precision. His books of poetry include Jaguar Skies, Dark Brown, Huge Dreams, Rebel Lions, Mysteriosos, and Of Indigo and Saffron. McClure later courted controversy as a playwright with his play The Beard. He lived in another world.. ). 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. and was warmly embraced in both London and Paris. Except for books, Amazon will display a List Price if the product was purchased by customers on Amazon or offered by other retailers at or above the List Price in at least the past 90 days. Anne Waldman, McClures poetry is a blob of protoplasmic energy. 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. McClure was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Persian Pony (2017), Mephistos and Other Poems (2016), Of Indigo and Saffron (2011), Mysteriosos and Other Poems (2010), Rebel Lions (1991), and The New Book/A Book of Torture (1961). Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations. 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. In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before, he wrote. Actors were sometimes arrested, along with the occasional director or producer. Garrett Caples is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Power Ballads (Wave, 2016). The roomsnot important but like divisions of all spaceof all hideousness and beauty. Beat poet, playwright, novelist, and documentary filmmaker Michael McClure was born in Marysville, Kansas, and raised there and in Seattle. 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. The poet Michael McClure, left, with Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco in 1965. 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. Gloria Graham 2004 during the taping of Add-Verse. He has also written a book of essays called. Light changes the room from yellows to violet! He lets you know: read the vertical lines as standard modern American language. FromMule Kick Blues and Last Poems by Michael McClure. Hes an expert reader too, with an actors voice, sensual and attuned finely to cadence and energies of enunciation. A well-heeled theatrical angel would post bail, and the ritual would be repeated the next night. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and is immortalized as "Pat McLear" in Kerouac's Big Sur. 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. I didnt know Michael very well, Ferlinghetti said. SoundCloud and 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. 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. My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.. The role model for Jim Morrison, the L.A.Times characterized McClure, and has found sources in music from Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis to the composer Terry Riley. The author turns his phrases around and around, he wrote, like animals wearily pacing up and down a sweating cage. ${cardName} not available for the seller you chose. McClure's honors included a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Alfred Jarry Award, as well as a Rockefeller grant for playwriting and an Obie Award for Best Play. They were whiteIt was some new fossil. Martin Scorsese) where he reads from The Canterbury Tales; Beyond the Law (dir. The play tells of a fictional encounter in the blue velvet of eternity 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." With his cinematic looks and mod three-piece suits, McClure made it onto stages far bigger than those offered at poetry readings. For Mr. McClure, the event was also a proving ground for a concept. and filled with dark chocolate cake. At the end of that third performance on August 8, 1966only the fifth time the play had been performed in publicthe San Francisco Police Department raided the venue and arrested actors Billie Dixon (Jean) and Richard Bright (Billy). At age 22, Michael McClure gave his first poetry reading at the legendary Six Gallery event in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read Howl. 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. 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 wasnt arrested when it was performed as the writer, he was constitutionally protected but actors in several productions were, on charges including public lewdness. He taught poetry for many years at the California College of the Arts. Tales in Martin Scorsese's film The Last Waltz , McClure has written . Clive Barnes of The New York Times, reviewing a 1967 production in Manhattan, did not find the play obscene but did find it tedious. By the end of the week, Id been asked to write something on him, so I visited Amy at the home theyd shared, to borrow some books and take a hit from the bottle of Johnnie Walker Black hed long promised himself on his deathbed. McClure, who died May 4 at 87 after suffering a stroke last year, was a countercultural figure who was present, Zelig-like, at key moments in San Franciscos Beat heyday and beyond. We are sorry. 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 . He has one daughter from his first marriage to Joanna McClure.). There is no hurry.I read the meanings of scratched walls and cracked ceilings.I am separate. Michael McClure reads a brief excerpt from Geoffrey Chaucer's General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. All the charges were dropped and the subsequent appeal lost. "[citation needed]. Even in the semi-darkness the softness of their brown feathers made curls pliant as a young mother's hair. Soon we came to a cottage of white clapboards behind a big white clapboard house and knocked on the door; it was answered by a young man with long hair who was from the Incredible String Band. McClure was a close friend of The Doors lead singer Jim Morrison and is generally acknowledged as having been responsible for promoting Morrison as a poet. 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). 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. McClures songs include Mercedes Benz, popularized by Janis Joplin. 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. 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. DEATH IS COMPRISED OF DEEP BLUE TORTURES. 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. There is no Time! . He has published eight books of plays and four collections of essays, including essays on Bob Dylan and on environmental issues. 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. 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. And hes learned from musicians. 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. His novels are The Mad Cub and The Adept. The answer to feeling is my feeling.The answer to joy is joy without feeling.The room is a multicolored cherubof air and bright colors. McClure also contributed the afterword to No One Here Gets Out Alive, Jerry Hopkins's and Danny Sugerman's seminal Doors biography. He 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. WIRE magazine, from a review of the CD I Like your Eyes Liberty, The most fantastic poem in America I passed by him both afraid and unafraid of wildness as I had passed through the herd of zebras at the top of Ngorongoro Crater in front of the lodge, where from the cliff we could see a herd of elephants like ants, and the soda lake looked pink because of flamingos there. The play has played a role in U.S. censorship and free speech battles since 1966 when it won the first lawsuit. He has made two television documentaries The Maze and September Blackberries and is featured in several films including The Last Waltz (dir. A poet of and for our time, his own formal structuresthe shape of his poems and his highly charged breath-linenevertheless look back to the classics, to the Provenal troubadours, and to the Romantic verse of Blake, Keats, and Shelley. Ferlinghetti added that McClures death was such a surprise because I always thought of him as being so young. Ferlinghetti, the poet and co-founder of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, turned 101 in March. I know all that I need to know. Yet he retained such vigor at 87, and briefly seemed like he might recover, so Id convinced myself he would. He even sometimes prints a single word vertically mid-poem, each line a single letter. 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. Four A.M. - OUT THERE, Michael McClure was born on October 20, 1932. are poems and long passages from nine of the authors earlier collections. His fourteen books of poetry include Jaguar Skies, Dark Brown, Huge Dreams, Rebel Lions, Rain Mirror and Plum Stones. He was also friends with Jim Morrison, that bands lead singer, although when they first met they did not instantly bond. A last CD, Piano Poems, recorded in San Francisco, was released in 2012. (Like several poets Ive known who were born in the 30s, Michael used the computer like a typewriter.) I visitamong the peoples of myself and know allI need to know.I KNOW EVERYTHING! To be sure, there are shocking bursts of toxic masculinity in, for example, The Mad Cub, but I feel like the frenzied, even abject eroticism of Dark Brownis it the first major American poem to feature analingus?successfully undermines such retrograde ideology. The pain in my stomach is warm and tender. Michael, granted, was 80 by the time we started hanging out, older than either of them had been, though Id become fast friends with Richard O. Moore when he was 90, so Im not sure age was the determining factor. The lyre-guitar was covered with square plastic buttons in rows of given sizes and shapes. At left, Mr. McClure in 1972. My mind is fingers holding a pen. A second performance followed at Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium on the July 24, 1966. The contemporary American poetic tradition known as ecopoetics arguably springs from their performances at the Six Gallery reading, where Snyder read A Berry Feast while McClure read For the Death of 100 Whales, which looks, in part, like this: The sleek wolvesMowers and reapers of sea kine.THE GIANT TADPOLES(Meat their algae)LeptLike sheep or children.Shot from the seas bore.(Goya!! The truth is we were never in a different category at all. Dark hairand eyebrowsSWIRLin delighted delusionBIG MEMORIES OF PLEASUREenwrap a mindas substantial. I pass fantasies as theysing to me with Circe-Voices. 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. 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. He wanted to study painting, his wife said in an interview, not to be a painter but to use the Abstract Expressionist ideas in his poetry.. He spent much of his childhood in Seattle but returned to Kansas with his mother and stepfather, finishing high school in Wichita. Educated at the Municipal University of Wichita (1951-1953), the University of Arizona (1953-1954) and San Francisco State College (B.A., 1955)[1][2] McClure's first book of poetry, Passage, was published in 1956 by small press publisher Jonathan Williams. He has written more than 20 plays and musicals, several television documentaries, and the song Mercedes Benz, which was made famous by singer Janis Joplin. [9], McClure during the video taping of "Add-Verse", 2004, Learn how and when to remove this template message, "Time Out talks to beat poet Michael McClure ahead of the London revival of his play, Michael McClure, famed Beat poet who helped launch the SF Renaissance, dead at 87, Michael McClure & Ray Manzarek official website, "Add-Verse" a poetry-photo-video project McClure participated in, Photograph, Michael McClure, 1951, with David Haselwood and Lee Streiff, Wichita, KS, Records of Michael McClure are held by Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books. The Spirit and Body are simultaneous, one tense, the Meat Walls are Spirit. 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. 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 Play in the surf. There is no Time!No answers. 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. Peter Fonda). citylights.com. I visit among the peoples of myself and know all I need to know. I hear the music of myself and write it down for no one to read. I see all there is to feel. On screen, McClure appeared in Martin Scorseses seminal 1978 concert film The Last Waltz perhaps the only rock documentary in which a poet reads lines by the Middle English author Geoffrey Chaucer. ${cardName} unavailable for quantities greater than ${maxQuantity}. 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. Barry Miles famously referred to McClure as "the Prince of the San Francisco Scene". As the late. McClure's first book of poetry, Passage, was published in 1956 by small press publisher Jonathan Williams. Your smile is my kindnessand it thrills me. The equating of Spirit with Meat Walls is an attempt to reintegrate the abstraction of mind with the physical body; as he writes in Wolf Net (1968), first published in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982), Brain cells, nerve cellslike any cellsare meat. Throughout his work he insists on such formulations to combat the alienation inherent in the more traditional Western humanist model of the duality of mind and body. At twenty-two he gave his first poetry reading at the legendary Six Gallery event in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read. He had one daughter from his first marriage to Joanna McClure. He lives in Oakland 's Bay Area hills with his wife the sculptor Amy Evans McClure. It was getting dark and the trees around the bridge almost glowed like a scene by Palmer. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_McClure&oldid=1152187161, This page was last edited on 28 April 2023, at 18:49. I returned home and began to write. The song, a wry commentary on materialism less than two minutes long, became one of Ms. Joplins most recognizable tunes. 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.. Mr. McClure lived near the Six Gallery. I wasnt sure it was going to work, Snyder admitted, though he was won over by listening to his friend read aloud. Im sure he did! Snyder said, and I would urge any readers who want to experience McClures poetry in its ideal form to get their hands on either edition of Dark Brown that Haselwood published with Auerhahn Press (1961) and his later eponymous imprint. They also republished McClures 1964 collection Ghost Tantras in 2013. It has since played successfully all over the world and is a favorite with American university drama groups. His play The Beard provoked numerous censorship battles in Los Angeles; the cast was arrested after each performance for fourteen nights in a row. With the Fillmore's high profile, the play attracted an audience of 700. The death of Michael McClure, on May 4, 2020, caught me off-guard. We dont share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we dont sell your information to others. The instrument would make any sound, play any blues, make any creature sound, play any melodyI wanted it badlyit was a joy. I knowall that there is to know. Their tiny heads (in proportion to their bodies) were bent utterly submerged in their business and sweeping side to side as a salmon doesor as a wolf does but with a Pleistocene, self-involved gentleness beyond our ken. McClure, who died May 4 at 87 after suffering a stroke last year, was a countercultural figure who was present, Zelig-like, at key moments in San Francisco's Beat heyday and beyond. Join our community book club. His wife, Amy Evans McClure, said the cause was complications of a stroke he had last year. 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?. of a spider thread. Gary Snyder, Without McClures roar there would have been no Sixties. I would give him questions in advance and he would consider them and even write out responses. We became close friends. Michael McClure (October 20, 1932 May 4, 2020) was an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist.

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