McClure, Michael

Antechamber, and Other Poems

Touching the Edge

     Innovative Beat poet Michael McClure has written a book of poems unlike any of his others. These dharma devotions are fruits of his Buddhist mediation practice. Like bold calligraphy moving vertically down a white scroll, they surprise the eye and mind, awakening us to a heightened sense of everyday things.

Rain Mirror: New Poems

"Rain Mirror," writes poet Michael McClure, "is my most bare and forthright book. It contains two long poems, 'Crisis Blossom' and 'Haiku Edge' which are quite disparate from one another." Yet brought under a single cover, the poems compliment each other as do light and dark, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Yin and Yang. "Haiku Edge" is a serial poem of linked haikus in the American idiom. Often humorous, sometimes harsh, always elegant, they catch moments in the landscape of Oakland's East Bay Hills where McClure now lives. "Crisis Blossom" in contrast is a long poem in three parts ("Graftings," "After the Solstice," and "After Meltdown") that record the poet's months' long shock and recovery after a near-fatal airplane accident. It is, in McClure's words, "my state of psyche, capillaries, muscles, fears, boldnesses, and hungers, down where they exist without managment." With Rain Mirror, the poet moves in two directions, inward and outward, to arrive at the balance point between the self and nonself: "THERE'S ME/and no me/on the other side/I'm here under hand/AND THERE/where thoughts glide."

Huge Dreams: San Francisco and Beat Poems (Poets, Penguin)

Huge Dreams republishes two books, out of print for thirty years, which together are a cornerstone of the Beat movement--The New Book/A Book of Torture and Star. Both were influential in expanding poetry into a larger world--the West Coast Beat phenomena, which focused on nature, the environment, antiwar activities, individual anarchism, Zen Buddhism, jazz, and a kind of romantic mystical thought. With these books Michael McClure brought an animal energy and a knowledge of art and physical human nature that was new to the scene.

The New Book/A Book of Torture was written spontaneously while McClure was in a "dark night of the soul" brought on by psychedelics. A single long poem of experience and exploration, it offers the means of liberation from the darkness it examines. Star is a wide-ranging book of chalice seeking, spiritual discovery, and political protest, grounded in the emotions and sensations of eros and play.

Selected Poems

Jaguar Skies (New Directions Book)

Rebel Lions (New Directions Paperbook, 712)

McClure, Rebel Lions. Poetry spanning a decade of personal change and growth.

Three Poems (Poets, Penguin)

Simple Eyes and Other Poems (New Directions Paperbook)

Dark Brown

An early book of poetry from the Bay Area poet, playwright and essayist. A bridge figure from the Beat Generation to the Sixties Generation, McClure read at the 1955 Six Gallery reading, when Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" debuted, and later collaborated with Jim Morrison.