Ghost Tantras

by Michael McClure

Michael McClure is a living legend. One of the poets who participated in the famous Six Gallery reading that featured the public debut of Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem Howl , he was immortalized by Jack Kerouac in his novel Big Sur . A central figure of the Beat Generation, McClure collaborated with Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner and was later associated with San Francisco's psychedelic counterculture. Originally self-published in 1964 and long out of print, Ghost Tantras is one of McClure's signature works, a book mostly written in "beast language." A mix of lyrical, guttural and laryngeal sound, lion roars and a touch of detonated dada, this is one of his best-known but least available books, a deep well from which decades of poetry have drawn. McClure's inspiration has always been the animal consciousness that still lives in mankind, and he has had a consistent "When a man does not admit that he is an animal, he is less than an animal." Ghost Tantras is his original and singular manifesto for a poetry that relies not on images and pictures, but on muscular, sensual, energetic sound. Praise for Michael "Michael McClure shares a place with the great William Blake, with the visionary Shelley, with the passionate D.H. Lawrence."—Robert Creeley "McClure's poetry is a blob of protoplasmic energy."—Allen Ginsberg "Without McClure's roar there would have been no Sixties."—Dennis Hopper

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published June 1, 1969

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although McClure employs some English in this book, most of the work is in a “beast language” that should be read out loud for the visceral experience. There is a recording by McClure called Ghost Tantras that can give you an idea of the sounds McClure had in mind. Mammalian.

Acquired 1986
The Word, Montreal, Quebec

[City Lights Booksellers & Publishers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hello from your friends at City Lights! Check out what The Rumpus has to say about Michael McClure's Ghost Tantras -

"Michael McClure is a Bay Area legend, a poet who participated in the Six Gallery reading that featured the public debut of Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl.' In 1964, he self-published Ghost Tantras, written in a mix of muscular free verse, sensual lyricism and an elemental "beast language" that includes roars, growls and other preverbal sounds. Now, 50 years after it first appeared, City Lights has reissued the book; Ghost Tantras remains an essential volume for Beat Generation aficionados."--Georgia Rowe, San Jose Mercury News

[Kent Winward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok, I understand what McClure was trying to do. GAHR (pronounced "gar" with an "h"). Probably works very well for channeling your inner beast and would be far superior as an audiobook, since this is sound poetry and does not work well on the page. Written the poems are exasperating and I think this is the first book I've ever enjoyed the dust jacket more than the contents.

By the way, I was right when I said they are better heard, rather than read.

McClure playing an audiotape of a reading Ghost Tantra 49 to the lions in the San Francisco zoo. https://vimeo.com/276683230

McClure reading Ghost Tantra 51: https://vimeo.com/276682867
This reading shows how maddening the poems are on the page. When McClure is writing in plain English he so transcends bestial noise that the contrast on the page is impossible. Listening to him read it, the poem works much better and the contrast blends in much better to the poetic language and sound.

One final postscript and after hearing McClure reading Ghost Tantra 51, I can confirm that the use of ALL CAPS throughout the book has not aged well and is not indicative of what McClure was trying to do. His poetic form and style has been subsumed by the text and IM culture.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

WUB
WUB
WUB
WUB
WUB
WUB
WUB
bweeeeeeeeee.

SHARRAH ! SHREEEHEE ! SHRAHHH !



Bluhh
!


(And the cover is a Wallace Berman photograph of the author!)

[Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this to your children. Or those of family/friends. It's a lot of fun!

[Brice Fuqua · Rating 1 out of 5]

One hundred pages of random typing pretending to be poetry. This is the kind of book that could only have been published in the 1960s.

[Mat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seemingly nonsensical on the surface and it is easy to dismiss this as a bit of hippie beat rubbish but hold your horses right there buster.
After reading all 99 tantras, I now add Ghost Tantras to the triumvirate of great 'ear poetry' works along with Finnegans Wake and Kerouac's Old Angel Midnight (as well as Kerouac's poem to the ocean in Big Sur.)

What do all of these works have in common?
They are all types of what Allen Ginsberg would call 'ear poetry' and that is why most people don't get them or dismiss them with a shrug. Most poetry, including my own, is lyrical.
It takes a lot of guts to write this kind of non-lyrical auditory poetry stuff. But in the works of Kerouac, McClure (to some extent, although he is also a very lyrical poet) and Philip Whalen, that's the whole shot!

In Finnegans Wake, Joyce tried to capture that intangible evasive 'dream language' which usually evaporates upon wakening. Kerouac in Old Angel Midnight tried to capture the sounds streaming through his 'twandow' in the Mill Valley cabin of Snyder's where he was staying in 1956 (twandow = twilight + window).
McClure in Ghost Tantras is trying to capture an internal music that moves not only in our muscles, veins and sinews but echoes through us genetically as animals or more specifically mammals, who are trying to forget or leave behind the 'animal' classification and push himself above it.

Now McClure mixes normal modern-day English with his beast language throughout Ghost Tantras, sometimes to great effect, sometimes he goes too far, and the impression I got from this, I might be wrong, is that he captured the dawn of consciousness of homo sapiens and the birth of human language in a condensed fast-forwarded version. That's my initial impressions of Ghost Tantras after putting it down. And also...a word to the wise - read it out aloud! Don't focus on or look for meaning just listen to the sounds. Remember it's not lyrical poetry. Some parts sound really nice and I really found it intriguing how a beast language which mostly made no sense to me in a semantic sense made complete sense on an emotive level. I guess it's just like Allen Ginsberg said about sections of Mexico City Blues and Old Angel Midnight - "it makes perfect sense on some telepathic level".

Not my favorite book of McClure's but definitely worth a read if you are looking for something different. Just remember - don't go looking for meaning. Approach this book as you would any weird modern-day far out band. Keep your ears and mind open.

Another unfair and inaccurate criticism levelled at this book is that it is written using a random invented language. Invented definitely but it is far from random. In fact McClure is very consistent in his use of words, to the point where my half-autistic cousin-in-law twice-removed could probably decode it.
Mankind IS a beast like all the other divers fauna strewn over this Earth. I sometimes feel McClure wrote these tantras to remind us of this simple fact and celebrate in it.

[City Lights Booksellers & Publishers]

"Michael McClure's Ghost Tantras, is also wonderfully welcome. City Lights Books has reprinted this slim volume by a Beat stalwart who never gets stale, has avoided with careful, exuberant wisdom the cannibalization of his comrades' memories, and is fearless . . . "--Barbara Berman, The Rumpus

"These poems are intense, serious, hilarious, beautiful. The 'beast language' is intended to appeal to the animal inside every human...For McClure, language is something entirely different than simple words and syntax. He pushes language to many limits, most of them definitive. Words here become sounds, writing becomes speech; what is so foundationally cultural—language—is imagined and acted upon as natural. If nothing else, this makes for some bravely original and compelling poetry, and McClure is widely recognized today as a revolutionary poet because of his atypical attitudes toward language."--Housten Donham, HTML Giant

"It's time for books with brains. . . . The famously lyrical (and out-of-print) Ghost Tantras by Beat poet Michael McClure is coming back to life."--Allison McCarthy, 7x7 Magazine