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Michael McClure: Pure Protestantism, Pure Poetry, Pure Rock 'n' Roll

Essay by Jack Foley


These are poems from what love I have invented, what soul I have made.
—Michael McClure, Of Indigo and Saffron (2011)

Poet/playwright Michael McClure has long been identified, rightly, with The Beat Generation and the extraordinary—and extraordinarily successful—assault on consciousness that the Beats represented. McClure appears as a character in Jack Kerouac’s novels, Dharma Bums (1958) and Big Sur (1962), and McClure’s own Scratching the Beat Surface (1982) has a wonderful, much-needed appreciation of Kerouac’s brilliant but neglected book-length poem, Mexico City Blues (1959): “Kerouac,” writes McClure, “was writing a mystical…, anarchist, epic-length, and open-ended poem”:

This great self-organizing act of verse-energy as it flows on and on, becoming more diverse, stronger in its self-supporting complexity—like the systems described by H.T. Odum in his remarkable Environment, Power and Society—begins to create a fundament that never existed before…creates a substrate—creates a new world, place, ground, or nourishing energy, in which a vision may come into being…I began to understand that there is never a final mystery—there is always a quark within the quark—always a structure reflecting itself in Indra’s net.

It’s a terrific passage of thoroughly deserved praise, but does it sound particularly (in the usual way we mean the word) “Beat”? It certainly doesn’t sound at all like what Kerouac might have said about a book.

It is perhaps time to remove McClure, at least a little, from the Beat context in order to see his work—his “great self-organizing act of verse-energy”—as the extraordinary, and extraordinarily complex, ecstatic achievement it is. “The struggle,” writes Leslie Scalapino in the introduction to Of Indigo and Saffron, “also is an open innocence.” From McClure’s earliest work—when, as a child, he believed himself to be William Blake!—to his most recent Buddhist-oriented productions, Michael McClure’s poetry has been an exploration of the beyond. “The surge of life,” he insists in Lighting the Corners (1993), “drifts in every direction.” And in “Simple Eyes (FIELDS),” 1994, he says, “Demands for communication are of small voice when art is pushing towards a oneness with the possibilities of imagination.”

McClure’s frequent references (as in The Beard and “Simple Eyes”) to what he calls “the kid” are an indication of his determination to remain connected to that open, child-like innocence of which Scalapino speaks and to a restless, multi-motivated spirituality which refuses to disentangle itself from the physical (and thus from that extension of the physical, the ecological) and which does not move towards “God” but towards the creation of—itself:

You and I
are a river of light
that pours
and gleams
in
the
blue-black
snows.

*

We dive into
the black, black rainbow
of the end
unless we spend
our life and build love
in creation of
what is organic.
The old views
(worn and blasted)
are a structure
of death.
Our breath
IS
TO
SERVE
THE ULTIMATE
beauty
of ourselves.

—Jaguar Skies (1975)

How does one arrive at a consciousness which is not “Christian” or “traditional” but which nonetheless transcends the everyday—which is different from we usually think and yet, in some mysterious sense, familiar (“ourselves”)? How can we achieve “Knowing in all possible directions” (Mysteriosos)?

“The Death of Kin Chuen Louie” from Fragments of Perseus (1983) is one of McClure’s least celebrated, least anthologized poems. Yet I think we can see very clearly in it the creation of the new consciousness for which the poet yearns, “the river of light that pours and gleams in the blue-black snows.” Indeed, we can see it all the more clearly because the poem is rooted in the everyday—in an experience which in fact had “happened” to McClure.

Twelve days ago, on the Festival
of the Lord Buddha, shortly
after two in the afternoon,
Kin Chuen Louie left his flat
on Kearney Street.
Louie’s young, long-haired murderer,
in black jacket and army pants,
waited with a .380
Walther automatic pistol holding
fourteen bullets. Kin Chuen Louie,
spotting his assailant, leaped
into his bright red Plymouth Fury.
The murderer stepped
to the driver’s side and fired a shot
into Louie. Louie started the ignition
and slammed into reverse.
His foot stuck on the accelerator.
The car, propelled backward with great
force, jammed between
a building and a white car
parked there—knocking loose shards
of red brick painted over with beige.
The murderer stepped quickly
to the passenger side of the trapped
and roaring car and fired seven bullets
through the windshield
into a tight pattern on the head and neck
of Louie. A ninth shot missed,
going finger-deep
into brick. The killer
fled a few yards, turned at the corner,
and disappeared down Sonoma Alley.
A moment later,
we arrived on the empty street
and looked through
shattered glass
at the young Chinese man—
blood pouring out of the holes
in his head—slumped over
on his side. It was like the close-up
in a Sam Peckinpah movie.
He was completely relaxed
—finally and almost pleasantly limp
and serene—wearing an army jacket
and grubby levis…a slender, handsome,
clean-cut face with short hair boyishly
hanging in his eyes above
the dime-size bullet holes.
The blood pouring onto the seat covers
was a thick, reddish vermillion.
There was a peaceful, robbe-grilletish,
dim light inside the car.

The shattered window was like
a frosted spider web.
Either death is beautiful to see
—or we learn the esthetic
of death from films. BUT I do know
that our physical, athletic body,
a thing of perfect loops, and secret
and manifest
dimensions and breathings of consciousness
and unconsciousness, emanates
rainbows and actions,
and black flowers
and
it is there
to bear us through this world
and to kiss us goodbye at the doorstep
of any other.
I praise Everything-That-Is
for that blessing.
I drink chrysanthemum
tea in his memory.
Candied ginger, scented with licorice
from Hong Kong
is on my breath.

I know each death

shall be as fine as his is.

What could be more repellant than the miserable death—carefully detailed by McClure— of this stunningly unimportant Chinatown hood, his name now immortalized in McClure’s poem? Yet the poet’s deep sense of the “beauty of ourselves,” of absolutely everyone, combined with the operation of the “innocent eye” of childhood allows him to arrive at an awareness which is simultaneously strange—out of bounds—and deeply familiar. In an extraordinary but entirely believable leap, McClure does not deplore but estheticizes the event: “I am in awe of the thought of the coolness and sureness of his assassin”; “It was like the close-up in a Sam Peckinpah movie.” We suddenly think, Of course that’s true. From the point of view of Beauty alone—beauty removed from moral, societal considerations, beauty removed even from our personal fears of murder—the scene is beautiful. Isn’t the redness of blood a beautiful thing? A “kid” in his innocence might see it in that way. And once that perception comes, something more follows:

It is at this point that the entire universe enters McClure’s poem. It is from this point of view, from the operation of what might be called this “river of light,” that we can see even Kin Chuen Louie and his miserable, horrific death as a portion of the “Everything-That-Is.” Even Kin Chuen Louie “creates a new world, place, ground, or nourishing energy, in which a vision may come into being.”

There is a passage in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Nature” (1836) that seems to me to be pure Michael McClure—a strain that is deeply, spiritually, even (sometimes) catastrophically American. Emerson’s courtly, elegant, carefully notated prose should not blind us to the fact that the matter of his essay is pure Protestantism, pure poetry, pure rock ’n’ roll. “Why should not we,” Emerson asks, “…enjoy an original relation to the universe?”

Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also… There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

To put it in a way that is closer to McClure’s idiom: Celebrate deep mammal genius.

Jack Foley is a widely published San Francisco poet and critic. Foley’s recent, monumental Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line 1940-2005 has received international attention and is recognized as an important compedium of California poetry. He lives in Oakland, Ca and June 5, 2010 was proclaimed “Jack
Foley Day” in Berkley.

This review first appeared in Pacific Rim Review of Books #19