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October 12th, 2008

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Bio-romantic

A conversation with poet and playwright Michael McClure

By Darrell Jónsson
For The Prague Post
June 4th, 2008 issue

JAN PŘEROVSKÝ/THE PRAGUE POST

A veteran of poetry readings with the likes of Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, McClure carries on the spirit of the '60s in his philosophy, writing and music. enlarge

Michael McClure

California Dreaming the Sixties
When: Wednesday, June 4, at 4
Where: Divadlo Minor
Admission: 70 Kč

With Paul Auster
When: Thursday, June 5, at 5
Where: American Center
Admission: Free

Without McClure’s roar, there would have been no ’60s,” actor Dennis Hopper once said.

As a friend of Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and co-author of the Janis Joplin hit “Mercedes Benz,” Michael McClure helped shape the consciousness of the era, mostly out of the spotlight. While Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg headlined the first Human Be-in, held in San Francisco in 1967, it was the array of other personalities onstage that day — San Francisco’s radio host/mystic Electric Buddha, Afro-American civil rights activist and comedian Dick Gregory, Asian linguist/poet Gary Snyder and poet/playwright McClure —who better represented the diversity of the ’60s counterculture.

Migrating to San Francisco from Seattle in the early 1950s, McClure brought with him something of the elegiac tone and appearance of the 19th-century English poet Shelley. Yet the title and content of an early work, Peyote Poem (1958), reveal the influence of the Marseilles-born dramatist Antonin Artaud, who prophesied the ’60s fascination with psychedelics, political confrontation and Asian arts.

The West Coast’s proximity to Japan and China, also reflected in the work of his friends Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder, inspired McClure’s effective synthesis of the sensual and ecological sensibilities found in Asian poetry. McClure added to the dramatic intensity by his creative use of centered and enlarged type. In his 1999 retrospective Huge Dreams (Penguin Poets), the words literally leap and roar from the page. And his continuing work as a performance poet with former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, chronicled on the DVD Love Lion (Mystic Fire Video, 1997), demonstrates that Morrison could have learned a thing or two about timeless poetics from McClure — and likely did.

In Prague this week as part of the Writers’ Festival, McClure talked to The Prague Post about overlooked branches of ’50s and ’60s counterculture, and their unique contributions.

The Prague Post: Can you tell us about your early days in San Francisco, and how it was different from other places you lived?

Michael McClure: I moved to San Francisco when I was 19 or 20. I was already writing poetry, but what I was most interested in was the transfer of philosophy from action painting to poetry. I had intended to take classes from painters like Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, who I thought were in San Francisco at the time. But they were not, so I ended up studying with Robert Duncan, a great American poet, and had Kenneth Rexroth as some kind of mentor.

San Francisco was at odds with the rest of America in the same sense, as Kenneth Rexroth said, that Barcelona was to the Spanish Anarchists. The Chinese and Italian communities were tolerant of a wider spectrum of thought than most of the United States. As young poets, we were angry and felt that our hearts were confined. We were greatly concerned with speaking out against the wars beginning in Asia, and against censorship.

In terms of our lives, speaking for people like myself, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, we were quite poor. But we were poor in a way that had some pleasure, in that we had a community of friends who were artists. Although at the time, none of us ever expected to have a book published or a painting showing in a glossy gallery.

TPP: What can people learn today from this sustainable creative community?
MM: Turn off your television sets, turn to your most intelligent friends, and let’s pull the world together with innate conscious intelligence, not the massive propaganda shoveled through the media.

TPP: Don’t we need a new word, other than “beatnik” or “hippie,” to describe the diverse subcultures that emerged in post-World War II California? What would it be?
MM: Bio-romantics.

TPP: Where and how did the Asian influence impact your community of bio-romantics?

MM: Very early we started climbing into old cars that somebody lent us or gave us and driving to wild areas — not so wild now— like Mount Tamalpais, Mount Diablo, Big Sur and Death Valley. We began to deepen our consciousness and make ourselves more aware of what we saw there, which was much bigger than anything we saw in the city, or in our culture. It had to do with what we were trying to understand about Asian thinking. Whether you’re talking about the Tang Dynasty, Zen or Tao or earlier periods, there is that way of seeing that man is not the center of nature; nature is the center of nature. And our divisions of past, present and future, and he, she and it, all have considerably less to do with the nature of reality than we had learned in our schools and our reading.

TPP: Why did the West Coast subcultures that emerged in the ’50s and ’60s take more readily to the relatively distant Asian culture than that of nearby American Indians?

MM: The Asian consciousness stood out more against the background of the city. In San Francisco, you had scenes like old men sitting on street corners playing two-string erhus. And it’s still there. One of the last things I saw in San Francisco recently was an old Chinese man sitting near the street, playing a cobra-skin fiddle.

TPP: Still, looking at your early work, it’s obvious you were influenced by Artaud’s experience and writings on the Taramara Indians.

MM: Artaud was one of the great soul explorers, and his exploration is one of the greatest gifts to the 20th century, in the way that D.H. Lawrence’s exploration of his own great soul is. For inspiration and imagination, I’d take just those two men, and what they gave us. It’s so different from one to the other, and yet so important to a younger artist looking for inspiration and imagination.

TPP: Picking up on the theme of this year’s Writers’ Festival, “1968: Laughter and Forgetting,” what from your perspective is important to remember, what’s important to laugh about and what might we be better off forgetting?

MM: I think maybe we should laugh about our own seriousness, and then intensify it and carry it on even stronger. It’s a different world, though, and people need to handle it in different ways.

TPP: When did you first start using the autoharp in combination with your poetry?

MM: When I met Bob Dylan and he found out I was interested in writing songs, but didn’t know how to play an instrument. He said, “What instrument would you play if you had it?” I immediately said, “An autoharp.” I didn’t know what an autoharp looked like, but I knew it was a folk instrument from the Appalachians. The next thing I knew, Dylan gave me one. It sat on my mantle for six months before I dared to touch it, and then I began picking it up and playing it.

TPP: You’ve worked with minimalist composer Terry Riley, and are busy with Ray Manzarek again. How are your current music projects going?

MM: I’d like to work more with Terry Riley. We often play music together, and we made a CD in 2004, I Like Your Eyes Liberty (Sri Moonshine Music), which actually won an award. My last performance was with a group I call “Big Mix,” which is: Manzarek from The Doors; an extraordinary bassist, Rob Wasserman, who works with Lou Reed; fusion saxophonist George Brooks; and Jay Lane, who works with Charlie Hunter. We just played at the new Yoshi’s, one of the largest jazz clubs in San Francisco.

TPP: How much of what you’re doing is improvisational?

MM: A lot of it is like our early poetry readings; it’s done with the audience, and takes on the tone and presence that’s there. On the other hand, much of it is like Miles Davis. When Miles went on stage, he knew exactly what he was going to do — and then he did something else. That’s what we’re doing.

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at tempo@praguepost.com

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