McClure, Michael (Thomas) 1932-

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McCLURE, Michael (Thomas) 1932-

PERSONAL: Born October 20, 1932, in Marysville, KS; son of Thomas and Marian (Dixie Johnston) McClure; married Joanna Kinnison, 1954 (divorced); married Amy Evans (a sculptor); children: Katherine Jane.

Ethnicity: "Scotch Irish." Education: Attended University of Wichita, 1951-53, and University of Arizona, 1953-54; San Francisco State College, B.A., 1955. Hobbies and other interests: "The biological sciences."

ADDRESSES: Home—3200 Burnell Dr., Oakland, CA 94602. Agent—Denise Enck, Empty Mirror Books Agency, P.O. Box 972, Mukilteo, WA 98275-0972.

CAREER: California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, assistant professor, 1962-77, associate professor, beginning 1977, became professor of humanities. Ark II/Moby I, editor, 1957; Journal for the Protection of All Beings, coeditor, 1961; State University of New York at Buffalo, lecturer, 1979; Pierson College, Yale University, associate fellow, 1982. Member of board of directors, Drylands Institute, Tucson, AZ.

MEMBER: Sons of Anacreon.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Endowment for the Arts grants, 1967 and 1974; Guggenheim fellowship, 1973; Alfred Jarry Award, Magic Theatre, 1973; Rockefeller fellow for the theatre, 1975; Obie Award for best play, Village Voice, 1979, for Josephine, the Mouse Singer; California Arts Council Berkeley Stage Company award, 1980; Pushcart Prize for Poetry, 1991; Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry, National Poetry Association, 1993; Pen West Josephine Miles Award, 1994 for Simple Eyes; Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Poetry, for Touching the Edge: Dharma Devotions from the Hummingbird Sangha.

WRITINGS:

poetry

Passage, Jonathan Williams (Big Sur, CA), 1956.

Peyote Poem, Semina, 1958.

For Artaud, Totem Press (New York, NY), 1959.

Hymns to St. Geryon, and Other Poems, Auerhahn Press (San Francisco, CA), 1959.

Dark Brown, Auerhahn Press (San Francisco, CA), 1961.

The New Book/A Book of Torture, Grove (New York City), York, NY), 1961.

Ghost Tantras, privately printed, 1964, Four Seasons Foundation (San Francisco, CA), 1969.

Two for Bruce Conner, Oyez (Kensington, CA), 1964.

Love Lion, Lioness (poem poster), Oyez (San Francisco, CA), 1964.

Double Murder! Vahrooooooohr!, Semina, 1964.

Poisoned Wheat, Oyez (San Francisco, CA), 1965.

Mandalas, Dave Haselwood (San Francisco, CA), 1965.

Unto Caesar, Dave Haselwood (San Francisco, CA), 1965.

Dream Table, Dave Haselwood (San Francisco, CA), 1965.

(With Bruce Conner) (The Mandala Book), Dave Haselwood (San Francisco, CA), 1966.

Hail Thee Who Play: A Poem, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1968, revised edition, Sand Dollar Press (Berkeley, CA), 1974.

Muscled Apple Swift, Love Press, 1968.

Love Lion Book, Four Seasons Foundation (San Francisco, CA), 1968.

The Sermons of Jean Harlow and the Curses of Billy the Kid, Four Seasons Foundation (San Francisco, CA), 1969.

Plane Pomes, Phoenix Book Shop (New York, NY), 1969.

Oh Christ God Love Cry of Love Stifled Furred Wall Smoking Burning, Auerhahn Press (San Francisco, CA), c. 1969.

Hymns to St. Geryon [and] Dark Brown, Cape Goliard Press (London, England), 1969, 3rd edition, Grey Fox Press (San Francisco, CA), 1982.

The Surge: A Poem, Frontier Press (Columbus, OH), 1969.

Lion Fight, Pierrepont Press (New York, NY), 1969.

Star, Grove (New York, NY), 1970.

99 Theses, Tansy Press (Lawrence, KS), 1972.

The Book of Joanna, Sand Dollar Press, 1973.

Transfiguration, Pomegranate Press (Cambridge, MA), 1973.

Rare Angel (writ with raven's blood), Black Sparrow Press (Los Angeles, CA), 1974.

September Blackberries, New Directions (New York, NY), 1974.

Solstice Blossoms, Arif Press (Berkeley, CA), 1974.

Fleas (189-195), Aloe Editions, 1974.

A Fist-Full (1956-1957), Black Sparrow Press (Los Angeles, CA), 1974.

On Organism, Institute of Further Studies (Buffalo, NY), 1974.

Flea 100, Frank Hallman, 1975.

Jaguar Skies, New Directions (New York, NY), 1975.

Man of Moderation: Two Poems, Frank Hallman, 1975.

Antechamber, Poythress Press, 1977, revised edition published as Antechamber and Other Poems, New Directions (New York, NY), 1978.

Fragments of Perseus, New Directions (New York, NY), 1983.

Fleas (180-186), Les Ferriss, 1985.

Selected Poems, New Directions (New York, NY), 1986.

Rebel Lions, New Directions (New York, NY), 1991.

Simple Eyes and Other Poems, New Directions (New York, NY), 1994.

Three Poems, introduction by Robert Hunter, Penguin Poets (New York, NY), 1995.

(Contributor) Jay DeFoe, Selected Works, 1952-1989, The Gallery, 1996.

Huge Dreams: San Francisco and Beat Poems, Penguin (New York, NY), 1999.

Rain Mirror, New Directions (New York, NY), 1999.

Plum Stones: Cartoons of No Heaven, O Books (Oakland, CA), 2002.

Also author of Thirteen Mad Sonnets, (Milan, Italy), 1965. McClure's poems have also been recorded on Ghost Tantras (audiocassette), S Press (Germany), 1982, and Love Lion (compact disc and audiocassette), Shanachie Records, 1993, and appear on Howls, Raps and Roars: Recordings from the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance (compact disc and audiocassette), Fantasy Records, 1993.

McClure's poetry has been translated into German, French, and Yugoslavian.

plays

!The Feast!, produced in San Francisco, CA, 1960.

Pillow, produced in New York City, 1961.

The Blossom; or, Billy the Kid (produced in New York City, 1964), Great Lakes (Brighton, MI), 1967.

The Beard (produced in San Francisco, 1965), privately printed, 1965, revised edition, Grove (New York, NY), 1967.

The Shell (produced in San Francisco, 1975), Cape Goliard Press (London, England), 1968.

The Cherub (produced in Berkeley, CA, 1969), Black Sparrow Press (Los Angeles, CA), 1970.

The Charbroiled Chinchilla: The Pansy, The Meatball, Spider Rabbit, produced in Berkeley, 1969.

The Brutal Brontosaurus: Spider Rabbit, The Meatball, The Shell, Apple Glove, The Authentic Radio Life of Bruce Conner and Snoutburbler, produced in Berkeley, 1970.

Gargoyle Cartoons (contains The Shell, The Pansy, The Meatball, The Bow, Spider Rabbit, Apple Glove, The Sail, The Dear, The Authentic Radio Life of Bruce Conner and Snoutburbler, The Feather, and The Cherub; produced in Philadelphia, PA, 1970), Delacorte (New York, NY), 1971.

The Growl, produced in Berkeley, 1971.

Polymorphous Pirates: The Pussy, The Button, The Feather, produced in San Francisco, 1972.

The Mammals (contains The Blossom, The Feast, and Pillow), Cranium Press, 1972.

McClure on Toast, produced in Los Angeles, 1973.

The Pussy, The Button, and Chekhov's Grandmother; or, The Sugar Wolves, produced in New York, 1973.

The Grabbing of the Fairy (produced in Los Angeles, 1973), Truck Press, 1978.

Music Piece, produced in San Francisco, 1974.

Gorf; or, Gorf and the Blind Dyke (produced in San Francisco, 1974), New Directions (New York, NY), 1976.

One Acts by Michael McClure, produced in New York, 1974.

The Derby, produced in Los Angeles, 1974, new version produced in New York, 1981.

General Gorgeous, produced in San Francisco, 1975.

Sunny-Sideup: The Pink Helmet and The Masked Choir, produced in Los Angeles, 1976.

Range War, produced in Tucson, AZ, 1976.

Two for the Tricentennial: The Pink Helmet and The Grabbing of the Fairy, produced in San Francisco, 1976.

Goethe: Ein Fragment, produced in San Francisco, 1978.

Minnie Mouse and the Tap-Dancing Buddha, produced in San Francisco, 1978.

Josephine, the Mouse Singer (adaptation of a story by Franz Kafka; produced in New York at the W.P.A. Theatre, 1978), New Directions (New York, NY), 1980.

The Red Snake, produced in San Francisco, 1979.

The Mirror, produced in Los Angeles, 1979.

Coyote in Chains, produced in San Francisco, 1980.

The Beard and VKMTS, Grove (New York, NY), 1985, produced by Living Theater (New York, NY), 1999.

Also author of television documentary The Maze, 1967, and of radio play, Music Peace, 1974.

other

Meat Science Essays, City Lights (San Francisco, CA), 1963, revised edition, 1966.

(With Frank Reynolds) Freewheelin' Frank, Secretary of the Angels, Grove (New York, NY), 1967.

Little Odes, Poems, and a Play, "The Raptors," Black Sparrow Press (Los Angeles, CA), 1969.

The Mad Cub (novel), Bantam (New York, NY), 1970.

The Adept (novel), Delacorte (New York, NY), 1971.

Scratching the Beat Surface (essays), North Point Press (Berkeley, CA), 1982, published as Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac, with photographs by Larry Keenan, Penguin (New York, NY), 1994.

Isamu Noguchi at Gemini, 1982-1983 (art monograph), Gemini Press (Greensboro, NC), 1983.

Specks, Talon Books (Vancouver, BC, Canada), 1985.

(With Francesco Clemente) Testa Coda (art criticism), Rizzoli Books (New York, NY), 1991.

(With Bruce Conner) Adventures of a Novel, Limestone (Kingston, Ontario, Canada), 1991.

Lighting the Corners on Nature, Art, and the Visionary: Essays and Interviews, College of Arts and Sciences, University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM), 1993.

Rain Mirror, New Directions (Albuquerque, NM), 1993.

Touching the Edge: Dharma Devotions from the Hummingbird Sangha, Shambhala (Boston, MA), 1999.

Camping Wyoming, WigRaf, 1999.

Contributor to "Forest Beatnike" and "Urban Thoreaus," P. Lang, 2000 and to anthologies, including The Beat Scene, Corinth, 1960; The Poetics of the New American Poetry, Grove (New York, NY), 1964; The San Francisco Poets, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1971; and The Portable Beat Reader, Viking (New York, NY), 1992. Contributor to magazines, including Beatitude, Big Table, Black Mountain Review, Chicago Review, City Lights Journal, Conjunctions, Grand Street, Imago, Jabberwocky, Kulchur, Life, Nation, Poetry, Rolling Stone, Semina Two, Vanity Fair, Yugen, and Zyzzyva.

ADAPTATIONS: Poems from September Blackberries were adapted for video by McClure and his former wife, Joanna, KQED-TV, 1973; The Blossom was filmed by George Herms; Love Lion was adapted as a video performance of poetry with piano by McClure and keyboardist Ray Manzarek, Mystic Fire Video/Island Visual Arts, 1991.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Red Snake (play); Dear Being (poetry); I Like Your Eyes Liberty, music and poetry CD, with composer Terry Riley.

SIDELIGHTS: Poet Michael McClure, drawing inspiration from both biology and mysticism, sees writing as a process whereby the body and mind can be united; the term he coined for this union is "spiritmeat"; as a writer for Jack noted, "If [Jack] Kerouac was the Beat Generation's first priest, then McClure was the Beat 'spiritmeat.' Generation's first biologist." A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement called McClure's work "one of the more remarkable achievements in recent American literature, a record of a man's attempt to find the terms he needs for a vital balance, for some kind of homeostasis of body and psyche." "It is this fusion of mind and body as a single principle that is the particular stamp of the man," wrote David Kherdian in Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance: Portraits and Checklists, "and it is this concept that has determined the flow of his work, which is of constant change, growth, and expansion."

McClure was born in Marysville, Kansas, but grew up in Seattle, Washington. He first began writing in the 1950s, moved to San Francisco in 1954, and came to public attention as one of San Francisco's Beat poets. Influenced not only by such literary figures as Theodore Roethke and Charles Olson, but by the prevailing ideas in biology and other natural sciences, McClure's poetry is meant to be an expression of the whole individual. "For McClure," Kherdian wrote, "there can be no distinction between the man and the writer, one being condemned to serve the other nor can there be a differentiation between the mind and the body, for if the mind is in error it will be reflected by a gesture of the body." McClure explained that "a poem is as much of me as an arm. Measure, line, etc. is interior and takes an outward shape, is not predestined or logical but immediate."

In Meat Science Essays, McClure develops some of his ideas about poetry and biology. He speaks of the need for humankind to be aware of its animal nature. This awareness results in the "intellect as we know it [subsiding] and mammalian intelligence acknowledgment of the senses as organs of knowing [returning]," wrote Michael Lynch in Parnassus. Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, William R. King pointed out that McClure sees the Beat movement as an "intense awakening of a 'bio-alchemical' consciousness" and calls for human beings "to achieve the clearest perceptions and to attune themselves to the inner voice or genetic being (the voice of the universe, which speaks from many centers) in order to transform society and restore the planet." From this biological awareness, then, an essentially mystical revelation emerges. "To McClure," King wrote, "the universe all that can be sensed or intuited is in a sense the messiah, leading us to witness its miraculous unfolding."

McClure's writing seeks to be an expression of the enlightened state of consciousness he hypothesizes. His work is, above all, a personal expression rather than a form of communication with an audience. Speaking in Scratching the Beat Surface of how he came to this approach, McClure stated that "communication was not as important to me as expression. To speak and move was the most important thing." McClure carries this idea to the physical structure of his poetry. His poems are centered on the page and move across and down in a flowing motion meant to approximate the actual speaking voice. Influenced by poet Charles Olson and his theory of projective verse and by the painter Jackson Pollock, who created action painting, McClure sees a poem as "a calligram of the moment of creation or experience, an artifact entirely representing the perceptions it contains in a highly compressed image," King explained. As McClure told Jhan Hochman and Todd Grimson of the Portland Review, "What we write, or what we paint, or what we sing or do, must actually, literally, be an extension of ourselves, or it is meaningless."

McClure's poetic language combining biblical phrasing, scientific terms, mantras, and meaningless yet powerful sounds gives his poetry a freewheeling energy that has been praised by many critics. Francis Crick, writing in Margins, observed, "What appeals to me most about [McClure's] poems is the fury and imagery of them. I love the vividness of his reactions and the very personal turns and swirls of the lines." Similarly, Robert Peters commented in Margins that "McClure's writing is like action painting: spontaneous. The reader is to re-experience the excitement McClure felt writing the poems. The energy … is as important as any direct poetic statement the reader might receive, of a traditional sort…. McClure's beast (mammal) language is LOVE: we are to form these strange sounds with abandon and pleasure, with love-explosives, love-verbal-funejaculations." At its best, Geoffrey Thurley wrote in Lee Bartlett's book The Beats: Essays in Criticism, McClure's poetry "achieves a poise and a sinewy delicacy rarely to be found in recent American writing."

McClure's plays also display an intense energy. In the tradition of such avant-garde playwrights as Antonin Artaud, McClure's work combines wildly divergent elements into dreamlike sequences. Featuring the characters Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow, who meet in the hereafter, The Beard explores American sexual attitudes as embodied in two cultural representatives of sex and violence. As Richard Gilman wrote in his Common and Uncommon Masks: Writings on Theatre, 1961-1970, "The whole point of the couple's being dead and legendary is that they may now serve as exemplary figures of the American confusion between orders of being, of our perpetual conversion of sexuality into one kind of art, the popular mythology of archetypal surrogates, the blonde bombshell, the steely outlaw and the consequent depletion of the sexual by being turned into emblem and shady metaphor." The Beard brought McClure notoriety from its first productions in San Francisco and Berkeley, California, in 1965. In 1968, because of the simulated sex act at the play's end, the members of the cast were arrested and carted off to jail at each performance on fourteen consecutive nights. (The play was later judged not obscene when finally brought to trial.) A production in Los Angeles was also met with police resistance, but the New York performance of The Beard won Obie awards for its director and lead actress.

Critical reaction to The Beard was generally favorable, with the play's "offensive" material deemed integral to its message. The language, the Newsweek reviewer admitted, is "without question the 'filthiest' ever heard on a commercial stage in the English-speaking nations." According to the reviewer, "McClure raises profanity to a comic passion. He has written a brilliant little monster of a play." Nation reviewer Harold Clurman, while judging The Beard "inconsequential as art," nevertheless found the play "a mockery of sex, a 'milestone' on the road to nonentity. We need not despise it. It shows us that our myths … are in the process of dissolution."

McClure won the coveted Obie Award for Josephine, the Mouse Singer, a play produced in New York in 1980. Unusual in that all the characters are mice, the play concerns the singer Josephine, who defends the freedom of the artist in modern society. It is in "the tradition of the fable, with all the grace and poise of [seventeenth-century French poet Jean de] la Fontaine along with his social astuteness," wrote Peter Clothier in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Speaking of McClure's work as a playwright, Mel Gussow of the New York Times called him "something of a comic-book fantasist, projecting larger-than-life images on an imaginary silver screen." But Arthur Sainer acclaimed him as "one of the best playwriting minds now working in America" and found The Beard to be "a small masterpiece." Speaking to Portland Review's Hochman and Grimson, McClure defined the relationship between his poetry and plays this way: "They're quite different and they're complementary. And they certainly come from different aspects of my character; poetry being subjective, [it has to] do with perception, and theatre being a social probing more like doing sculptures with bodies to create hallucinations on stage, to see the effect of the reflection of my hallucinations on the universe and on other people. I think with my poetry, and I experience with my poetry, and I'm really probing with my theatre."

In the author's note to Rebel Lions, a poetry collection published in 1991, McClure commented frankly on his own career and on how he creates his poems. He called poetry "a muscular principle" and noted that he had centered his recent poems in order to give them a "body language on the page." Of his use of lines written in capital letters, he noted: "The poem on the page troubled me because it seemed like such a thing of beauty, I wanted to remind the reader that it was, in fact, an object, and a seductive object because it was so close to being alive. By putting lines of capital letters in the text of the poem there was a disruption of the allure of the poem and a reminder that it was a made thing."

In the same note, McClure discussed his collaboration with keyboardist Ray Manzarek of the rock group The Doors, who played piano while McClure read his poems. McClure noted that some of his more recent works "High Heels," "Foreman and Ali," and "Czechoslovakia" were written with "this artistic symbiosis in mind." Performing his poetry has long been a hallmark of McClure's art. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, King noted that "at each stage of his progress, [McClure] has assumed the mantle of bard and stepped forward as a poet-singer, giving testimony and witness to the times. He has read to college students and Zen monks, at rock concerts, at the Library of Congress, and to lions." An interesting bit of trivia about McClure's career is the fact that he wrote the lyrics to the song "Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes-Benz," which was made popular by singer Janis Joplin.

In 1998, McClure was in a nearly fatal airplane crash; the event precipitated a depressed period in his life. He wrote about that time in Rain Mirror. According to John Sakowitz in Metro Active, the book "tells about this dark night of the soul, and later, of his recovery from depression." Plum Stones: Cartoon of No Heaven, like McClure's Touching the Edge, incorporates Buddhist thinking. Of Plum Stones, Jack Foley wrote in Also Preview, "The Buddhist stance and the wonderful specificity which is always an aspect of McClure's writing give the book a texture which is fresh and new." The book contains deliberate repetition, as lines from earlier poems become the seeds of later ones; according to Foley, this technique successfully conveys the idea that "any single direction [is] essentially illusory."

Whether his poems are spontaneous or carefully reworked, McClure points out that he uses repetition to give his work energy. It is this energy and heightened awareness in Rebel Lions that many critics comment upon. Anne Waldman observed in a dust-jacket blurb for the book, "There is in [McClure's] poetry what Marianne Moore demands, and what many others misunderstand, the raw and the genuine willingness of unwearied senses to be what they perceive." Norman Mailer commented upon the singularity of McClure's work in his blurb, observing, "McClure is one of the few poets in America who has always been his own voice, and that voice is like no other." On his Web site, McClure noted, "When I speak of things or events I have usually experienced them. It is good fortune to have friends who have shown me eagles and serpentine cliffs and trees flowering with morning glories." And in Contemporary Poets, he commented, "Poetry is a muscular principle, an athletic song or whisper of fleshly thought. We can be as serious as blue black gloom or bright as a buttercup in the dawn. The spirit of poetry is hope we send out from the expanding helix of our lives. With poetry we can meet an old perception on a mountaintop or in a subway or view a new perception loping in the distance like a wolf or glimmering like an opal in the twilight."

McClure told CA: "I am a projective poet and my physical breath and my bodily energy are integral to the creation of poetry. I was walking one day in a forest near Gloucester with Charles Olson, the inventor of projective verse. Charles sat down on a stump under a tree and mimed writing a projective poem in the air, flourishing a broken branch in his hand as if it were a pen. I believe that language is most important as a means of the restructuring of thought and also for thinking itself. At the deepest level communication is not the most important aspect of language. Stephane Mallarme stated, 'Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.' That's right.

"One reason we love poetry is because we discover the inspirations of other poets, their illuminations light us up and prove that we can recognize our own inspirations, and not bluntly and quietly allow them to pass. Biology and the biological aspects of nature fascinate me for similar reasons. Certainly life is a state of crisis.

"As artists we are hungry to use the instruments of our art to enrich, and to make our self-experience more myriad-minded. With the invention of Projective Verse there came a means of vividly experiencing the field our energies and senses. I believe this is the way D. H. Lawrence rejoiced in his poetry. It is something like what I find in Percy B. Shelley and in William Blake and the visionary Japanese master Dogen and in Meister Eckhart. It is what I hear in the piano music of Thelonius Monk—and Monk does it with great elegance. This is the way that I experience Jackson Pollock's paintings."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

A Bibliography of the Auerhahn Press and Its Successor, Dave Haselwood Books, Poltroon Press (Berkeley, CA), 1976.

Allen, Donald M., editor, The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, Grove (New York, NY), 1960.

Bartlett, Lee, editor, The Beats: Essays in Criticism, McFarland (Jefferson, NC), 1981.

Bartlett, Lee, The Sun Is but a Morning Star, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1989.

Bertholf, Robert J., and Ian W. Reid, editors, Robert Duncan: Scales of the Marvelous, New Directions (New York, NY,) 1979.

Clements, Marshall, A Catalog of Works by Michael McClure, 1957-1965, Phoenix Bookshop (New York, NY), 1965.

Contemporary Dramatists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 6, 1976, Volume 10, 1979.

Contemporary Poets, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Cook, Bruce, The Beat Generation, Scribner (New York, NY), 1971.

Davidson, Michael, The San Francisco Renaissance, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, and Nancy Peters, Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day, City Lights/Harper (New York, NY), 1980.

Gilman, Richard, Common and Uncommon Masks: Writings on Theatre, 1961-1970, Random House (New York, NY), 1971.

Kahn, Douglas, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1999.

Kherdian, David, Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance: Portraits and Checklists, Giligia Press (Aurora, OR), 1967.

Leary, Paris, and Robert Kelly, editors, A Controversy of Poets, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 1965.

Lipton, Lawrence, The Erotic Revolution, Sherbourne Press (Los Angeles, CA), 1965.

McClure, Michael, Lighting the Corners on Nature, Art, and the Visionary: Essays and Interviews, College of Arts and Sciences, University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, NM), 1993.

Meltzer, David, The San Francisco Poets, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1971.

Morgan, Bill, The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Tour, City Lights Books (San Francisco, CA), 2003.

Phillips, Rod, "Forest Beatniks" and "Urban Thoreaus": Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, and Michael McClure, P. Lang (New York, NY), 2000.

Philips, Rod, Michael McClure, Boise State University (Boise, ID), 2003.

Smith, Richard Cándida, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California, University of California Press, (Berkeley, CA), 1995.

Stephenson, Gregory, The Daybreak Boys, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1990.

periodicals

Berkeley Gazette, July 8, 1982.

Big Table, spring, 1960.

Bloomsbury Review, November, 1999, review of Rain Mirror, p. 24.

Booklist, May 1, 1978; March 15, 1999, Donna Seaman, review of Touching the Edge, p. 1278.

Books, September, 1967; October, 1967.

Book World, August 15, 1971.

Christian Century, January 17, 1968.

Credences, number 1, 1980.

Kerouac Connection, spring, 1994, Mitchell Smith, interview with McClure, pp. 31-38.

Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 1999, review of Rain Mirror, p. 1445.

Los Angeles Free Press, February 2, 1982.

Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1993, p. F8.

Margins, March, 1975, "Michael McClure Symposium."

Nation, November 13, 1967, p. 508; July 20, 1970.

Newsweek, November 6, 1971.

New York Times, October 3, 1981.

New York Times Book Review, June 20, 1971; October 31, 1999, review of Rain Mirror, p. 25.

Parnassus, spring-summer, 1976.

Poetry Information, spring, 1975.

Portland Review, Volume 28, number 1, 1982.

Publishers Weekly, April 25, 1994, p. 65; July 31, 1995, p. 75; March 29, 1999, review of Touching the Edge and Huge Dreams, p. 100; April 12, 1999, review of Touching the Edge, p. 71.

Rain Taxi, fall 1999, Wayne Atherton, review of Touching the Edge.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1990, S. E. Gontarski, interview with McClure, pp. 116-123.

San Francisco Review of Books, December, 1977.

San Francisco Theatre, summer, 1977.

Show, May, 1970.

Sulfur, spring, 1996, p. 163.

Times Literary Supplement, March 25, 1965, "This Is Geryon."

Village Voice, October 5, 1967; November 2, 1967; November 16, 1967; January 22, 1970; January 3, 1974.

Yugen, number 7, 1961.