SELECTED POEMS OF MCCLURE PA - Softcover

McClure, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811209512 ISBN 13: 9780811209519

Publisher: New Directions, 1986

Synopsis

“Poetry,” Michael McClure has said, “is not a system but is real events spoken of, or happening, in sounds.” And for thirty years, whether in his early “Dionysian” lyrics or his evolving “bio-alchemical” wisdom, his work has shown a ferocious energy and driving physicality. A poet of and for our time, his own formal structures―the shape of his poems and his highly charged breath-line―nevertheless look back to the classics, to the Provençal troubadours, and to the Romantic verse of Blake, Keats, and Shelley. McClure’s Selected Poems is the first major retrospective collection of a poet and Obie-winning playwright associated with the San Francisco Renaissance from its start as well as the early Beat movement. The poems in the book, chosen by McClure himself, hold the undiminished force of three decades’ work distilled. Included in Selected Poems are poems and long passages from nine of the author’s earlier collections.

About this title

About the Author

Michael McClure, a founding member of the Beat Generation, has long been noted for the popularity of his dynamic poetry performances. At twenty-two he gave his first poetry reading at the legendary Six Gallery event in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read Howl. He is the co-author of the song “Mercedes Benz” and often performs with musicians, notably Ray Manzarek and Terry Riley.

From Publishers Weekly

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0811209512
• ISBN 13: 9780811209519
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 132