'Of Indigo and Saffron,' by Michael McClure
Of Indigo and Saffron
New and Selected Poems
By Michael McClure; edited by Leslie Scalapino
(University of California Press; 319 pages; $24.95)
Before there was a counterculture, there was Michael McClure - and, of
course, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. But the point bears repeating
that McClure was close to the heart of the Beats almost 60 years ago,
affiliated with the key figures of the San Francisco Renaissance, and
the wider cultural movement flowing from the Greenwich Village/North
Beach poetry revolution: Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the self-awareness,
ecological and anti-militarist impulses that define the liberal person
today, as if by osmosis.
Everyone - at least in the Bay Area - knows about McClure's Six Gallery
reading in October 1955, where Ginsberg read "Howl" and McClure read
"Point Lobos: Animism" and "For the Death of 100 Whales," but what
deserves more attention today, from the point of view of McClure's
legacy, is his intimate association with San Francisco legend Robert
Duncan and also Robert Creeley; after Ezra Pound, the most fruitful
innovation in American poetry arguably comes from Duncan and Creeley,
along with Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Charles Olson, and it is
this tendency McClure broadly shares. And if this radical movement has
run dry, for various institutional reasons, that should concern every
reader of contemporary poetry.
The "New and Selected Poems" issued by the University of California
Press has been edited by West Coast Language poet Leslie Scalapino (who
died in May). Scalapino includes those parts of McClure's oeuvre that
focus on the questioning of identity, the uncertain position of the
self, and the irrelevance of the traditional lyric "I," the bete noire
of language poets. But Scalapino's selections do give a broad taste of
McClure's perennial concerns with the body, alternative forms of
consciousness and environmentalism - that objectified, almost
commercialized concept, which blooms forth in McClure's work like the
radical form of consciousness it really is.
McClure invented a new form for himself: the poem centered in the middle
of the page, with occasional lines in capital letters (he has insisted
that these are not meant to be shouted), with the phrase or line
equivalent to Olson's notion of whatever encompasses a breath. McClure
has been able to accommodate every thematic concern, every mood and
temperament, within this form's versatile parameters.
February 06, 2011|By Anis Shivani, Special to The Chronicle
It reminds one of a skeleton, and the anatomical analogy works well,
given McClure's own recognition of poetics (and politics) as biology. In
"Poisoned Wheat," from "Star" (1970), he writes: "POLITICS IS DEAD AND
BIOLOGY IS HERE!" Or again, in "Poetics," from "Jaguar Skies" (1975),
"YES! THERE IS BUT ONE/ POLITICS AND THAT/ IS BIOLOGY."
So what can a new generation of readers take away from this important
book? All the rage today is for narcissistic memoir/confessionalism.
Landmark poems like "Ode to Jackson Pollock" ("Jackson Pollock my sorrow
is selfish"), from one of his strongest books, "The New Book/A Book of
Torture" (1961), or "Dark Contemplation" ("I know less than the small
fly/ who lands on the red-veined stone"), from "Rebel Lions" (1984),
testify to McClure's relentless search for alternative forms of
consciousness.
The Beats militated against academic poetry; nearly all officially
recognized poetry today is academic. This is a huge problem, but a young
reader can be inspired by McClure's radical questioning of the
established social order at every turn. There is no give when it comes
to injustice, yet there is no stridency. McClure, among all the Beat
poets, is perhaps the softest, most tender, most yielding.
In the introduction to his most recent book, "Mysteriosos and Other
Poems" (2010) - not included in the present volume - McClure writes:
"Our unending war against nature is the crisis from which I write. My
poetry demands the tearing down of what we are and letting our energies
and bodies of meat and nothingness rebuild themselves." A reader new to
McClure should get inspired to look deeper into these consistent
60-year-long investigations - "meat" as a central counterpoint to
transcendental consciousness - in such strong collections as "Simple
Eyes & Other Poems" (1993), or his manifesto of sorts, "Scratching the
Beat Surface" (1982).
McClure actually tried to re-imagine the physics of poetry, as Olson,
Oppen, Zukofsky, Creeley and Duncan tried to do - for this effort, he
deserves renewed circulation and validity.
--
http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-02-06/books/27103220_1_michael-mcclure-george
-oppen-poetry
Via InstaFetch
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