Exclusive: Beat Poet Michael McClure On Jim Morrison, The Doors, Allen
Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac
by Anis Shivani, huffingtonpost.com
March 3rd 2011 7:22 AM
There are few poets as underappreciated today as Michael McClure. For close
to six decades now, he has been writing visionary poetry, lauded by many of
the most original American minds of the second half of the twentieth
century--figures such as Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg.
McClure seems to have been at the center of many of the most important
artistic developments of the last 50 years. His new selected poems, Of
Indigo and Saffron, is just out from the University of California Press.
This seemed a good time to catch up with him for a wide-ranging discussion
about his own poetics, his major influences, poetry and science, and poetry
and biology, not to mention his formative associations with leading poets,
artists, and musicians.
See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QPQ1piSzVI
Shivani: Leslie Scalapino, a San Francisco language poet, picked the poems
for Of Indigo and Saffron, just issued by the University of California
Press. How do these selections differ from your earlier selected poems? Was
there a particular emphasis for Scalapino? Did you collaborate in the
selection?
McClure: Leslie Scalapino writes in her introduction, " This is not a
traditional selected poems. It does not seek to represent the body of work
of a poet by encapsulating the books in excerpts...my choice of poems was
based on tracing certain gestures as related to vital elements in Michael
McClure's poetry: particularly, a struggle evident in his work for
apprehension of being and language of poetry--as that language is enactment
of being."
If I had edited this selected, I would have known what belonged in it, and
used my set pieces and pieces that were bravado with my conscious and
established ends. That is what we do when we edit our own works. Instead, I
receive exhilaration from Leslie's selection, which shows a me who is freed
of the surface, and the armoring of self-image. We know we are many. Leslie
presents one of my many, which is close to me and allows me the feeling of
freedom--not to be dragging around a dinosaur tail of self-image. On seeing
one of her earliest drafts I was delighted and stepped back. As her editing
continued, she presented more groups of poems and my pleasure grew at her
finding another shape of my poetry that is so deeply representative of all
that I am. Once or twice she asked for advice--as in her selection of my
beast language poems, Ghost Tantras. Also, I made sure that the entirety of
my bio-political poem, Poisoned Wheat, is in Of Indigo and Saffron.
Shivani: You have remained consistent with your form over 55 years of
writing poetry: the poem centered on the page, with some lines in capitals
interspersed throughout. Once you got this form down, did you ever feel like
experimenting with other forms? Why has this form been so productive for
you?
McClure: Let me call what I do "shape" and not "form," but more of that
later. I have never gotten shape "down"--shape remains open, not fillable
nor unfillable nor closeable. When I wrote my verse play, Josephine the
Mouse Singer, the poetry became narrow, supple, intense, and soft like the
lives and voices of mice. In another drama, The Blossom, my poetry is
long-lined, disruptive, angry, fierce. In new writing in this Selected,
"Swirls in Asphalt," there is a newborn shape, and shapes I have never
confronted before, and they slip in and out of the sizelessness of moments,
and from the being in one moment to another without linear chronology.
Writing my biomorphic, centered verse is protean for me. Also, I enjoy many
traditional forms and use their standard requirements, especially the
sonnet, which can be a perfect instrument of poetry in the hands of Shelley
or Keats.
Shivani: Do you see a danger, as you limit the line to the breath, of the
lines flowing almost too smoothly, too rapidly? Can this form lead to piling
on phrases upon phrases, instead of forcing one to pause and check the
interrelationship of ideas, as might be more true of a line not correlated
with the breath?
McClure: My poetry at its truest is an extension of my physical person. It
isn't my nature to extend constructions until they begin to pile up and
overlap or cataract themselves away. Strange as my poems might appear on the
page to some readers, and as unlikely as some might guess it to be, a goal
in my life and poetry is the maintenance of equipoise. However, equipoise is
as likely to be misunderstood as the concept Reason. For an understanding of
Reason I would look to Alfred North Whitehead's understanding, an
apprehension and action, not intellectual apparatus.
Shivani: In your essay "Breakthrough," you write that "Robert Creeley
reminded me of Olson's maxim that form is the extension of content," but
also that you "could not use this [Olson's'] concept of form" in your work.
What was the contradiction there, and how did you solve it?
McClure: My poem, "Rant Block," published in The New Book/A Book of Torture,
written in what I believe to have been a dark night of the soul begins,
"THERE IS NO FORM BUT SHAPE! NO LOGIC BUT/SEQUENCE" These lines answered for
me my youthful quarrel with the concept of form. "Form" became invalid after
the freedom I found in the work of Jackson Pollock and Bop.
Shivani: In your essay "The Beat Surface," in the book Scratching the Beat
Surface, you write, in connection with Francis Crick's use of your lines
from Peyote Poem, about the "reaching out from science to poetry and from
poetry to science that was part of the Beat movement." What do you mean by
this? Similarly, in the introduction to your recent collection, Mysteriosos
and Other Poems, you write: "Like Crick I believe that flesh and
consciousness are one thing--and I see there is no wall between biology and
poetry."
McClure: Schlegel the German Romantic wrote, " All art should become science
and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." When I gave
my first poetry reading in 1955, it was the time to go beyond
Existentialism. Reductionism had reached its peak in the sciences and in
art. Inspiration and imagination were there to be freed and reflect their
presence in nature. 150 years earlier Shelley saw Nature being there--to
erase huge codes of fraud and woe. The Fifties were marked by fraud and woe.
But Francis Crick performed a luminous deed in his elucidation of the DNA
molecule. He, like the new poetry, began shaking free from mechanistic ideas
of Biology--from pinpoint reductionism to an understanding of all life to be
a single molecule. It was surprising to be on the stage reciting a poem "For
the Death of 100 Killer Whales" and to hear Allen Ginsberg recite "Howl"
while Kerouac shouted "Go!", and to understand that we were not speaking to
but for the audience.
Shivani: You also write in the same essay, "Much of what the Beat Generation
is about is nature." Do we have too freighted a conception of Beat poetry as
being urban?
McClure: Following the publication of On The Road some academic critics
leapt on the Ginsberg/Cassidy/Kerouac romance, which gave them much to write
about and answered some of their problems regarding the new American
writing. After 1955 we became, intentionally or not, the first literary wing
of an environmental movement. (Please note: Jack Kerouac went from an East
coast kid driving Route 66, looking at cows with awe, to climbing Desolation
Peak, a fire lookout in the North Cascades, with Gary Snyder in Dharma Bums.
He later experienced his depths in the vastness of nature in Big Sur. A new
critic could write about the effect of coastal California, Mexico City, and
Jack's free-form but deeply experienced Buddhism and give a wider view of
what happened.)
Shivani: You always make a distinction between the intellectual and the
intellective. What does intellective mean to you?
McClure: Intellective is use of the intellect with fresh circumstances
without being freighted down with societal mental structures. Intellectual
is the performance of thinking with pre-established customs and viewpoints,
good or bad.
Shivani: Was Allen Ginsberg intellectual or intellective?
McClure: When I first met Allen, he was a young Socialist, bohemian, artist
intellectual living in San Francisco's North Beach, and even then his sparks
of imagination kept him high above intellectualism. Allen grew from
intellectual to what I would call "Mahatma," as in Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma
meaning "Big Soul."
Shivani: The Six Gallery reading where Ginsberg first read "Howl" and you
read some of your youthful poems--the inaugural moment for the Beat
generation--seems impossible to conceptualize today. Did Ginsberg ever tell
you that he had become jaded over time, particularly after the sixties, that
such a renaissance of innocence was more difficult to imagine in postmodern
culture, where irony and surface are everything?
McClure: It was not Allen's nature to be jaded, but being swept in the
samsaric undertow of media, overpopulation, censorship, and the attempt to
disparage or hide what we accomplished, all of us have had troubled moments.
Possibly at the Six Gallery we were innocent, but all of us were serious. We
felt a new seriousness. We were variously Socialist, Buddhist-Anarchist,
Anarchist, Surrealist-visionary, and Zen. The reading's master-of-ceremonies
Kenneth Rexroth, in the sharpness and acuity of his person, lacked any
innocence that I'm aware of. Postmodern irony and surface that you speak of,
were in 1955 entropic, militaristic, and dreary--as they remain today.
Shivani: You have often talked about the "biological basis of poetry," as
you do in your essay "Hammering It Out." These ideas seem to have something
in common with Robert Duncan and Charles Olson's views. About Olson you say,
"I believed that the spring of poetry must be more physical, more genetic,
more based in flesh, and have less relationship to culture." How do your
thoughts differ from Duncan and Olson? Is your view more mystical than
theirs? You've also referred to Artaud as a key influence, as someone who
showed you the "open space of verse" and the "physicality of thought."
McClure: Robert Duncan introduced me to Charles Olson's essay on Projective
Verse, with which I wrestled long and hard for an understanding of an
absolutely new poetics, grounded in one's physique, perceptions, and
inspiration. It is about prehension--apprehension by the senses. Stirring in
the body to the heart and joining with the breath, expressing itself
outwardly, energetically onto the field. The field might be the sheet of
paper or the screen or the vocal air. Robert Duncan called his personal
projective verse, "composition by field." His punning meaning was that he
dealt with the "feeled," as in his earliest projective work, The Opening of
the Field.
Artaud's solid and daunting denials of lies and politics, as in the opening
of Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of
God), and his horrific explorations, like flaying of the psyche and
Manichean screams were there to be read, heard, and imagined. An inspiration
to be straight with oneself. I see that we seek out inspiration, not just
for its beauty and thrill, but because the existence of that inspiration
proves to one the reality of their own inspiration.
Shivani: Is Olson the major figure in American poetry after Pound?
McClure: I do not like seeing poetry as literature rather than art and I'm
not happy with the separation of Poetry and the sister arts, I prefer to see
Art as Art. I perceive that a major figure after Pound would be Jackson
Pollock, and instead of looking at "American" Poetry as William Carlos
Williams exhorted all to do, I would look worldwide at the poetry of D.H.
Lawrence, Federico Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and of course Charles
Olson, and all.
Shivani: Can you please talk about the set of poems called "Fields" in
Simple Eyes, where you take off in multiple directions from a boyhood
photograph? This seems to me one of your most successful experiments.
McClure: Simple Eyes: Fields came winging to me with the news that it wanted
to seek shapes on the page and hover around a boyhood snapshot of myself
wearing a sweater vest from the neighborhood YMCA in Seattle. In the major
earth-moving reconstruction of the enclosed basement of the YMCA, gangs of
boys had mock wars, hurling clods of clay at each other and shouting. In the
hilly and forested neighborhood of the YMCA, I delivered newspapers from an
oversized canvas pouch around my neck. And walking through a marshy area in
the morning on my way to school, I'd lie down at the edge of the vernal pond
and look at fairy shrimp, large fresh water crustaceans, swimming on their
backs; water beetles; pollywogs swimming around and others wriggling out of
the jelly mass of the egg cluster. This moment was an opal--a universe of
living stuff. What I call "the spiritual autobiography" of Fields lifts out
of those experiences, which sometimes take the shapes of much more recent
experiences connected to them.
Shivani: Can you please discuss your relationship with Robert Duncan? Was he
the poet who most gave you a sense of vocation?
McClure: Robert Duncan and Jess Collins, in their household filled with
sculptures, collages, paintings, sounds of Webern and Lou Harrison, and
their attention to the arts and biological sciences made an example for me
of one of the ways in which life might be lived. Another example was Wallace
Berman, photographer and collage artist, and his family who led an equally
complex and rich life.
Shivani: In "Hail Thee Who Play!" you write: "OH MUSE, // SING THAT I BE ME,
BE THOU, // BE MEAT, // be me, be I, no ruse / -- A MAMMALED MAN, / and
stand with rainbow robes / that drop away and globes / that float in air
about my hand." "Meat"--it's a concept that occurs throughout your work.
What do you mean by it, and why is it so important to you? Is it something
to be overcome? Are you alienated from--"meat?"
McClure: "Hail Thee Who Play!" is dedicated to James Douglas Morrison. Jim
Morrison and I met because of his interest in my play The Beard, an erotic
succes de scandale, a confrontation between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow in
a blue velvet eternity. It was arranged for us to meet at an Irish bar. We
disliked each other at first sight--both with long hair and leather
pants--and began sullenly drinking Johnny Walker, which quickly turned to
talk about poetry and Elizabethan theater and actors. The simpatico we
arrived at so quickly seems like a triumph of meat. Usually when I say
"meat" in my poetry, and it's a word I often use, I mean flesh. But "flesh"
is too good, so clean, so contrived--far away from the experience of
actually touching the stuff or eating the stuff. I take it as my mammal duty
to remind others that the flesh we love and touch is meat, which is the same
thing as and inseparable from spirit. To continue our lives we devour spirit
as well as make love to it. It's mammalian MEAT.
Shivani: "Meat" appears in your play The Beard as well, in the confrontation
between Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid.
McClure: In The Beard, when Harlow or The Kid speak of "meat," they use the
word in at least five different ways; from sarcasm to contempt to admiration
to love, that's what we all do. We use the word all those ways.
Shivani: Also in your essay, "The Beat Surface," you write: "We hated the
war and the inhumanity and the coldness. 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." You did bring it back to life. Do you
see an analogy today, as we fight another perpetual war? Is poetry again
dead? If it is dead, why is it so? Who or what can bring it back to life?
McClure: In spite of the smothering effort by many in the academy and by the
ignorant, poetry is alive. It is often hard to find, because it is dodging
the samsaric breakers and one-dimensional undertow, or it is in plain
hearing in the art of Bob Dylan, or kept a little out of the way from
readers in the dimness of misinformation about poetry. There is no finer
poet than Diane di Prima who, like Joanne Kyger, does not broadcast or
flaunt her rich creation. Amiri Baraka seems to be in the midst of a
personal renaissance of commitment and clarity. Jerome Rothenberg continues
bringing me news of poetry that I never imagined. Clayton Eshleman is
exploring the Paleolithic galleries of his person. Philip Lamantia's almost
lost poetry will be published soon, in a Collected Poems by a major
university press. Poets of modesty, brevity, and intense genius like David
Gitin can be found in small press editions. Online sites contain shimmering
ongoing streams of poetry by younger people who do not press for public
recognition--they have to be sought out.
Shivani: Three Poems brings together your longer poems, "Dolphin Skull,"
"Rare Angel," and "Dark Brown." You seem to have a particular affection for
these three poems. Did they teach you things you hadn't known in your
shorter poems?
McClure: "Dark Brown" is my first breakthrough in searching out the
possibilities of Projective Verse and the freedom that I saw in the
paintings of Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, and in the music I was
listening to, whether Jazz or Scarlatti. The poem "Dark Brown" remains as
the best statement I could make at that time of freeing myself from what
Marcuse calls one- dimensionality. Moshe Feldenkrais describes it as the
family and social structures binding up one's motor nervous system. Reich
saw it his way. This struggle for liberation is inherent in "Dark Brown" and
it remains dear and important to me. "Rare Angel" is a huge patch, or series
of patches, of deepening and expansion of my voice, feelings, and
thinking--not only into what I was learning while travelling and doing field
study with biologists, but what the assembling of these experiences/actions
into a poem actually created under my fingers and in front of my eyes and
ears. "Rare Angel" dips into Paleolithic hunting scenes and the near
unbelievabilities of childhood. "Dark Brown" is a future-modern work that
could only come out of the 1950s but now I see many other resemblances: to
Haida tribal art and Tang Dynasty Chinese amalgams of Zen, and to what we
could call "primitive" thinking. On the other hand "Rare Angel" seems to me
to be like a big personal huggable bear. "Dolphin Skull" the third long
poem, began with studying the psychoanalytic sketches of Jackson Pollock and
using their field as the jumping off point for my own self-trust. Writing it
was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life.
Shivani: Your book that seems to me most relevant to the state of the world
today is The New Book/A Book of Torture, reissued as part of Huge Dreams,
with an introduction by Creeley. In "Mad Sonnet 11," you write: "I LOVE /
Killer Whales, and the spiral galaxies, / and Keats, and viruses, and
anti-particles, / and the dainty and dark perversity of lovely women / with
hooked noses and black hair--or blonde and plump / with slim ankles--Brahms,
/ MELVILLE, AND MARX (Harpo), REICH, FREUD / and the juvenile delusions of
Einstein. / I like fat and muscle, sweet and bitter, and all of the Comedy
of Glory." You are countering war and madness with love. Is such a position
possible today?
McClure: The New Book/A Book of Torture, from 1959, was scrawled and typed
out when I believe I was having a dark night of the soul. I agree that The
New Book/A Book of Torture might be the most relevant to this immediate
present in the U.S.A. Rimbaud was searching for, and living in, what he
called "an arranged derangement of the senses." He knew a derangement of
sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, and all of the other senses brings about
a condition of what might be called "voyancy." This is not anomie,
deracination, vertigo, schizyness, depersonalization, or something
resembling those. In fact, today it is the condition of overpopulation
insanity, media obsession, gluttony, druggedness, genetic feedback [as
Konrad Lorenz wrote of], and drinking from rivers polluted not only by
pathogens, but as importantly, with synthetic hormones. Of course, there's
climate disruption and worldwide food shortages everywhere except in the
developed countries. That hardly covers it, but Calhoun's studies of
overpopulation and social sinks, as well as Artaud's vision of post-World
War II U.S.A., were things that I spoke of with Robert Duncan and Philip
Lamantia. We're living it now. Looking around we can feel the stressed and
scrambled shapes and combinations in cars, airplanes, and burger shops.
Shivani: You took Jim Morrison very seriously as a poet. And you have had a
rich collaboration with Ray Manzarek of the Doors. Tell us about these
relationships.
McClure: When Jim and I were in London, in the late 1960s, working together
on a screenplay from my novel The Adept, he showed me the manuscript of his
first poems, The New Creatures. It is hard to believe that there was a
better poet than Jim, at his age. The manuscript was perfectly edited by his
wife, Pam. I urged Jim to publish it and when he demurred because of his
concern that it would be read as rock-star poetry, I persuaded him to do a
private publication, and helped him distribute it. Jim and I were close
friends and we drank a lot. Often he visited San Francisco and stayed with
my family and me, sometimes I stayed with Jim and Pam when I was in LA.
Strange as it sounds, Jim had a fear of reading his poetry to an audience
without a band backing him. We gave poetry readings together, hung out,
drank, took drugs, and even performed with The Living Theater. When I wrote
a hallucinatory comedy about our escapades, he flew up from LA to see the
play. After their ovation, the actors came out and applauded us!
In 1986, Ray Manzarek and I began a collaboration of piano and voice,
improvising in the manner of Jazz. We have given at least 170 performances.
My goal was to continue what we had started at The Six Gallery with a new
audience; through poetry to speak of nature, politics, and freedom. Ray
wanted to continue what he had done early on with The Doors, to bring
meaningful spiritual experience to people. We performed in coffee houses,
beer bars, museums, colleges, rock clubs, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
jazz clubs, dance halls, night clubs--any place that would have us. Ray and
I have two albums and are about to edit a double album, "Live from San
Francisco," and there is a documentary about our work together, "Third
Mind." Our next gig will be in Poland, when we fly to Krakow to perform in
honor of Milosz at his centennial. Besides the States, we have performed
together in Japan, Canada, and Mexico.
Shivani: Can we say that the fundamental problem with poetry today is that
it is quotidian and pedestrian, rather than visionary in nature? Do you see
any visionaries around? Are there many paths to the visionary? Is it
possible that the most visionary is that which at first appears the least
visionary?
McClure: There are many "visionaries" around but few William Blakes, or
Meister Eckharts or Eihei Dogens. It is probable that much of the visionary
begins with what appears to be ordinary. Haikus are like that too.
Shivani: Can the visionary become commoditized?
McClure: It is ceaselessly commoditized--both the true thing which is not
harmed by commoditization, and the military-industrial "visionary" which
becomes small wars and proud public scandals and entertainment devices to be
held in one's hand.
Anis Shivani's debut book of criticism is Against the Workshop:
Provocations, Polemics, Controversies (forthcoming, July 2011).
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