Michael McClure: Selected Poems - Hardcover

McClure, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0811209504 ISBN 13: 9780811209502

Publisher: New Directions, 1986

Synopsis

Poems written during the past twenty-four years deal with night, nature, death, dreams, poetry, painting, freedom, and politics

About this title

Reviews

This small personal sampler of 25 years of McClure's work has an earnest and programmatic quality to it. An ecological romantic with Marxist tendencies, McClure juxtaposes the evil of politics with the virtue of what he calls "biology," a kind of ideal, Lawrentian natural order. Strident and morally didactic, many of his poems read like political or religious chants. As he states it, the poem has value more "as an extension of myself, as a gesture," than as a text per sea theory that leads inexorably to self-indulgence and excess. McClure is enamored of splashy upper-case interjections and multiple exclamation points, but the effect is somewhat quaint and endearing. He writes of one of his own poems: "It is comprised, as our cells are, of Pleistocene hunts and toy umbrellas." Cute, yes, but quintessential McClure.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Influenced by abstract expressionism, McClure splashed and splattered his poems from the Beat rebellion of the 1950s through the anarchistic rhetoric of the 1960s; but, minus the events and circumstances that produced them, the poems seem like a long series of affectations and mannerisms. Selected "intuitively" by the author, they rail and shout, via capital letters and exclamation points, and are sadly dated: "Can it get one high? . . .as we make the revolution/ with our bodies." The poems do all the thinking for us, and what once seemed like energy now seems like bombast. Readers will get a better flavor of McClure's appeal from the original collections (many are still in print), which include the poet's more flamboyant and flagrantly sexual poems. Leonard Kniffel, Detroit P.L.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811209504
• ISBN 13: 9780811209502
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 116