Tomorrow, at the California Shakespeare Theater, in Orinda, California, there will be a memorial to poet, playwright and thinker Michael McClure, who passed away in May of 2020. Along with Diane di Prima, of all the great poets we have lost in the past few years, Michael for me defines an era. It’s funny to think of it now, but it’s McClure and di Prima who somehow stand for a whole experiment in poetry and living that remains vital to me, and I imagine always will. I think it is partially the integration of their poetry with a way of thinking about living that is the key to their vitality.
In his introduction to the first edition of Ghost Tantras, published by City Lights in 1964, McClure wrote:
I WAS HERE AND I LIKED IT!
It was all O.K.
I suffered.
There were scents, and flowers, and textures, beautiful women.
I was a handsome man. I invented love.
I radiated genius for those who saw me with loving eyes.
I was happy — I laughed and cried. Constantly new
sights and sounds. I trembled and sweated
at the sight of beauty. I laughed at strong
things because I loved them — wanting to kick them in
and make freedom. When I go I’M GONE.
Don’t resurrect me
or the duplicates of my atoms.
It was perfect !
I am sheer spirit.
Tomorrow, poets, musicians, publishers, friends will celebrate this poet who some link to Shelley and Lawrence, and who I see as a human being able to intuit his living on earth in relation to all other living beings, and simultaneously to flesh that out in relation to the beauty, and sometimes terror, he sensed in the arts of painting, music, dance, theater. He wanted to reach most of all, to reach out, to resist, to feel the softness of the couch beneath his lover and himself, the dissolving of inside and out, the hummingbird, the bombs falling on Cambodia, consciousness creating and destroying itself each instant.
As a kind of parting gift, Michael left us Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems, published this year by City Lights. Editor Garrett Caples’ account of how the book was put together makes clear both McClure’s fastidiousness when it came to form and his openness to such questions as sequencing and grouping poems. A sequence of four “Death Poems” in a section called “MORTALITIES” evinces one of the most joyful attitudes toward death I’ve seen in poetry, something perhaps not surprising to readers of McClure, but still a fantastic thing to have:
TO GROW OLD IS A JOY PRECEDING THE BIG ONE.
Death is a dark chocolate cake,
sweet, and filled with deep blue tortures.
Remember Michael tomorrow, remember joy, remember poetry.