Conversations With Michael Mcclure

Conversations with Michael McClure features twenty interviews from 1969 to 2015 that chronicle the capacious scope of McClure’s creativity. McClure (1932–2020) is notable not only for his considerable achievements as a poet and prose writer of the Beat Generation, but also for the many collaborative connections he forged over seven decades. From the 1950s to his death, McClure worked with an astonishing range of important figures in the worlds of painting, filmmaking, music, and science. McClure counted among his friends and acquaintances Bruce Conner, Harold Pinter, Amiri Baraka, Richard Brautigan, Wallace Berman, George Herms, Lawrence Jordan, Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Sterling Bunnell, Francis Crick, Gary Snyder, Francesco Clemente, and Diane di Prima. During his early years in San Francisco, McClure attended Kenneth Rexroth’s literary evenings and formed significant lifelong friendships. Among those friends were poets Philip Lamantia and Robert Duncan, who became a mentor to McClure. He also learned much from Charles Olson and adopted several features of Olson’s concept of “Projective Verse” in his own work. McClure’s exchange of letters with experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage lasted for four decades. During his illustrious career, McClure published fourteen books of poetry, eight books of plays, and four collections of essays. Conversations with Michael McClure reveals the many contributions of this central personality in the evolution of the American counterculture.

Lion roars, detonated dada, and visceral emotional truths: McClure describes these tantras as “ceremonies to change the nature of reality."

More than half a century of interviews with one of the most distinguished contemporary American poets

The final book of poems from a Beat Generation legend, Mule Kick Blues finds McClure restlessly innovating until the end. Completed over the last years of his life, Mule Kick Blues is the final book of poems by Beat Generation legend Michael McClure. Taking its title from an innovative sequence of homages to blues musicians like Leadbelly, Willie Dixon, and Howlin' Wolf, and evoking Kerouac's concept of "blues" poems, Mule Kick Blues contains stark meditations on the poet's mortality as well as the nature and zen poems for which McClure is known. With shout-outs to lifelong friends like Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, and Gary Snyder, the long poem"Fragments of Narcissus," and the profound and moving sequence "Death Poems," Mule Kick Blues is a definitive statement by one of the most significant American poets of the last 60 years. "His validity and his intelligence and his intensity and his curiosity about the complexly diverse world in which we live is to me extraordinarily interesting."--Robert Creeley

Rebel Lions, Michael McClure's first book of poetry since the retrospective Selected Poems (1985), spans a decade of profound personal change and poetic evolution for the author. In an introductory note, he provides a backdrop for the collection, which moves from old life to new. McClure's work bursts forth from the matrix of the physical and spiritual. "Poetry is one of the edges of consciousness," he asserts. "And consciousness is a real thing like the hoof of a deer or the smell of a bush of blackberries at the roadside in the sun." In the first section of Rebel Lions, "Old Flames," the poems range from the realistic ("Awakening and Recalling a Summer Hike") to the metaphorical ("The Silken Stitching"), as the poet addresses a life on the verge of transformation. The second section, "Rose Rain," exults in a life transformed through love's alchemy. Rebel Lions closes with "New Brain," poems affirming the freedom of all humankind and matter in the eternal now.

Legendary poet Michael McClure expands upon Charles Olson's proprioceptive poetic with Aristotelian metaphysics, Lorca's duende, environmental awareness, and biological exploration.