CAPITALIZATION in Grenier's Series: Poems 1967-1971

Above is the title page of Robert Grenier's collection SERIES: Poems 1967-1971 [Kensington: This Press, 1978]. It should be understood that this bracket of work/time is not wholly representative of the range of writing Grenier did in those years. Grenier was working during this period on many of the poems that would eventually find their way into A Day At the Beach [New York: Roof Books, 1985]; and there were poems that he had written between the publication of Dusk Road Games [Cambridge: Pym-Randall Press, 1967] and the beginning of the period of his temporary appointment in the English department at Berkeley [Fall 1968]--in addition to others from the early 1970's, which have never been collected, but probably never will be--poems that were submitted in manuscript (under the title Water Farmer, and rejected) to New Directions in the late 1960's. Those poems in Water Farmer would have made clear--had they been published, as Grenier's second trade collection--the bridge between the early "discipleships" to Frost, Lowell, Justice, Ashbery and Creeley, and the kind of works, initially inspired chiefly by Creeley's Pieces [New York: Scribner's, 1969], which would break cleanly from tradition, to become the minimalist triumphs of A Day At the Beach, and Sentences [Cambridge: Whale Cloth Press, 1978].

The crisis of Grenier's work, which occurs between the last works published in Dusk Road Games [1967], and the earliest poems in Sentences [1978], took place over a 5-7 year span, a relatively short period, in retrospect, but one in which he was confronting the contradictions inherent in his earliest apprehensions of the possibilities of traditional avant garde verse (a la Williams and Pound), and attempting to reconcile a psychological resistance to formulaic constructions, by focusing on smaller and smaller particles of language. This alienation from prescribed (and proscribed) linguistic formulae went through a distinct phase in Series, specifically the section entitled FALL WINTER FAMILY HOME, dated August 1970 / January 1971. In it, we can see the breakdown of the sentiment-in-words which had characterized nearly all of his work up to that point, a methodical deconstruction of the Poundian commitment to genuine speech and the Objectivists' adherence to a valid (emotive) content. Grenier's earliest successes had been characterized (in the first two sections of Dusk Road Games) by a sweetly innocent honesty of emotion, with delicate turns and picturesque youthful tropes of marriage, parenthood and pure physical joy. His attempt to salvage these traditional thematic relationships was bound to be lost in the purification and steady winnowing down of syntax and elaboration. This crisis was formulated in FALL WINTER FAMILY HOME as a dialectic between capital and lower case letters, with capitals represented as symbolic titling, signifying commands, announciatories, subjects, objects, symbols, colloquialisms, queues, or any preemptive platform from which to launch a resistant or playful response.

The campaign against titles--and capital letters--as symbols or signs of authority--both real and "verbal" (the King's English) , signals a kind of guerilla conflict (or pitched battle) against SPEECH. Capitals stand like the names over the capitals of buildings, as public displays of advertisement or enforcement in the community. Thus in Grenier's work CAPITAL letters are parodied, mocked as the evidences of power, ignorance, unconscious threat--as, in effect, power centers of language. The alienation of the individual consciousness from inherited language, from the givens of "public" speech, creates a tension in utterance which places the speaker in an ambivalent position with respect to assertion and sentiment. If the archetypes of language--its nominatives, relations and unnatural significations--dominate the speaker, there are plenty of stand-ins to address. In a capitalist sense, language is the currency of exchange or the promulgation of law--language facilitates exchange, and becomes the instrument of persuasion and expansive fulfillment. In a socialist sense, language may be the shorthand for exploitation, the tissue of half-truths or outright lies which muddy the waters of sense and equality. A psychological interpretation of the archetypes of language as a tainted inheritance of a damned culture; a paranoid rejection of the prevalent ideological roots buried in language might be any sensitive reader's familiar disaffection. True freedom may exist only through a redefinition--or purification--of language itself. Poets habitually face the resistance of received signifiers, to express a unique vision of reality. This seems to me to be an over-riding preoccupation in Grenier's quest for an artistic space that is wholly unique, and completely his own: The compulsion to resist the given, to separate oneself from external influences, and to invest a discrete space with hermetic elements (drawn characters).

In FALL WINTER FAMILY HOME, Roman capitals are isolated, treated as distinct phenomena. I noticed as early as 1968, that Grenier had a distinctly "designed" handwriting, in no sense traditional, or based on any script styles he may have seen in school. It was clear--though I wouldn't have been able to summarize my sense of it then--that he was defining himself through a deliberately eccentric printing style. His writing wasn't "neat," it didn't "flow" or organize naturally into a dominant rigid structural grid. In short, he was seeing letters as individual entities; individual words were "speaking" to him in ways that were far more interiorized and sensitized than they are for most people. The objectification of individual words, and even individual letters, as evocative signifiers, apart from their function in sentences and phrases, allowed him to see them as oppositions, as sign-signifiers, often self-reflective, inherently contradictory, or bristling with (either amusing, or terrifying) connotations. Words could generate physical movements or echoes which were sufficiently autonomous (vivid) to stand alone, or which might serve as backstops against verbal ricochets. An exchange between capitals and lower case print could create a dialectic between "wisdom" or "law" or presumed function on the one hand--and protest, critical regard and amused play on the other. In FALL WINTER FAMILY HOME, Grenier teetered on the edge of a complete abandonment of the sentimental "voice" and "persona" of his earliest commitments to the Pound/Creeley injunctions to invest in emotionally honest stances (and speech), in favor of a de-personalized object status, in which address is not a condition of the projection of a speaking voice, but a manipulation of parts of speech, broken down into manageable size, and re-constituted as non-literal data.

JOY

maple

apple

_____________________________

STEAM

inside

_____________________________

DEVOTION

_____________________________

SUCH BROWN MANSIONS

NO BASIC TASK

_____________________________

CLAPBOARDS

_____________________________

round and

round and

round the

roads of

CAPE ANN

______________________________

VOLUME

______________________________

GLAD

of that

______________________________

UNIFORM

even mine

______________________________

NOW IT IS

______________________________

SLUSH

splashed her

______________________________

BLOCKS AWAY

______________________________

PLOWS

by

______________________________

SHARPS

in the cold

______________________________

SNAPS

get it to cook

______________________________

no signs

of things

One might hope to imagine that each of these "poems" was seen, or occurred, on a single page, isolated within the whiteness of a surrounding unoccupied space. The metaphor has a separate significance in Grenier's work, too, of a dreadful or liberating white snowy expanse, a covering, drifted nothingness of a Minnesota Winter landscape. Nonetheless, their particularity and isolation as facts of being inhering as unconnected, disconnected images OF words is overpoweringly present. The capitalized words denote an object status which is not a projection of the writer's intention, but substantial presences or structures with their own integrity. Notice how the capital V, in "VOLUME" or "DEVOTION" functions as a literal wedge or blade in space. The words seen as literal resonances of their own structure, like a harp vibrating in sympathy with a rumbling train sound, or the neighbor's lawn mower singing the song of your homely vacuum cleaner.

In "SLUSH//splashed her" the word slush acquires its own literal symbolic convexity as the very thing itself. Williams's admonition to have "no ideas but in things" here is carried one step further: This isn't an idea in a thing, but words as things themselves. Not words as signs for things--"no signs//of things"--but things, simply.

The "writing" consists then of elaborations upon literal facts. "PLOWS" go "by" but the sliced off go signifies the precision of the passage of the snowplow's blade as it carves the white mass of snow. Its going is animated by (the word) "by"--the y itself, its slanting acute descender like the angle of the blade. A capitalized "Y" is different from the lower-case "y" since the capital supports an equilateral upright angle supported by a vertical pillar, whereas the lower-case creates a straight y/ tilted line. The apprehension of alphabetical structures is a key to Grenier's preoccupation with the visual "language" of shape, which vies at every point to influence, or dominate our sense of the meaning of letters in space. In "BLOCKS AWAY" the blocks become the literal rectangles of built structure, and there's a movement by increment of the sized proportion of that rectangularity as an interval of literal form. BLOCKS literally block out the metaphorical space of their area.

I find myself using this word "literal" over and over in a discussion of these poems, because it defines what is happening here. "SHARPS//in the cold" makes the word sharps black, as if the sharps were the black keys on a white keyboard. The duality of black/white, brittle(echoing)/(in the) cold, dry clarity versus soft (flat) heat. There's a literal spin or spiraling in round/and round//and round/the roads of//CAPE ANN which delights in its ability to create movement through circularity and propagating conjunctive line-breaks, resolved, like a ditty, in the elegant, poised, purity of "CAPE ANN." If it's a "poem" it tells us nothing about the place, or our experience of it, except the motion of our passage in a vehicle, of which the poem is the literal metaphor. The capitalized CAPE ANN functions as a place-holder for the placeness of a literal location on the earth, its nominative object status as a memorable recorded instance with real historical roots. The reader is "there" only in the fleeting sense that he has ridden round it, whereas the literal fact of the place remains untouched, and emptily present, a nowhere in the middle of blank space. Again, the isolation of the words, disconnected from normative syntax and specific referential values, signals an alienation from the given set of signifiers, allowing them to be seen as separate entities, with their own integrity, their own oscillating connotations.

YELLOW

boots

_______________________________

GLAD

of that

_______________________________

Maine

WILLIE

In "Maine//WILLIE" there is a quality of connotation that is wholly gratuitous to the literal meanings of the individual words. Each is a name (a noun), which stands for something. Maine is a specific space, a "state" of landscape; Willie is a person's name, but otherwise completely non-specific and generalized. Nonetheless, the "Willie-ness" of the name Willie is connected to a site-specific generic identity through the linking to a broadly geographical referent. There is an overlap of generic connotations, which creates a common intersection of senses of meaning. The place-name Maine is placed in traditional capitalized form because it has an immovable identity as a given referent; whereas Willie has a human, genetic variance peculiar to a given set of possible individuals, all of whom share the name Willie. Whatever it is about the name Willie that might suggest Maine, is not relevant to the constructed relationship which the poem sets up. If there is any gratuitous humor ignited by our sense of the name Willie, it can have no other meanings than what the poem grants us. It's an illogical equation which "doesn't work" except by improbable accident. Whoever Willie is, he may be from Maine, or he may never have set foot there, but he is in some proximity to a place-holder ("MAINE") for a place in space. A state and a person have been de-constructed and allowed to conjoin in the literal space of a printed page (or a projection of shapes) in space.

On the same level, "YELLOW//boots" opposes a color which is then modified into an adjective by the addition of the words "boots." YELLOW functions initially as nothing but a literal color, but then is "assigned" an adjectival value as the suggested application (of the cliché) to rubber, canvas-lined, boots. The color yellow has no shape, isolated from any applied syntactical context, until it is turned into a modifier by the addition of AN-other noun, whence it becomes a compound nominative phrase, a descriptive referent. Again, there is a generic non-specificity which treats the universe of known (named) objects as categorical distinctions only. These boots don't belong to anyone, are of no given size, and exist in no specific context. They may as well not even exist, in the sense of having a meaning or substantiality in any probable narrative of use. The poem, again, is a "universal" equation which defines two qualities--a color and a physical object--through the occasion of their applied linkage. By setting the two words in vertical relationship, their natural syntactical connection is thwarted, or at least brought into question by this arrangement.

YELLOW boots

is not the same thing as

YELLOW

boots

By setting them together and apart in this way, their separate integrity as individual words (as things) is preserved, until they are set into motion by syntax. Syntax is a kind of inertia, which, once allowed to gain momentum, creates a music of continuity. Objectifying that inertia, cutting it up into its constituent parts, and then arranging them in unlikely orders or positions, allows their discrete character(s) to be exposed, played and replayed. YELLOW is capitalized in order to show its fluid (liquid) physical quality, against the three-dimensional denotation of boots, a familiar form. Color as non-specific dimension (visual) literally applied to a form: Color (a certain wave-length of visible rays as perceived) paints the object as supplied.

These BUILDING BLOCKS of the alphabet suggest an ultimate deconstruction of language, which is exactly the direction Grenier's work would turn in the years following the publication of Series. Sentences evolves directly from the de-constructions of FALL WINTER FAMILY HOME. The vastness of Sentences opens out into an unbound set of instances, in which place, person (identity), and time (occasion) are all relinquished in favor of discrete fragments, formulae found, obsessively, or randomly, in the detritus of the common day's tasks. Its universal applications are freed from context, and are like annotations (captions) to a story never told. Everything's exposed but nothing is divulged.

The Magic of Bill Dan - Rock Balancing Artist

The history of Western Art had been the progression--despite a series of setbacks and false leads (like the Dark Ages)--of an increasing mastery over accurate representation, or verisimilitude. This trend underwent a deep transformation in the 20th Century, as photography and electronic imaging supplanted the hand, as media replicated our apprehension of the known: Seen, heard, followed, imagined.

Brain research suggests that we "build" the dimensions of the known out of a set of cognitive models, and that our sense of the structure of "the world" is a parallel version of "reality."

As the ability to create a third thing--the artistic object--by which to represent this "reality"--began to decline, the importance assigned to the mastery over the medium has tended to fall, leaving a residual core of insight or meaning. The artist's gift now is interpreted as the ability to see meaning and beauty, and this meaning and beauty isn't simply in the ability to create or interpret a meaningful representation in a resistant, timeless form. Most aesthetic theory now acknowledges the ephemeral and the performed as valid artistic representations of man's response to the world and his place in it.

What we know of human artistic artifact is the consequence of the endurance, the survival of objects. Through archeology, and accidental preservation, we have a rough, incomplete picture of what man made through time. Historically, we have both the works, and in some cases the text of what artists or society thought about art.

Occasionally, an artistic enterprise appears that can have only an ephemeral existence, and cannot last. This temporariness may make it seem less substantial than finished, enduring objects. If something doesn't stand the test of endurance, how can it even hold the value of its form or meaning?

The work of Bill Dan exists somewhere in a limbo between performance art and traditional sculpture. It's a skill--perhaps a mystical ability--but the artifacts it leaves in its wake are so fragile that the experience of them can only survive as a report, a photograph, or as an instance of direct experience.

Everyone, I presume, has seen a juggler, the nimble performer throwing balls or spinning plates or kicking hacky-sacks, sometimes while doing something else. These performances are feats, or learned skills--impressive, sometimes even miraculous, but we don't think of them as art per se. Performance art, on the other hand, may not have any inherent skill or ability associated with it; the idea or narrative or ingenuity of the presentation may be the point itself. Where does the "art" of Bill Dan fall in the artistic range?

The ability to balance objects against the incessant, predictable, even pull of gravity is certainly a skill, like painting or drawing or playing an instrument, or juggling fruit. But stacking irregular piles of eccentrically shaped rocks seems somehow more elemental. And stacking them in precariously insistent forms, where the points of balance are so tenuous, truncate, and fragile, does seem a very ambitious form of making.

Working in public, along the riprap shorelines of the San Francisco Bay Area Peninsula, Dan has managed to achieve a world-wide reputation as a "rock sculptor" or "rock balancer." The charming faux-amateurishness of his quest for improbable balance makes his work feel as if it is itself a kind of balancing act--between sheer audacity, religious patience, and incredible intuitive touch.

Does Bill possess some strange, special power over objects--specifically stones--that enables him to find their centers and set their tandem positions according to some ineffable formula which he's able to locate in naked space?

There's a tantalizing sense that the balance thus achieved--delicacy and weightiness poised at the edge of (im-)probability--like a weight-lifter on tiptoe--brings delight and disbelief in equal measure, made more poignant by the knowledge that these arrangements cannot survive the ravages of the elements, much less the depredations of man.

Indeed, it's this fragility and ephemerality which underscores their beauty, as momentary glimpses of some divine mediation between mass, shape and time.

There's a quiet, playful, joyous simplicity about them, which suggests a childish innocence, a delight in the found object.

Unlike Duchamp's readymades (which deal primarily with man-made "ready-mades"), or Andy Goldworthy's methodical arrangements of forms in natural settings (which work off the contrast between natural and artificial form), or Robert Smithson's landscape manipulations (which challenge our sense of the cultivated picturesque), the work of Bill Dan employs found materials to create a fleeting, formal arrangement, where the artistic skill and achievement is expressed through the act (the performance), and subsequent temporary model (artifact) of the event.

The rock sculptures he makes thus hold the residue of the process only long enough to prove his realization, but then pass back into "nature" and time, nothing lost, nothing wasted, nothing harmed.

Ecologically, they're perfect examples of a passive response to change, decay and the possessiveness of most artifact-based artistic enterprise. There's no "value" in a tumbled-down aftermath of rubble.

Metaphorically, these rock "piles" or pyramids suggest a timeless quality that goes all the way back to man's earliest kinds of inquiry into the world. And Dan's efforts suggest a kind of discipline which is clearly religious in its dedication, care, respect and uncomplicated joy. Underneath that joy must also be frustration, consternation and some self-doubt. For each achieved balance, how many failures, tumbling in a heap at his feet?

Dan has taken the house-of-cards metaphor to an absolute limit, and the results are stunning. Asked about the "meaning" of his work, he replies that "Some people try to make things too complicated. This is the opposite." Dan is a craftsman, but his craft seems so original and ingenious, that it could never be codified into a system of processes or skills. He's one of those odd birds who found an ability in himself that no one had ever really exploited. What's interesting, too, is that there is no envy or covetousness in his art. It can't be speculated or stolen or enterprised. You could try to copy him, but what would be the point? Riding a unicycle is fun, but you wouldn't do it as an artistic act. Bill Dan has found aesthetic gold among the rocks on the shore of time.

Bill Dan's website, Rock on, Rock ON!, contains more information about his activities, and Really funny stuff has lots more pictures and a video.

Serpentine

Mobile

The hovering of an invisible fly

In a room where you’ve never been

Its buzzing, insistent and pointless

The insatiable hunger for blood

The overwhelming heat

Of the oven of Summer

The rot of the world

In perfect stasis

The futility

Of nothing

Circling

Round in time

Through the tattered screen of

An empty Alabama

Afternoon

Play it Again, Hoag

What is it about girls sitting on pianos? Is it the vibration of the notes transmitted up through their butts into their romantic hearts, making them sensual and pliable? Or is it by way of the piano, and through it, to the pianist, that the woman's ineffable influence is transmitted?

Hoagy Carmichael often seemed inspired by the romance implied by the presence of a beautiful woman, as he famously was, by Hollywood, which appropriated his sultry, suave persona to bring some lyrical titillation to the adaptation of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not [1944], the Bogart-Bacall vehicle which memorialized the talented couple's real life romance (they married a year later). Carmichael's all time classic, though, Stardust, is not about passion, but passion lost, seen through a rosy glass of nostalgia, its effortless strum of notes sliding up and down the keyboard like a string of perfect pearls. The song he and Bacall sang in the little Caribbean club which was the setting for the movie, was Am I Blue? It wasn't a tune Carmichael had written, but it could have been; Bacall's deep-throated rendition sounded almost butch (which is probably what made Bacall seem so soft-tough).

Or maybe, it's that with a lady sitting at eye level, you might hope to catch a better view of her legs. What could be more inspiring than that?, as Harry Truman gazes with rapt amazement at his accompanist in this National Press Club Canteen encounter from February 1945.

Stardust has been recorded by so many people, and rendered in so many versions, it's almost become our jazz National Anthem. This one by Dave Brubeck has a lovely streamlined sound, as if Alec Wilder were riding in a 1960 Caddy Convertible. And if you want a taste of Wilder, try Sinatra doing I'll Be Around--for my money probably the teariest of the Torchies.

America's romance with the automobile also used to be associated with sex, though these days it all seems to be about danger and speed and incognito pizzazz. The radio was our conduit to the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. Today you're lucky if you can navigate through the thicket of smash-mouth conservative talk and-in-your-face hip hop jive (what my wife and I refer to as "FOONK-cha music").

Carmichael was an Indiana kid, and his hybrid drawl seemed the perfect spin on the melding of country blues, up-river jazz and Tin Pan wit that became his signature style. His lyrics always seemed to sound better with a cigarette or a toothpick dangling from his lower lip, and the slow-world of Southern livin', tarnished dreams and forsaken romantic love was the perfect antidote to the Depression Era hardships which made everyone feel lost.

If easy-goingness were a commodity, you could sell it all day and never run out of the action; and that's what Carmichael seemed to capture in his melodies, all capitulation and small-town tinsel, sweet as maple hash. Hoagy once said he'd wasted his talent, because he had more music in him than he could exhaust, and considering his portfolio, that sounds plausible. Riverboat Shuffle, Washboard Blues, Georgia on My Mind, Rockin' Chair, Up a Lazy River, In the Still of the Night, The Nearness of You, Small Fry, Two Sleepy People, Skylark, Old Music Master, Ole Buttermilk Sky, In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening, and the inimitable Hong Kong Blues. That happens in the same movie as the Bacall duet, which only goes to prove. . .well, what does it prove? That talent is where you find it, maybe. Certainly those were better days for American film and music, despite what we might like to think about our scintillating present. Hard times often produce good art, but the market is fickle. In a black and white world, things may seem simpler, and a good tune may save a dreary day, or maybe even a week.

But composing is a lonely craft, except for collaborating on lyrics. And for me, music has never been much of a social thing. I like to listen to music the old-fashioned way, just me and the record player (or CD player). Like Jon Carroll, I like the music to be "over there" while I'm sitting here. And I don't need to be waving my arms around or doing calisthenics to augment my appreciation. For me, music is the re-creation of an experience, an animated memory rewound on command, just for my pleasure. There's no top 20, or top 50, but the favorites make you breathe deeply. They're like memory's request song. That's my queue.

We Might Be Lions: Michael McClure's new Selected Poems

Michael McClure [1932- ] is, along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder, the last of the surviving members of the original Beat crew which read (or was present) at the Six Gallery in 1955. His literary credentials have always been immaculate. Coming from Kansas in early youth to the San Francisco Bay Area, he has remained a towering figure of creative energy. Though primarily a poet, he's also made huge contributions towards avant garde theater, and has been involved in art, popular music and film.

Like Snyder and Whalen and Ginsberg and Kerouac, his work has always had affinities with Eastern religion and mysticism, but he brings an emphatic and declarative style to his transcendent, arching, naturalistic vision. Like Larry Eigner's, his work is immediately recognizable--aside from a handful of very minor exceptions, with its vertically line-centered form--and like Eigner, too, it's easily apprehensible, making few demands upon the reader, aside from a healthy tolerance for wide-eyed enthusiasm and an unashamedly romantic point of view.

I often think of McClure as the counterpoint--in terms of movements and groups--of Kenneth Koch--of writers who, in each case, seem somewhat the exceptional member, each rendering his respective primitivist agenda in a simplified format that belies its underlying complexity and sophisticated sensibility. In terms of a poetics, McClure has never been interested either in larger, extended forms, or in a complex, tortured syntax, or in a highly wrought intellectual surface. For a writer of his longevity and reach, he's been amazingly consistent, having come by his approach--a kind of totemistic, hieratic, dionysian lyric, at once ekstatic and deeply chthonic--and stuck with it through fifty plus years of work.

When I first read McClure in the mid-1960's, I must admit that I found him simplistic; indeed, I imagined that were I to attempt to imitate any of its effects, I would appear hopelessly naive and ridiculous, rather as if I were trying to do a belly-dance in public. Reading Hymns to St. Geryon [1959] and Dark Brown [1961], I had the impression of an adolescent mind over-impressed with its own inebriation--indeed, its "drugged-up" mood suggested the same kind of trope that Ginsberg and Kerouac and others of the Beat stream had proposed as the proper psychological condition of the artist: high, happy and oblivious to contradiction. This apprehension gradually gave way, over time and further exposure, to a realization that McClure was by no means merely a Blakean lyricist with flower-power giddiness, but a serious explorer of the senses of wildness, and an hypnotic concentration upon the dynamism of the natural world. He was like a naturalistic physicist (or philosopher), exploring sensation(s) with an empiricist's determination.

The University of California Press has just published McClure's Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems, edited by the late Leslie Scalapino [1944-2010], the occasion of my appraisal of McClure's work. There are many ways to approach his poetry. I sometimes think of his poems as small dervish-like trances in which a possessed medium transmits vital observations (or koans) of wise insight, or as performances to incite or generate higher states of being. But McClure's sense of the sacred appears to have little to do with fixed organum of any particular sect; rather, it seems to consist of a religion based upon nature, a sort of pantheistic hierarchy of species of consciousness, with the higher animals (mammals) sharing privileged position with man, whose insights are granted as a gift inherited from outer space. Such alchemical/astrophysical notions play a preeminent part in McClure's poetic universe.

The Air

for Robert [Duncan] and Jess [Collins]

Clumsy, astonished. Puzzled

as the gazelle cracked

in my forepaws/

The light body twitches/

A slight breeze moves among whiskers.

The air curves itself to song

A trace, a scent lost among whiskers.

A form carved in the air

and lost by eye or ear.

The herd's thunder or the whack

of a tail on earth

evident only in dim vibration

less than a whirr of brush (and bushes).

Not a sound in a flat stone.

(Less than a fly

about the ears.)

An object, a voice, an odor.

A grain moving before the eyes.

A rising of gases/

An object/

An instant/Tiny, brighter

than sunlight.

The sound of a herd. The sound of a rock/

A passing.

McClure's work often seems like a summoning of the archetypical spirits of animal deities, an attempt to get inside the feeling of beasts. The poet-figure of the lion is often evoked as the persona of the speaker, humorously in Ghost Tantras [1964], where McClure summons the spirit of the lion (or of the animal kingdom generally) with repeated exclamations of "GRAHR!"--the epithet becoming for some years the signature of his reputation.

from Dolphin Skull

I AM A GOD WITH A HUGE FACE. Lions

and eagles pour out of my mouth. Big white

square teeth and a red-purple tongue. These are

magenta clouds around my head and this is my throne room. Actors perform

the drama of my being inside of you,

WEARING

YOUR

SKIN.

I

am writhing and clawing.

BEG FOR MERCY.

Blackberry bramble catching

my pants leg. A tearing sound.

Deep inside in the padded car.

Garbage truck full of petroleum fantasies.

Dogs barking under the dark

tall pine trees. Hollyhocks

and a few pink roses. You are

everyone

BUT

I am nobody.

Nobody is very large

and

powerful.

Memory is naked bodies

in a battle. The war is sensuous

as a little boy's penis.

Fighter planes are guns.

I am the river god

in love with my dreams.

Not dreams but ongoing presences

spewed from the bang

through a nervous system.

At the edge of things but reaching

way back inside.

This fragment of a larger work sets out many of the parameters of McClure's preoccupations. The assumption of the power and humility of symbols or presences as deities. The interpenetration of body and the universal flux (not unlike Dylan Thomas--another poet who explored vertical centering in his work). The attempt to penetrate bodies "way back" into the subterranean fastnesses of primitive memory. The noticing of ecological despair ("petroleum fantasies"). The acknowledgment of predation and violence, and the beauty of untamed wildness.

The zoo metaphor in McClure's work is always present, that is, the harnassing and domestication of wild being. Each of us contains the functional templates of our ancient descent, which inhabit us like ghosts, deeply buried under the presumptions of culture, and the civilizing influence of our higher brains. The interposition of a present reality is nothing more than an illusion:

MUSK CRAB SHELL

roses, warm

autumn breeze

are

part

of the BIG FIRE.

We burn

pass and change.

Adagio is too fast

for this "paramecium pace,"

zinging into senses

forgotten

and reborn.

Perfumes decorate

warm flesh.

Words and sensoria

are the body

of the moment.

Remembering New York

and the artists hotel

where a Russian

poet is

mugged in

the hall.

JUST

YOU

AND

I

here

waiting

for Hermes

with

his

message

and rainbows.

He steps through

the wall.

No one denies us.

The SHELL is like a totem object used to generate a meditation about the tranformative fire dance of change. The underlying order of change, the nodes of light and energy expressed as revealed signs, the unlikely coincidence of quotidian event and awestruck surprise.

MUSCLE TISSUE TENDON

teased

into mind-waves

IS

AN

INSTANT

of incense

and candle flame

suspended in beeping

yellow truck sounds.

I would like to sleep

in the shadowed grace

of the profile

of your nose

AND BROWS.

To the deepest

pit

a hummingbird

is a giant.

I

HAVE

abandoned it

all

for a misunderstanding

of

Chivalry,

BUT

RIGHT

HERE

IN THE GLEAM

OF

THE GRAIL.

Many of McClure's poems are frankly sexual in meaning and subject, and are to my mind among the least inhibited and purely romantic ever written. The sense of transportation via a heightened sensory stimulation is expressed through both a coherence and a confusion of comprehension. The body becomes the shore upon which the untethered soul finds solace ("THE GRAIL"), and yet this is "a misunderstanding of Chivalry." McClure's admonition to the self for the vanity (or futility) of striving through the onanism of a single writing/act is repeatedly used as a quasi-religious dialectic.

Mortality becomes a window through which the animate flicker and momentum of fate is fitfully glimpsed--

A VULTURE FLIES OVER THE EDGE

of the pine

into an ancient sonata

of blue sky.

The city ceaselessly roars

in the mid-distance

and we might be lions

looking for the meaning

of things in themselves.

Secretly knowing this moment

is tentative

we put our feet

down on it

and it is as solid

as everything

ELSE.

We are dressed

in casual elegance

and our minds

melting

together are elegant.

The instant rushes

so rapidly in the citron silver car

that there is almost

NO LOVE

as it gives way to mutual

care and support.

NOT

ENOUGH

to go on living for.

THIS

HUNGER

is for itself

and only my chest

longing for you can suppress it.

You are beyond all, in your laughter

and quietness,

and the way you imitate

the expressions of animals.

McClure with Richard Brautigan: The Two Counterculture Heroes of the Era

During the late 1960's and 1970's, McClure became identified with the counterculture brewing and boiling over in San Francisco's Haight Ashbery district. In his NET poet portrait done in the late Sixties, he tours the area, pointing out places and explaining the movement. In those days, McClure was probably better known as a playwright, for his The Beard [1965] and The Sermons of Jean Harlow and the Curses of Billy the Kid [1968]. He had a sense of the public use of attention which was defining and pragmatic. Despite the distractions of those years, he kept on writing poems, and his collected would probably run to well over 750 pages at this point. This selected volume runs to just over 300 pages, but it's a broad and deep portrait of a serious poet and explorer of the unknown.

Here's a contemporary picture of the old lion with his mane of white.