Reviewing Michael McClure's Scratching the Beat Surface in 1982, I wrote: In George Oppen's only review, published in Poetry in August of 1962 and dealing with work by Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Michael McClure, he dismisses McClure's verse as born of "excitement, intoxication, meaninglessness, a destruction of the sense of oneself among things." Assuredly, McClure's poetry is both generated by and celebrative of those Dionysian elements the Apollonian/modernist sensibility finds offensive. In terms of politics, however, Oppen's dismissal seems curious; while he and his fellow objectivists were in the main high modernists in terms of practice, Oppen himself was a left-wing activist. Further, his own work shifted from the Pound/Williams influence in the objectivist Discrete Series to a more subjective poetry in the mid-fifties. But where Oppen's leftist politics are occasionally programmatic (Marxist), McClure's leftist politics are at once more diffuse and more encompassing; it is here, I think, that Oppen feels from McClure a threat which goes beyond the simply aesthetic. McClure considers himself above all a poet of revolt. A 1961 essay: at all times revolt is the search for health and naturality"; "hysteria is a real animal process"; "revolt is a striving to a regimen that is conceived of as athletic and physical." And essentially, and probably most disturbing to Oppen, "there is no political revolt. All revolt is personal" ("Revolt").

or

Like a key source, Shelley, McClure is often, even sometimes painfully, rhetorical, yet his exploration of revolt is an exploration of sound. A few years ago Robert Peters likened McClure's poetry to action painting, wherein "the energy screaming (at times) streaming (at others) is as important as any direct poetic statement." As a "mammalian communicator" (Peters's term) McClure has attempted to register the raw, animal, sexual possibilities of the howl, the grunt, the spontaneous cry:

(Ghost Tantras, 1964). "What I am most concerned with now," he tells David Meltzer in his San Francisco Poets interview, "is the river within ourselves. The biological energy of ourselves as extrusions or tentacles of the universe of meat."

"In Tantrism the human body acquired an importance without precedent in India's spiritual history. The body is no longer the ,source of sufferings' but the surest and most accomplished instrument available to man for the 'conquest of death"' (Mircea Eliade, Patanjali and Yoga). "Poetry is a muscular principle." Tantra (whether Buddhist or Hindu) is antispeculative, antiascetic. "Since the body represents the cosmos and all the gods, since liberation can be gained only by setting out from the body, it is important to have a body that is healthy and strong . . . liberation is pure spontaneity" (Eliade, Yoga). Poetry is a muscular principle. The Kid (William H. Bonney, d. 1891 at 22) charmingly seducing Jean Harlow (d. 1937 at 25) in McClure's The Beard (December 18, 1965, the Actor's Workshop, SF; a few days later charged in Berkeley with "lewd and dissolute conduct in a public place"): "YOU'RE A BAG OF MEAT! A white sack of soft skin and fat held in shape by a lot of bones! . . . Nobody's free of being divine!"

Tantra (tan: "multiply"; sanskrit: "to weave"). A sacred, ritualistic, transformative text. Tantras="Treatises on the Doctrine." Often centering on Shakti (energy), wife of Shiva (whose cosmic dance announces the apocalypse) and divine, in the form of a dialogue (The Kid and Ms. Harlow?). Ghost Tantras, "ghost texts." Or, perhaps, tantrums, a moving out of the intellect into the (hysterical) song of the body.

"When a man does not admit he is an animal, he is less than an animal. . . . Blake was the revolt of one man. He was not a revolutionary but a man in revolt. A creature in revolt can conceive that there is NO solution and that there will be unending construction and destruction. . . . Blake revolted with his being and maintained himself as a visionary mammal as best he might in his circumstances. His creature pride and his vision in works of poetry and painting survive as part of his body. "REVOLT IS A BIOLOGICAL PROCESS" ("Blake and the Yogin,").

(Biographical: b. Marysville, Kansas, October 20, 1932; removes to San Francisco from Tuscon, 1955, with Joanna; enrolls in Duncan's SF State Poetry Workshop, participating in Faust Foutu reading; meets Ginsberg at a party for Auden; Six Gallery reading [October 13, 1955, with Rexroth, Ginsberg, Snyder, etal.] first publicreading; first published poeins: "For Theodore Roethke" [villanelles] Poetry, 1956; revived anarchist Ark, with James Harmon, Ark II Moby I; first book, Passage, published by Jonathan Williams's Jargon, 1956; extended late fifties correspondence with Olson [McClure's papers: Modern Literature Collection, Simon Fraser; Olson's papers: Olson Archive, Storrs]; first play: "The Raptors" [1957]; first play produced: "The Feast!" [1960]; Journal For the Protection of All Beings, ed. with Ferlinghetti & Meltzer [1961], includes "Revolt"; 1962, Joins faculty of California Colleges of Arts and Crafts, Oakland [professorship, 19771; spontaneous novel: The Mad Club [1970]; role in N. Maller's film "Beyond the Law," film script with Jim Morrison [The Doors {of Perception}], autoharp from Bob Dylan, writes "Mercedes Benz" [recorded by Janis Joplin]; report on trip to 1971 UN Environmental Conference [Stockholm, with Snyder, Stewart Brand, Sterling Bunnel, and Joanna, rep. Project Jonnah] for Rolling Stone; Josephine: The Mouse Singer [first performance, NY, 1978], Obie Award for Best Play of the Year.)

Along with Rexroth, Olson, Snyder, and Tarn, McClure reads seriously "outside his discipline." Snyder in 1974: "One of my best friends, who's also one of my gurus in a way, stopped just short of his Ph.D. in biophysics, and now he fixes trucks. But whenever I have a really difficult question I go to him, on the scientific level. And he recommends books to me which I recommend to Michael sometimes" (Knight, The Beat Diary). M.'s "reading list" appended to Scratching the Beat Surface in- cludes not only Blake, Duncan, Olson, Shelley, and Snyder, but: Garma C. C. Chang, The Buddhist Teaching of Totality; Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century; Harry J. Jerison, Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence; Ramon Margalef, Perspectives in Ecological Theory; Lynn Margulls, Origin of Eukaryotic Cells; Philip Tobias, The Brain in Hominid Evolution; et al. And of course Francis Crick, Of Molecules and Men, and Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power, and Sociology.

Crick and Odum, especially, are crucial sources, as is Morowitz, who tells McClure (who is reading Olson's "The Kingfishers" and thinking in terms of a "systemless system") that the flow of energy through a system acts to organize the system," which is what-

Williams: "Therefore each speech having its own character the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form";

Olson: "The poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy construct and, at all points, an energy discharge";

Levertov: "Form is never more than a revelation of content";

Creeley: "Nothing will fit if we assume a place for it." Ginsberg: "Meaning Mind practiced in spontaneity invents forms in its own image & gets to Last Thoughts" recognize in their own contexts.

Francis Harry Crick (b. 1916), biophysicist, purchased McClure's broadside "Peyote Poem" in San Francisco four years before winning the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1962 for his work on the double helix of the DNA molecule; he includes two lines, "THIS IS THE POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE / we smile with it," in Of Molecules and Men. (Crick contributes a short essay to the McClure symposium issue, Margins, 1975.) McClure: "Crick's use of those lines shows the important, yet little known reaching out from science to poetry and from poetry to science that was part of the Beat movement. . . . In childhood I had intended to be a naturalist or biologist and he helped me keep that consciousness vital" ("The Beat Surface" in memoriam Olson).

Re: Odum and the question of energy. Talking with Gary Snyder at his in-progress house in the Sierra foothills in 1974 (he was not yet serving as an advisor to Jerry Brown, and lived with his wife and sons without telephone, electricity, and running water); he told me, when I asked him about his sense of Buckminster Fuller's notion of "self- interfering patterns": "In energy-system terms, bodies are temporary energy traps in which energy is held briefly and can be deferred into other uses, other ecosystems, on the path of energy from the sun to the energy-sink in the universe. And so all living structures, and perhaps all material structures, are various augmentations and temporary constructions that energy takes on its way to the heat-sink. H. T. Odum says that language is a form of energy trap, and that particular kinds of communications which he calls tiny energies in precise forms released at the right moment amount to energy transfers that are much larger than their size would indicate-which is what poems are, from an ecological energy-systems man's point of view."

And McClure: "It is the surge of our physical energy that carries us through - and we need no vanity about having it -- it is an inheritance. It is also the surge that organizes the system into tribes. It spurts and it radiates. It is the energy that defines poetry. 'The Kingfishers' is an ode to energy and of energy" ("The Shape of Energy," 1982).

(Last month George Butterick sent a long essay on "The Kingfishers" for AP; on the phone a few days later, "I think it's my best piece on Olson," in a difficult voice from his library office. I hadn't learned of his illness until very late, then yesterday a letter from Paul Christensen, "George Butterick has died.")

as long as it was necessary for him, my guide
to look into the yellow of that longest-lasting rose

"The ideal of Yoga, the state of jivan-mukti, is to live in the 'eternal present,' outside of time. 'Liberated in life,' the jivan-mukta no longer possess a personal consciousness-that is, a consciousness nourished on its own history-but a witnessing consciousness, which is pure lucidity and spontaneity" (Eliade, Yoga).

"Pure lucidity and spontaneity." Wilhelm Reich (b. 1897, d. 1957 in Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania), developed out of Freud's libido theory the concept of orgone, "life energy." Of the "beat writers," William Burroughs especially was drawn to Reich's thought and praxis, as was McClure, who told David Meltzer in 1969, "Reich came like a bolt out of heaven for me. I found the muscular contractions and armoring he speaks of to be quite clearly within my own body. I tried a Reichian analyst. There wasn't one on the West Coast. I worked through experiments, exercising, automatic writing, and a lot of good friends and luck to find the armorings and to do what I could to eliminate them. I was in a state of extraordinary biological distress when I stumbled onto his work. I found it to be a great godsend, messiah-send - if the messiah is the universe."

In Function of the Orgasm (1942), Reich argues that the orgasm represents a spontaneous discharge of sexual excitation, that "the involuntary bio-energetic contraction of orgasm and the complete discharge of excitation are the most important criteria for orgastic potency." As the point of orgasm is reached in sexual intercourse, a "clouding of consiousness" ("beclouding of consciousness" -- Kerouac, "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose") occurs, which erupts into the ultimate Dionysian transportation out of the ego. Reich discovers that both male and female patients suffering from a variety of neuroses are unable fully to experience this transport, that they all retain a great degree of intellectual lucidity during orgasm. He concludes that this produces a sexual stasis in the individual, a clogging-up of sexual energy that fuels the neurosis. It is only when "full orgastic gratification took place in the immediate present" that sexual equilibrium and mental health might be restored.

W. Burroughs: "Reich advocated the use of orgone therapy as both a preventative and the best treatment for active cancer. He considered that cancer occurs when the electrical charge at the surface of the cells falls to a suffocation point" (The Adding Machine, 1985).

ALL IS QUIET BUT MY SONG TO ME, YOUR SONG
    to you. This is our touching. This
is the vast hall that we inhabit. Coiling,
standing. Cock into rose-black meat. Tongue
into rose meat. Come upon your breasts, Come
    upon your tongue, come in your burrow
Cavern love snail breath strange arm line.

"Revolt is a striving to a regimen that is conceived of as athletic and physical. Its function is to uncover and keep alive the natural physical urges of our meat. Some of these processes are sex, desire for awareness, and desire for pleasure. Perhaps they are not divisible but all erotic" ("Revolt").

Hymns to St. Geryon and Other Poems (1959): Hercules killed Geryon, a human beast with three bodies and one pair of legs, to capture his oxen; Dante figures Geryon as falsehood, McClure as the instinctual/social strain: "I am the body, the animal, the poem / is a gesture of mine." (McClure opens the Selected Poems, 1986, with work from St. Geryon.)

Robert Bly (News of the Universe) reminds us that Cartesian dualism stands as the bulwork of the "Old Position," solidifying an earlier Augustinian view of nature as evil. "I think, therefore I am," privileging the mind (the city) over the body (nature). For poets like Lessing, Pope, and Arnold, nature becomes the Other, something either to be feared or disdained, while civilization offers salvation. Romanticism provides a general revolt, but Bly finds little use in the English Romantics who (save Blake) remain "primarily in the realm of feeling"; even Keats, Bly suggests, finds it necessary in a poem like "Ode to a Nightingale" to return to the comfort of human society at the last moment, unable to sustain himself in a "twofold consciousness." Bly turns to Nerval, Holderlin, and Novalis as examples of poets who are willing to accept the "dark side" of nature in their praise of the unconscious-night, sexuality, woman-over against Wordsworthian idealization.

Harlow: "Then what's so great about me?-What do you want with a bag of meat?" (The Beard).

Bly continues by suggesting that we reconsider what ,'modern poetry" is. There is, he admits, a genuine tradition sourced in Corblìe and LaForgue, and continuing through Eliot, Auden, and Lowell, and its essence is irony. The major tradition for Bly, however, is the Novalis/Holderlin/Goethe line, a line whose mood "is not ironic but swift association." (McClure: "You see I didn't plan to write a stanza, saying 'now I'll tell about the time I went down to the candy shop' - Instead one memory would bring another memory into being. Sometimes memories changed in the middle of a stanza, then I began to sense how one of them would light up another related memory and that memory would light up another and that one would light up another. Then a constellation of those three, having been lit, would light up another one which would be seemingly disparate but was related to the constellation of the three" [1974, The Beat Journey). Where Eliot accepts with resignation that the mermaids will not sing to him, poets of the primary tradition (Rilke, Lawrence, Snyder, McClure) will not, as they refuse to collapse into a Cartesian dualism.

1961: "Body is the major force, and intellect is a contained auxiliary. . . . The physiological processes of the Body, and the emotions, desires, hungers, organs, nerves, etc. are the Body. And the Body, as in the planaria, is Spirit. . . . There is a single SELF now, I know it and feel it" ("Revolt"). 1982: "It is our over abstracted nature that does not see the complexity, or feel the complexity, of the body. Charles Olson realized that when he wrote his essay, 'Projective Verse'. There is no separation between body and mind" ("The Shape of Energy").

Ghost Tantras, beast language. The Fall is, perhaps, a fall into language. It is language, words (the mind-"I think, therefore I am"), which forces us into dualistic thinking, as each word represents a conceptual category. The more literate we are, the more "civilized," the further we are from the Garden, from the body. (Thus women, constantly reminding men of their corporeal selves, in all patriarchal religions-from mainline Christianity to conservative Buddhism - are seen as instruments of evi ']: tile tei- nptress, seductress.) To perceive an object is to name it; to name an object is to objectify it, thus ever increasing our distance from the One. The poet uses language to transcend language, probably a losing proposition. What we cannot speak about, Wittgenstein tells us, we must pass over in silence. McClure: "Look at stanza 51. It begins in English and turns into beast language-star becomes stahr. Body becomes boody. Nose becomes noze. Everybody knows how to pronounce NOH or VOOR-NAH or GAHROOOOO ME."

Or, M. Merleau-Ponty. (Butterick has Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, in Olson's library, "Olson's Reading: A Preliminary Report"): "I regard my body, which is my point of view upon the world, as one of the objects of that world. . . . Yet the absolute positing of a single object is the death of consciousness. . . . To be a consciousness or rather to be an experience is to hold inner communication with the world, the body and other people, to be with them instead of beside them." One of the central projects of phenomenological positivism, with its insistence on the ontological and epistemological primacy of perceptual experience, is the (reinstatement of the body as aperture. Poetry is a muscular principle, and it is only in the body (which includes, McClure reminds us, the mind: It intellect is a function of the body") that we are in the world. Again, Merleau-Ponty: "Our century has wiped out the dividing line between 'body' and 'mind'. . . . For many thinkers at the close of the nineteenth century, the body was a bit of matter, a network of mechanisms. The twentieth century has restored and deepened the notion of flesh, that is, of animate body" ("Man and Adversity"). We find this in Lao Tzu ("One who recognizes all people as members of one's own body / is sound to guard them"), Whitman/Thoreau/Emerson, and the New Physics. Duncan: "Merleau-Ponty sounded to me like some sections of my journals. . . . I find him almost impossible to read. He seems too redundant and robbing of my own thoughts" (Faas).

Aldous Huxley: "In Blake's words, we must I cleanse the doors of perception'; for when the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears to man as it is-infinite" ("Culture and the Individual"). Our current (USA, 1988) attitude towards drugs belies Merleau- Ponty's conclusion that in any actual sense politically, socially, culturally-Cartesian dualism has been erased. The political hypocrisy/conspiracy of "just say no" is traced early in Alfred W. McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (1972), which the CIA tried to suppress, and Allen Ginsberg's "Addiction Politics" (Allen Verbatim, 1974). Yet we know from R. Gordon Wasson that perhaps the (acci- dental) ingestion of a hallucinogenic plant, probably a Flyagaric, led to our first recognition of deity. Certainly, under the influence of psilocybin, any notion of mind/body split is profoundly eased. Lawrence Lipton: Even ganja awakens us to recognition that "the magic circle is, in fact, a symbol of and a preparation for the metaphysical orgasm. While marijuana does not give the user the sense of timelessness to the same degree that peyote does, or LSD or other drugs, it does so sufficiently to impart a sense of presence" (The Holy Barbarians).

Psilocybin offers recognition of integration, McClure writes in "The Mushroom": "All of our notions of the human body's shape are wrong. We think it is a head joined on a torso and sprouting arms and legs and genitals or breasts, but we're wrong. It is more unified than that. It's one total unity of protoplasm." Or, more complexly to Meltzer, "All I am saying is we can grant recognition of that river within us which, in mixed vocabulary, could be the Hindu 'We are all one,' but it would seem that that doesn't lend any solution. I am many is where it is at. I am a heart, I am three trillion cells, I am a lung, I am many neuronal centers."

Timothy Leary: "1960. Allen Ginsberg phoned from New York, eager to begin our campaign for the politics of ecstasy. He had lined up mushroom sessions for Jack Kerouac, Robert Lowell, and Barney Rossett, famed avant-garde publisher....... Kerouac had propelled me into my first negative trip....... Throughout the night Kerouac had remained unmoveably the Catholic carouser, an old-style Bohemian without a hippie bone in his body. Jack Kerouac opened the neural doors to the future, looked ahead, and didn't see his place in it. Not for him the utopian pluralist optimism of the sixties. . . . Lowell, always the gentleman, took me aside and wrung my hand in gratitude. 'Now I know what Blake and St. John of the Cross were talking about,' he said. 'This experience is what I was seeking when I became a Catholic"' (Flashbacks).

(Catholicism: Transubstantiation, the body into the body. Everson as Brother Antoninus; Rexroth's deathbed conversion; Duncan on Olson: "So Charles wanted to keep the Catholic origins somewhat in the same way that I kept my Hermeticism" [Faas]. All of McClure [a non-Catholic] 's network).

Snyder interview, 1974: "I've been really getting into botany. McClure got me started on learning plants more. It's so exciting to get through that initial kind of brush-tangle of taxonomy and get into seeing something."

1954, McClure meets Duncan, enrolling in his SF Poetry Center workshop. Two years earlier Duncan had taken mescalin ("the only time I took a hallucinogenic drug") in an experiment at Stanford (CIA sponsored?). His experience was typical, but unlike with McClure, Ginsberg, and Leary the revelation distressed him: "My sense of the external was so acute that I raised the question, as I still often do, whether there is any being in me which can be called my ego. . . . Later, in possibly 1963, at the University of British Columbia, I gave a lecture which was about my refusal to have any mystical experiences because I wanted to be made out of thousands of threads that I myself have tied" (Faas).

Again, in 1958, Francis Crick purchased a copy of "Peyote Poem" broadside at Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore in SF, written out of McClure's first experience with the drug, five buttons given him by the artist Wallace Berman, his "peyote father" ("The Beat Surface").

The dark brown space behind the door is precious
    intimate, silent and still. The birthplace
       of Brahms. I know
all that I need to know. There is no hurry.

In 1963 McClure writes of psilocybin, peyote, heroin, and cocaine; in 1982 he opens Scratching the Beat Surface with his "Peyote Poem" and narrative surrounding it. (In 1969, interviewed in Algiers, Eldridge Cleaver: "I will reenter [the United States], and I plan to shed my blood and to put my life on the line and to seek to take the lives of the pigs of the power structure in Babylon," Conversations; by the 1980s he had become a born-again Christian, working for a Christian broadcasting network.) "Revolt is a biological principle."

Mushroom: "It opens you up so that you feel internally deep inside, and all around you, the utterly human and humane. . . . People are no longer like our conception of them. They are like godly beasts."

Peyote: "Sharp divisions between inert and organic disappear. A spectrum and flow of intensities of spirit and lifemeanings is visible."

Heroin: (The mention of the word evokes hysteria, yet physicians tell us that the substance has no effect on vital organs, unlike alcohol). "A new kind of self takes over - there is not so much I. I is an interference with near-passivity. . . . A loosening of ways of thinking and the visible beauties that things have when we are relaxed."

Cocaine: "An ace of sunlight."

McClure's NET film: "I first took peyote because I heard it was great. . . . It was a divine experience. With another friend I went on a trip of investigating, taking all of it I could possibly get my hands on. What happened was that I took so many, so many times, that I began to have what I call 'the dark side of the soul,' and which Allen Ginsberg calls anxiety. The last time I took peyote it took six weeks to come down. In fact, I didn't know if I was ever going to come down. I walked up and down the street looking at the cracks in the sidewalk. . . . I vowed not to take any more hallucinogens. But then I did take one more, and I think I'm ready to take more now" (1966).

Reich's orgone experiments and McClure's experiments with drugs converge at the same vortex: poetry as muscular principle.

Allen Ginsberg on the poet's responsibility re: drug education: "And as the regular respectable professors refused to deal with that area-well, doctors and psychiatrists gave it over into the hands of the police, or the police grabbed it out of their hands. So it was left to some extent to the poets to formulate some sort of public knowledge, to transmit granny wisdom about those things" (1974, The Beat Journey).

McClure: "A crack of light must be made. There should be no lies....... There should be no mystiques of language, drugs, or sex, or..... !" ("Heroin: A Cherub's Tale").

The New Book / Book of Torture - collection of poems written "in a psychedelic state": "I am a black beast and clear man in one. With no / split or division . . . / Free of politics. Liberty and pride to guide you. You pass / from ancestral myths to myth of self. And make / the giant bright stroke like that madman Van Gogh."

( }L poema }Gk poema, var. of poiema poem, something made poi [ein] [to] make + - ema - EME.)

"Each Poem should be an experiment-in the sense that there are experiments in alchemy and biochemistry. I have my transient meatflesh to play on as if it is a harp. . . . A poem is an amino acid in the ripples of an endless sea" (September Blackberries, 1974).

The NET film, alone in a dark room, mid-summer afternoon. McClure is very young, very handsome, wearing the paisley shirt you saw everywhere that year in the Haight, at the Filmore I wanted to make poetry that didn't have images in the more sense the images describe something in the real world. But the sound of the poetry itself creates an image in the mind, the body, the muscles of the body. Created a melody that was also an image, that imprinted itself in the body."

He stands with the great lions at San Francisco's Fleishaker Zoo, those indoor cages I remember from childhood trips across the bay, lions surely long dead three decades later. He reads to them in beast language. "When a man does not admit that he is an animal. Ghrooooh!" They stir, and are roused.

Years after, he watches a snow leopardess. "She puts her face within an inch of the wire and SPEAKS to me. . . . I am surrounded by the physicality of her speech. It is a real thing in the air. It absorbs me and I can feel and see nothing else. Her face and features disappear, becoming one entity with her speech. The speech is the purest, most perfect music I have ever heard, and I know that I am touched by the divine, on my cheeks, and on my brow, and on the typanums of my ears, and the vibrations on my chest, and on the inner organs of perception. It is music-speech. . . . We see, hear, feel through the veil. WE are translated" ("A Mammal Gallery," 1982).