Touching the Edge

by Michael McClure

     Innovative Beat poet Michael McClure has written a book of poems unlike any of his others. These dharma devotions are fruits of his Buddhist mediation practice. Like bold calligraphy moving vertically down a white scroll, they surprise the eye and mind, awakening us to a heightened sense of everyday things.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published April 6, 1999

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

[Josiah Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing! Some of these devotions are jaw-droppingly beautiful and some are just ugly, but they all are thought-provoking and are ugly and beautiful for a reason. It makes me feel like i want to start reading this over again but i might let it sink in first.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading Michael McClure since sometime in the early 70's, though I've never gotten through an entire collection until now. Touching the Edge is McClure totally on his game with 99 pages that come deep from the heart of meditation. The subtitle of the book is Dharma Devotions. They feel a little like being inside McClure as he sits. It's a stunning book, in his inimitable style, and would be a good exercise one poem, one day at a time - which is pretty much how I took them. There's a bit of a reminder of Kerouac's Mexico City Blues in that Touching the Edge is not so much 99 poems, as one rolling poem of verses while the chorus is in your mind, and is the practice itself.

Vague? Oh...ok.

[Joe M · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Bay area poet Michael McClure first came to prominence in the Beat era. This book, subtitled “Dharma Devotions from the Hummingbird Sangha” consists of 99 poems split into three sections of 33 poems. McClure’s attention to aesthetic beauty is well-realized in the poems’ form: uncluttered; vertically oriented with a frequent use of all-capitalized words; and centered at the page, sometimes directly dropping down and sometimes drifting slightly askew, as if blown by the wind. In terms of content, the Buddhist influence that has informed McClure’s latest work is clear. The poems are loaded with natural imagery, especially a plethora of types of birds and flowers, as well as other Eastern images such as bells, incense, dragons…yet McClure is careful not to exclude man-made objects either, emphasizing the co-existence of these elements. Reinforcing this holistic view, he employs a frequent use of paradox, contrast, and negation to suggest that the world of the illusory and the immaterial exists on an equal plane with ‘reality’: “It’s all flying apart and coming together,” “motionless wine in a moving flagon,” “Thoughts twine around nothingness,” “Ever and ever is nothing maybe,” “The content of the enlightenment is everywhere, nowhere,” “hear imagined echoes of imagined roaring,” “I was whoever,” “delusion resting on real insubstantiality.” Another Buddhist theme is that of recycling: key words and phrases repeat throughout the poems (e.g., hummingbird, blossom, mountain, fog, delusion, lion, throne), and are ‘reincarnated’ in a manner by subtle changes in their associated words. My favorites of these repeated phrases are “the calico cat [kitten] sleeps [slides, snores]” and “Manjushri’s snow lion roars [coughs] as the [flame-]sword swings.” My enjoyment of this book has increased with each read. As McClure writes: “This may be delusion…but it shines." (originally written May 23, 2008)

[Mat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, poignant, moving Buddhist-flavored poetry, in the same vein as his collection Plum Stones.

McClure's poetry has achieved a remarkable refinement and sophistication as a result of his studies into Buddhism. In these poems, you can feel his gentleness and spirit as he explores the delicacy of fruit, the poetry-in-motion of animals such as deers and raccoons as well as the ephemeral delicacy of twigs covered in lichen or paint or ink splashed across the page. The way he gets the reader to center his eye and attention on the center of the page with only a few words on each line (often only one word) helps us glide through this book with ease and wonder.

Highly recommended. You will come away from this book changed, with a beautiful refreshing perspective on life and how every moment is not only a glance but a triumph and a painting to be lived and appreciated. Some moments in life are only witnessed by us and it is these treasures which we should live and enjoy when they take place. One great quote I remember from this book is, "Wisdom is not knowledge but awareness". How true.

Great stuff.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 M1286to 1999