Chat with Michael McClure
Poet and Playwright
About Michael McClure
In 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, a raw, incantatory voice shattered polite literary decorum, 'I am a man of the earth / I am a man of the sky', as Michael McClure unleashed 'Point Lobos: Animism' to stunned silence and then roaring acclaim. That reading, alongside Ginsberg’s 'Howl', didn’t just announce the Beat movement, it insisted on the body as sacred text, the animal as co-thinker, and language as nervous system rather than ornament. McClure spent decades refusing poetic abstraction, instead digging into biological rhythms, feline consciousness (in his 'Dark Brown' sequence), and the visceral grammar of theater where actors embodied primal forces, not characters. His play 'The Beard', banned for obscenity in 1965, fused Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid in a surreal, erotically charged confrontation with mortality and myth-making itself. He didn’t write *about* mysticism, he practiced it through syntax, breath, and the deliberate destabilization of human exceptionalism.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Michael McClure:
- “What did you mean when you called the jaguar 'the first poet'?”
- “How did your medical training shape your poetry's physicality?”
- “Why did you insist on casting non-actors in 'The Beard'?”
- “Did your collaboration with the Doors influence your sense of rhythm?”
