Michael McClure (born October 20, 1932 in Marysville, Kansas) is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and is immortalized as "Pat McLear" in Kerouac's Big Sur.
McClure's first book of poetry, Passage, was published in 1956 by small press publisher Jonathan Williams. His poetry is heavily infused with an awareness of nature, especially in the animal consciousness that often lies dormant in mankind. Not only an awareness of nature, but the poems are organized in an organic fashion, continuing with his appreciation of nature's purity. Stan Brakhage, friend of McClure, stated in Chicago Review that:
"McClure always, and more and more as he grows older, gives his reader access to the verbal impulses of his whole body's thought (as distinct from simply and only brain-think, as it is with most who write). He invents a form for the cellular messages of his, a form which will feel as if it were organic on the page; and he sticks with it across his life..."
McClure has since published eight books of plays and four collections of essays, including essays on Bob Dylan and the environment. His fourteen books of poetry include Jaguar Skies, Dark Brown, Huge Dreams, Rebel Lions, Rain Mirror and Plum Stones. McClure famously read selections of his Ghost Tantra poetry series to the caged lions in the San Francisco Zoo. His work as a novelist includes the autobiographical The Mad Cub and The Adept.
On January 14, 1967, McClure read at the epochal Human Be-In event in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and transcended his Beat label to become an important member of the 1960s Hippie counterculture. Barry Miles famously referred to McClure as "the Prince of the San Francisco Scene".
McClure would later court controversy as a playwright with his play The Beard. The play tells of a fictional encounter in the blue velvet of eternity between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow and is a theatrical exploration of his "Meat Politics" theory, in which all human beings are "bags of meat."
McClure's play The Beard debuted at the Actor’s Workshop Theatre in San Francisco on the December 18, 1965. A second performance followed at Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium on the July 24, 1966. With the Fillmore’s high profile, the play attracted an audience of 700. After success at the Fillmore, the following month the play opened at The Committee, a theatre nightclub in the North Beach area of the city, where it was hoped it would enjoy a lengthy run.
Now aware of the play’s subject matter, the San Francisco Police Department secretly tape-recorded the first two performances and secretly filmed the third performance. Having failed in their attempts to successfully censor Allen Ginsberg’s "Howl", the performances of Lenny Bruce and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the police department was intent to succeed this time.
At the end of that third performance on August 8, 1966—only the fifth time the play had been performed in public—the SFPD raided the venue and arrested actors Billie Dixon (Jean) and Richard Bright (Billy). Under Penal Code Section 647(a) the pair were initially charged with “obscenity”, then “conspiracy to commit a felony” and ultimately with “lewd or dissolute conduct in a public place.”
The American Civil Liberties Union took the case and represented the actors. Twelve days after the arrests, the play was performed at The Florence Schwimley Little Theatre, in Berkeley. The audience included more than a hundred ACLU-invited expert witnesses, including political activists, academics, writers and even members of the clergy. Seven members of the Berkeley Police Department and the District Attorney’s office were also present. Five days later, the city of Berkeley brought its own charges of “lewd or dissolute conduct” against the play. It became a theatrical cause célèbre, until finally, after months of legal deliberation, Judge Joseph Karesh of the San Francisco Superior Court ruled that while the play did contain material of a troublesome nature, it was not appropriate to prosecute such work under the law. All the charges were dropped and the subsequent appeal lost.
Unable to perform in the San Francisco area, the play moved to Los Angeles where the play's attempt at a run was disrupted by the arrest of both Dixon and Bright at curtain down of fourteen consecutive performances. McClure recalls, “The actor and the actress actually got two standing ovations, one at the end of the play and the second when the police hauled them out of the door and into the waiting wagon and took them off to book them.”
Bibliography
Passage (1956)
For Artaud (1959)
Hymns to St. Geryon and Other Poems (1959)
The New Book/A Book of Torture (1961)
Dark Brown (1961)
Meat Science Essays (1963)
The Blossom; or Billy the Kid (1964)
The Beard (1965)
Poisoned Wheat (1965)
Unto Caesar (1965)
Love Lion Book (1966)
Freewheelin Frank (with Frank Reynolds) (1967)
The Sermons of Jean Harlow and the Curses of Billy the Kid (1968)
Hail Thee Who Play (1968)
Muscled Apple Swift (1968)
Little Odes and The Raptors (1969)
The Surge (1969)
Star (1970)
The Mad Cub (1970)
The Adept (1971)
Gargoyle Cartoons (1971)
The Mammals – includes The Feast, The Blossom; or, Billy the Kid, and Pillow (1972)
The Book of Joanna (1973)
Solstice Blossom (1973)
The Grabbing of the Fairy (1973)
Rare Angel (1974)
A Fist-Full (1956–57) (1974)
Gorf (1974)
September Blackberries (1974)
The Last American Valentine: Illustrated poems to seduce and destroy – Write Bloody Publishing anthology (2008)
Mysteriosos and Other Poems (2010)
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