Michael McClure obituary | Poetry
Poetry This article is more than 3 years oldObituaryMichael McClure obituary
This article is more than 3 years oldUS writer who saw himself and his fellow Beat poets as the literary wing of the green movementMichael McClure was one of the six poets who took part in the reading on 7 October 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco that announced the arrival of the Beat generation. Performing his poem For the Death of a Hundred Whales, which commemorated an act of slaughter by bored GIs stationed at an Icelandic Nato base, McClure declared his dominant concern with the animal consciousness in man rendered dormant by industrialisation.
Describing the ethos of that night, a watershed in American culture at which Allen Ginsberg first presented Howl, McClure, who has died aged 87, wrote: “We were locked in the cold war and the Asian debacle. The country had the feeling of martial law … We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead – killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life … We wanted voice and we wanted vision.”
His first book, Passage (1956), testified to his belief that the Beats comprised the “literary wing” of the green movement. The next decade saw McClure in part catalyse the transition from Beat to hippy, frequently writing under the influence of psychotropics and performing Blakean melodies on his autoharp, most notably at the Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in 1967, the apex of the counterculture movement.
“Poetry is a muscular principle and a revolution for the body-spirit and intellect and ear,” he proclaimed on the cover of his 1964 collection, Ghost Tantras. “There are no laws but living changing ones, and any system is a touch of death.” Inside the book lay a blazing series of poems with no prior literary blueprint, representing McClure’s faith in the imaginative act to renew man’s “meat-spirit”, and bring to form a meeting between the realms of ethnopoetics, biology and ritual.
In 1966 he was filmed reading from the work to the lions at San Francisco Zoo, the poet handsome and fearless – “a defining moment in 20th-century poetry”, according to Jerome Rothenberg.
Throughout this era McClure straddled the Haight-Ashbury scene, pulling energies exuberantly towards him and revelling in Dionysian conflict. “JESUS HOW I HATE THE MIDDLE COURSE!” he roared in the poem Love Lion (1970). Accordingly he rode with the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels, fascinated by notions of charismatic allegiance and destructive power, and collaborated with its secretary, Freewheelin’ Frank, on his autobiography.
McClure also co-wrote the lyrics for Janis Joplin’s 1970 song Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz, and made an explosive contribution to American theatre with darkly absurdist plays such as The Beard (1965) and Josephine: The Mouse Singer (1978, and published as a book two years later). The former, which orbited a seduction scene in hell between Billy “the Kid” Bonney and Jean Harlow, attracted the charge of “lewd and dissolute conduct in a public place” after its opening performances by the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop in 1965, before moving to Los Angeles, where the police arrested the entire cast every night during its two-week run.
Prior to this, Jack Kerouac had dramatised McClure in his 1962 novel Big Sur as the “handsome but faintly ‘decadent’ Rimbaud-type personality,” Pat McLear, with “a goddamn HAWK on his shoulder”. But a measure of McClure’s appeal beyond Beat limits was the endorsement of his work by the Nobel prizewinning scientist Francis Crick, who acknowledged his shared position within McClure’s “private world of personal reactions and the biological world, [while] in between, above and below, stands man, the howling mammal, contrived out of ‘meat’ by chance and necessity.”
Crick included two lines from McClure’s Peyote Poem (1959) - “THIS IS THE POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE / we smile with it” – in his 1966 book Of Molecules and Men: proof to the poet of “the important, yet little known reaching out from science to poetry and from poetry to science that was part of the Beat movement.”
Born in Marysville, Kansas, Michael was the son of Marion (nee Dixie Johnston) and Thomas McClure. Soon afterwards they divorced, and Michael, partly raised by his maternal grandfather, grew up in Seattle, where he immersed himself in an American wilderness ethic extending back to Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Returning to Kansas for high school, where he met the painter Bruce Conner, he then studied for a year at Wichita University and went on to the University of Arizona, Tucson, where he met Joanna Kinnison.
They headed for San Francisco and married in 1954. While in California, McClure got to know the experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage and the actor Dennis Hopper. Initially he intended to study painting with Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko at the Art Institute, only to discover that they had decamped the previous year. Instead he apprenticed himself as a poet to Robert Duncan, a radiant core of the city’s emerging renaissance, and to Charles Olson, then rector of Black Mountain College. Olson spoke of the poem in terms of “speed,” “kinetics”, and “energy transference” from subject to poet to reader, and this awakened McClure’s sense of art’s capacity for healing and liberation. Seizing, too, on Jackson Pollock’s desire to let a work’s “life come through” in the act of making, McClure set about translating his “swinging loops of paint” into the “spiritual autobiography and gesture” of poetry. The results were soon aired at the Six Gallery reading.
McClure joined the faculty of the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1961, the year that he attended the UN Environmental Conference in Stockholm, along with the poet Gary Snyder, the visionary technologist Stewart Brand and the naturalist Sterling Bunnell. Having previously collaborated with Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, McClure began working with the group’s keyboardist Ray Manzarek and the composer Terry Riley in a bid to return to a “common tribal dancing ground whether we were poets, or painters, or sculptors”. With Manzarek he released a live album of performance pieces, Love Lion, in 1993.
With the encouragement of his second wife, the sculptor Amy Evans, whom he married in 1997, McClure became progressively concerned with recording of Zen Buddhist states of being in his poetry, words moving as breath and gliding spaciously down a page.
“Many of us who began to write in the 50s were desperados,” McClure later recalled. “And in the teeth of the times we were outlaws. But now anyone with deep human or humane feelings is something like an outlaw.” McClure nonetheless maintained an unswerving commitment to “the discovery of the materiality of consciousness, whether in the sound of a car starting, the tension of a shoulder muscle, or the floating of an owl feather in the breeze,” through many collections of verse, essays and recordings.
He is survived by Amy and by a daughter, Jane, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce, and two grandchildren.
Michael McClure, poet, playwright and essayist, born 20 October 1932; died 4 May 2020
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