Michael McClure: Selected Poems

by Michael McClure

Poems written during the past twenty-four years deal with night, nature, death, dreams, poetry, painting, freedom, and politics

Genres: Poetry

116 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1986

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

[Drew Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are moving sizeless rooms that push away the dark

[Chelsea]

Good sober, good not.

[Michael Shockley · Rating 1 out of 5]

This isn't poetry, it's just mindless soap-boxing with random capitalization and lines splitting through the pages in some crude attempt at writing free-verse. At the very least, he should have tried writing verse before deciding whether or not it should be free - I'm not sure what to classify this bullshit as, but I'm sure the author would like us to believe that he's being bold and experimental, even if the only point he can get across is that humans are reproducing and using resources beyond our capacity to replenish them, and that we are all part of the same grand web of things with other lifeforms or whatever. If this was his point, he could have tried writing prose to make his argument instead of these atrocious "poems," but if he writes prose like he does poetry, I'd rather he just make like those animals he keeps likening himself to and go live somewhere outside of society where he can perhaps find an audience that he can communicate with.

[Cadence · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much yelling

[Victoria & David Williams]

We have the paperback edition.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 M1286s 1986