Selections from Ghost Tantras

An Anthology of the Poetry of Michael McClure, as selected by the author. Contains poems from all his books of poetry up to 1999, and an excerpt from his play, The Beard

"A Mammal Gallery" from Scratching the Beat Surface

The first tier of this gathering appeared in "A Symposium on Michael McClure," guest edited by John Jacob as part of my Margins Symposium Series in 1975. Jacob extended the second tier to include commentery on McClure written since the 1975 gathering, as a means of expanding and updating the discussion. McClure has proved himself a durable and versatile poet. An important figure of the Beat Movement in its heyday, his work now reaches a generation born since the 1975 gathering, as it had attracted young people in the period between the Beat flowering of the 1950s and the Margins Symposium -- and not just poets in the Beat lineage, but covering a broad swath of the literary spectrum. A measure of McClure's ability to extend his range is the interest in his work expresed by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, one of the most important scientists of the century. I'm not in any way dissing poets (myself, John Jacob, and Michael McClure included) when I insist that poetry should not be resrtricted to poets and critics, its fans should include a full spectrum of society, in McClure's case, from Hell's Angels to Nobel Prize winning scientists.

The work presented here at this time is simply a beginning. More will appear regularly over the next month or so, and, we hope, other tiers will be added in the future -- perhaps eventually continuing after the discussion has once again moved on to another medium, and yet another generation has joined the conversation.

Introduction to the On-Going Considerations of Michael McClure, by John Jacob.

from 1975 Margins Symposium:

A Surge: Introduction to the 1975 Margins Symposium, by John Jacob
For Michael, by Robert Creeley
Organism: Notes, by Anne Waldman
A Scientist's View, by Francis Crick
"Letter to Michael McClure: a Pretty Serious Poem" by Charles Olson
/Wash.'s birth: a CHOCK, by Charles Olson [in graphic format]
"A Solid Moving Through An Inferno" by Stan Brakhage.

Table of Contents, 1975 symposium

On Further Consideration:

"Michael McClure" from The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters by Steven Watson
Notes on the Work of Michael McClure, by Gregory Stephenson
Review of Michael McClure and Ray Manzarek's "Love Lion" by John Aiello.
Short Reviews of Lighting the Corners, The Mad Cub, and 3 Poems by Jake Berry
Meat Science to Wolf Net, by Lee Bartlett
"Livingness" by Jack Foley
"Let Us Throw Out the Word Man; Michael McClure's Mammalian Poetics" from "Forest Beatnicks" and "Urban Thoreaus": Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, and Michael McClure by Rod Phillips.
The Poem as Spirit-Meat: Michael McClure's Corpus of Poems, by Robert Peters

Into a New Millenium:

"Michael McCLure: A Year 2000 Consideration," by John Jacob.
"For Michael McClure - Reading at D.G. Wills" by Jerome Rothenberg.