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Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems
This essential collection of Michael McClure's poetry contains the most original, radical, and visionary work of a major poet who has been garnering acclaim and generating controversy for more than fifty years. Ranging from A Fist Full, published in 1957, through Swirls in Asphalt, a new poem sequence, Of Indigo and Saffron is both an excellent introduction to this unique American voice and an impressive selection from McClure's landmark volumes for those already familiar with his boldly inventive work. One of the five poets who heralded the Beat movement in the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, McClure reveals in his poetry a close kinship to Romanticism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Japanese haiku. These poems—grounded in imagination and a profound regard for the natural world—chart a poetic landscape of utter originality.
- GenresPoetry
342 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 16, 2010
12 people are currently reading
29 people want to read
About the author
Michael McClure
221 books60 followersMichael 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.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 17, 2020
4 stars--rounding up to 5 stars because I will never forget this poet and he has had a big impact on my life already--he was the single greatest thing to happen to me in 2019.
This is the best collection of his poetry and highly desirable for any fan of McClure's, Allen Ginsberg or the genre of Beat Poetry. This is the book McClure's wife recommended that I should buy.
4 stars only just because Beat Poetry isn't quite my thing, however, these poems are extremely accessible and easy to read. The challenge is slowing down while reading, reading them aloud is best, really thinking about the connections between his ideas and images.
McClure himself signed my copy of his book as did his amazing wife Amy.
I also have a CD of him reading his own poetry which is outstanding.
This is the best collection of his poetry and highly desirable for any fan of McClure's, Allen Ginsberg or the genre of Beat Poetry. This is the book McClure's wife recommended that I should buy.
4 stars only just because Beat Poetry isn't quite my thing, however, these poems are extremely accessible and easy to read. The challenge is slowing down while reading, reading them aloud is best, really thinking about the connections between his ideas and images.
McClure himself signed my copy of his book as did his amazing wife Amy.
I also have a CD of him reading his own poetry which is outstanding.
November 28, 2011
Important collection. Gets a bit overwhelming and calls out for a slow read over time. Helps to understand the evolution of McClure's thought, style and scope of interest. I had not grasped the latter from reading poems or even from hearing him read. Well worth the effort.
June 17, 2011
Awesome collection.
GOOOOOOR!
GOOOOOOR!
February 16, 2022
Michael McClure was the most innovative of the poets to come out of the 1950s San Francisco renaissance, and while this is to his credit, his aesthetic remains Avant Garde by the standards of the mainstream. This means most readers, raised on a fare of academic criticism, still find him difficult to absorb. In the past, his work stood in stark contrast to the dominant poetry of the 50s, 60s, and 70s: the sedate Midwestern meditative lyric. And today it continues to find little place with the dominant political identity poetry.
The attribute of his poetry that strikes readers first with its obvious uniqueness is his use of center alignment for most of his poems. There are precedents (and influence) for his approach in concrete poetry, Dada, and Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse.” McClure has stated that one motivation was to break the tyranny of the left margin and allow greater freedom for the word on the page. Probably his most important inspiration came from painting rather than poetry. He greatly admired the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollack and the way his drips and streams of paint on canvas documented the literal operation of his muscles, bones, joints, and nerves.
While the layout is visually arresting, it is far less significant than McClure’s approach to the content and syntax of the poem. While his contemporaries like Allen Ginsberg extended the poetic line and the use of candor, and Gary Snyder folded various world and ancient literatures into his poetry, McClure molded the sentence into an oratorical, declamatory form (“ I AM MY ABSTRACT ALCHEMIST OF FLESH made real!”) that could trace his own movements as an organism, not simply as a stream of consciousness but a stream of biology – an animal mingling with his environment.
This evolution of language probably reached its apogee in the “Beast Language” found in his plays and the poetry book Ghost Tantras. Here English mixes with transcriptions of grunts, growls, howls, moans, and groans to create a language that is not nonsense in a Carrollian sense but a bio-lingua which captures the sound of the mammal in action.
This can and often does include observations of the political landscape but in a way that lacks the quick polemical judgments of contemporary writers. He is less focused on current events than on the current that runs through events. McClure’s ethics – always a living, breathing, metamorphosing creature rather than a static dogma – remains critically under-appreciated or explored. “SURE , LET'S CELEBRATE THE BLACK SIDE OF JOY. LET'S DROWN the cup of cheer in the barrel full of wine.” McClure’s search is not for small-minded certainties but for context from the microbiological level to that of the cosmos.
Readers sometimes come to McClure from the French Symbolist stylings of Jim Morrison’s lyrics and poetry or from other Beat Generation poets like Ginsberg, Snyder, Corso, or Ferlinghetti. But his work bears little in common with those writers (and part of the splendid legacy of the Beat Generation is that it was no single thing but rather a plenitude). The poet of that era who is closest to McClure is actually Jack Kerouac with his own reinvention of the sentence and wild semiotic adventures with words. But here again, differences stand out. While Kerouac records the minute particulars of the external world that his senses capture, McClure pulls his focus back into the sensory organs themselves, tracing the operation of an individual organism.
It is a heady mixture, and McClure’s Of Indigo and Saffron is a good place to start. I would also recommend his Fragments of Perseus as another. Although the title poem is a lot to bite off at once, the shorter lyrics are punchy and concise: “The Death of Kin Chuen Louie,” “Song,” “Listen Lawrence,” “Action Philosophy,” and the larger “Stanzas Composed in Turmoil,” a stunning, Shelleyan crisis-poem that swirls like a DNA helix and ends in a shamanistic chant.
The attribute of his poetry that strikes readers first with its obvious uniqueness is his use of center alignment for most of his poems. There are precedents (and influence) for his approach in concrete poetry, Dada, and Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse.” McClure has stated that one motivation was to break the tyranny of the left margin and allow greater freedom for the word on the page. Probably his most important inspiration came from painting rather than poetry. He greatly admired the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollack and the way his drips and streams of paint on canvas documented the literal operation of his muscles, bones, joints, and nerves.
While the layout is visually arresting, it is far less significant than McClure’s approach to the content and syntax of the poem. While his contemporaries like Allen Ginsberg extended the poetic line and the use of candor, and Gary Snyder folded various world and ancient literatures into his poetry, McClure molded the sentence into an oratorical, declamatory form (“ I AM MY ABSTRACT ALCHEMIST OF FLESH made real!”) that could trace his own movements as an organism, not simply as a stream of consciousness but a stream of biology – an animal mingling with his environment.
This evolution of language probably reached its apogee in the “Beast Language” found in his plays and the poetry book Ghost Tantras. Here English mixes with transcriptions of grunts, growls, howls, moans, and groans to create a language that is not nonsense in a Carrollian sense but a bio-lingua which captures the sound of the mammal in action.
This can and often does include observations of the political landscape but in a way that lacks the quick polemical judgments of contemporary writers. He is less focused on current events than on the current that runs through events. McClure’s ethics – always a living, breathing, metamorphosing creature rather than a static dogma – remains critically under-appreciated or explored. “SURE , LET'S CELEBRATE THE BLACK SIDE OF JOY. LET'S DROWN the cup of cheer in the barrel full of wine.” McClure’s search is not for small-minded certainties but for context from the microbiological level to that of the cosmos.
Readers sometimes come to McClure from the French Symbolist stylings of Jim Morrison’s lyrics and poetry or from other Beat Generation poets like Ginsberg, Snyder, Corso, or Ferlinghetti. But his work bears little in common with those writers (and part of the splendid legacy of the Beat Generation is that it was no single thing but rather a plenitude). The poet of that era who is closest to McClure is actually Jack Kerouac with his own reinvention of the sentence and wild semiotic adventures with words. But here again, differences stand out. While Kerouac records the minute particulars of the external world that his senses capture, McClure pulls his focus back into the sensory organs themselves, tracing the operation of an individual organism.
It is a heady mixture, and McClure’s Of Indigo and Saffron is a good place to start. I would also recommend his Fragments of Perseus as another. Although the title poem is a lot to bite off at once, the shorter lyrics are punchy and concise: “The Death of Kin Chuen Louie,” “Song,” “Listen Lawrence,” “Action Philosophy,” and the larger “Stanzas Composed in Turmoil,” a stunning, Shelleyan crisis-poem that swirls like a DNA helix and ends in a shamanistic chant.
April 24, 2021
Not my cup of tea. Language is too loose. Imagery is insuffient, lacking. Pedantic and didactic. Unappealing.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews