Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac

by Michael McClure, Larry Keenan (Photographer)

This insider's view of the Beat scene of the fifties and early sixties vividly marks the advancement of a new perception of art as "a living bio-alchemical organism" through essays by a poet and playwright who helped shape the movement.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1994

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]

This is not a book of literary criticism in any conventional sense. Nor is it a literary biography, although it includes passages in which McClure discusses his development as a poet. What it is, is a poetics, but unlike Aristotle’s Poetics or Jack Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” McClure’s Scratching the Beat Surface is a heavily theoretical mix of biophysics, cybernetics and self-referentiality.

The book starts off simply enough, with a chapter in which, following a discussion of an early experience with peyote, McClure turns to the subject of the Six Gallery poetry reading in 1955 at which, among other things, Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl.” The events of that evening have been described elsewhere (Kerouac’s fictionalized version in The Subterraneans is perhaps the best known), and here, instead of going over the familiar details, McClure includes in his book the texts of some of the poems that were read that night by poets like Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. Although McClure does not analyze the poems for their imagery, their symbolism, their language, or their metre, he does relate them to the main argument of his book, which is that the formal experiments of both the Romantics and the Beats reflect new perceptions and new ideas about the relations among poetry, consciousness and the natural world.

It is with the second chapter that reading McClure’s argument becomes an interesting experience. He takes up ideas from science, from poetic tradition, and from personal observation and employs these in an exploration of “the biological basis of poetry” (43). However, the argument here is not structured as it would be in a conventional work of natural science: as he discusses DNA, cells, energy and evolution, McClure structures his argument experimentally, and employs sensuous imagery and poetic forms, suggesting that he has structured his exploration of the relationship between biology and poetry in a way that expresses the theory he is describing (in a similar way, it has been suggested that Jacques Lacan’s writing style is difficult because it reflects the theories he describes. But one gets into an interesting paradox here: McClure writes of his poems: “Communication was not as important to me as expression. To speak and move was the most important thing” [26]; the question this raises is whether in this book McClure is interested in communicating a meaning or an experience? Inasmuch as McClure includes the texts of several poems and comments on them, I’m inclined to think that there is meaning here. But the example of William S. Burroughs’s cut-ups is never far from my mind, and one has to wonder whether, in terms of the argument McClure is making, the inclusion of texts by poets and passages from biology texts could not be read as irony?)

In addition to the theory, the second chapter includes the text of a difficult poem, Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers.” It is certainly worth reading, but again here you will not get McClure’s discussion of its meaning (McClure writes, “Sherman Paul’s gloss of the poem tells us much of what [“The Kingfishers”] means, but I am more impressed with the poem than with what it means”; nor, strangely, is there a great deal of comment on how this poem in particular relates to the argument McClure is making about poetic structure. However, it is clear from McClure’s comments that Olson was an important influence for him, and it may be useful in understanding McClure’s argument to read a text he does not include in this book, Olson’s essay “Projective Verse,” on several passages of which McClure comments.

The latter half of the book could be read as applied theory, as McClure discusses Mozart and William Blake in terms of his theories of poetry, biology and new vision. Like Georges Bataille in Literature and Evil, though, McClure tends to discuss those artists in terms of their personalities rather than in terms of their work.

Reread: August 25-27 2015

My first readings were with a hardcover copy purchased from Classics Books, Montreal, Quebec
Acquired the copy I am currently using Sept 21, 2006
City Lights Book Shop, London, Ontario

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

A previous reviewer has analyzed the contents of this book already in quite stunning depth so i'll just stick to my own personal thoughts and impressions.

I had many conflicting feelings about this book - in some ways it's very 'airy fairy' and 'really out there' and discontiguous as McClure jumps from subject to subject making the connections and his overall argument quite disparate in parts.

On the other hand, what i did enjoy about this book was McClure's highly original analysis, how he turns his back on traditional Cartesian logic (which explains many of my criticisms above) and most importantly we begin to understand not only McClure's cryptic comment of "poetry is a muscular principle" but also WHY McClure believes there is a strong connection between poetry and biology.

The main takeaway i got from McClure's analysis was this: we have traditionally thought that poetry must come from the mind (and therefore the brain) but McClure reminds us that the brain is not an independent and autonomous organ - it receives signals from and signals to other parts of the body such as our organs and muscles (or 'meat' - remember McClure wrote a book called Meat Science Essays?) Therefore one's poetry might be a reflection of not only our mind but our whole physiological condition and status as well as psychological, right down to the cellular level.

A fascinating philosophy and theory but i couldn't help thinking - so what?
Even if we have a better understanding of where poetry comes from, does that show us or tell us how we should write it?

This is a book of poetics but only in terms of theory. If you want to learn more about HOW to write poetry, read Pound or Williams or Eliot.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

For lack of a better word, I will call this a book of illuminations. What other categorization is appropriate for a book that says "Poetry is biological!"? The essays weave together so many different aspects of "the universe" to show what poetry is and can be, and not only what it is, but how it is and who it s. The explications of works by his contemporaries are very insightful, very helpful. This is a book steeped in learning and as such has much to teach.

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh man, I wish I knew what I was thinking with this one.

Actually, I know what I was thinking. I was thinking I'd purchased a book of essays about the Beats, their artistic influence, maybe another new and interesting point of view on the Six Gallery Reading, as McClure was one of the readers that night. I was hoping for something new, something different, something I had yet to uncover in my studies of the Beats. I got just that, but now that I got it, I want to throw it right back. Because what I really got was a bunch of hippie-dippie crap and a whole lot of navel gazing.

Here is what I have gathered from reading this book:

Michael McClure took peyote 24 years prior to writing the book. He may have still been a little high when he sat down to write it.

McClure fucking LOVES wolves and William Blake.

McClure has a NASTY habit of CAPITALIZING WORDS he WANTS to emphasize. IT GETS really tiresome TO READ PROSE or even poetry when the author is textually shouting at you A THIRD OF THE TIME.

In short, if you aren't the biggest McClure fan (I am not) or get tired of all the metaphysical "expand your consciousness" talk (I cannot stand it) avoid this book. I should have.

I leave you with an excerpt to show you what I'm talking about:

A ribosome in a liver cell in a salmon might relate to a field of energies or a point within a quasar or a distant sun. There might be interlocked and predisposed relationships of these, and other constructs. If the universe is a single flow or aura, it seems highly likely that such interrelationships exist. (And the universe IS indeed an aura or trillionically multiplex interrelations. And it is primarily comprised of styles of matter that we do not consciously contact.) We cannot perceive an antimatter universe - yet everything that we perceive as real might be an empty pinprick of nothingness within a nirvana of antimatter beyond comprehension.

Yes, because that's what I think of when I want to read about a literary sub-genre.

Fucking shoot me.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael McClure was among the poets who read their work when Allen Ginsberg read Howl at the Six Gallery. He writes about why poetry and the influences among his friends and other poets, particularly Charles Olson. "I was sensing through the eyes and nose of Shelley and John Webster, and using the hearing and touch of Ginsberg and Duncan and Kerouac—and the jazz lucidity of Creeley, and the Doug fir of Snyder, and the almost mystical physical perceptions of D.H. Lawrence and of Olson himself. I was convinced that poetry was about, by, and from, the meat, that poetry was the product of flesh brushing itself against experience. We are seekers moving in the Tathagata brushing ourselves against the universe of real, solid illusions. It is by our touches that we become ourselves—as our ancestors became us and as we become our maturing, sharpening, brightening selves."

[Lady3jane]

Recommended by a dance teacher; chock full of interesting insight, inspiring thought, and beautiful poetry.

[Sacha]

This or math poetry by same author

[Chris Balz · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting tour of the ways of poetic vision by one of Jim Morrison's most important intellectual sponsors.