Rebel Lions, Michael McClure's first book of poetry since the retrospective Selected Poems (1985), spans a decade of profound personal change and poetic evolution for the author. In an introductory note, he provides a backdrop for the collection, which moves from old life to new. McClure's work bursts forth from the matrix of the physical and spiritual. "Poetry is one of the edges of consciousness," he asserts. "And consciousness is a real thing like the hoof of a deer or the smell of a bush of blackberries at the roadside in the sun." In the first section of Rebel Lions, "Old Flames," the poems range from the realistic ("Awakening and Recalling a Summer Hike") to the metaphorical ("The Silken Stitching"), as the poet addresses a life on the verge of transformation. The second section, "Rose Rain," exults in a life transformed through love's alchemy. Rebel Lions closes with "New Brain," poems affirming the freedom of all humankind and matter in the eternal now.
"Poetry," Michael McClure has said, "is not a system but is real events spoken of, or happening, in sounds." And for thirty years, whether in his early "Dionysian" lyrics or his evolving "bio-alchemical" wisdom, his work has shown a ferocious energy and driving physicality. A poet of and for our time, his own formal structures--the shape of his poems and his highly charged breath-line--nevertheless look back to the classics, to the Provençal troubadours, and to the Romantic verse of Blake, Keats, and Shelley. McClure's Selected Poems is the first major retrospective collection of a poet and Obie-winning playwright associated with the San Francisco Renaissance from its start as well as the early Beat movement. The poems in the book, chosen by McClure himself, hold the undiminished force of three decades' work distilled. Included in Selected Poems are poems and long passages from nine of the author's earlier collections.
"Rain Mirror," writes Michael McClure, "stands as my most bare and forthright book. It contains two long poems, 'Haiku Edge' and 'Crisis Blossom, ' which are quite disparate from one another." Together, the poems complement each other as do light and dark. "Haiku Edge" is a poem of linked haiku, often humorous, sometimes harsh, and always elegant. "Crisis Blossom," in contrast, is a long poem in three parts that records the author's "state of psyche, capillaries, muscles, fears, boldnesses, and hungers down where they exist without management," and the months of shock and recovery during a psychophysical meltdown.
The final book of poems from a Beat Generation legend, Mule Kick Blues finds McClure restlessly innovating until the end. Completed over the last years of his life, Mule Kick Blues is the final book of poems by Beat Generation legend Michael McClure. Taking its title from an innovative sequence of homages to blues musicians like Leadbelly, Willie Dixon, and Howlin' Wolf, and evoking Kerouac's concept of "blues" poems, Mule Kick Blues contains stark meditations on the poet's mortality as well as the nature and zen poems for which McClure is known. With shout-outs to lifelong friends like Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, and Gary Snyder, the long poem"Fragments of Narcissus," and the profound and moving sequence "Death Poems," Mule Kick Blues is a definitive statement by one of the most significant American poets of the last 60 years. "His validity and his intelligence and his intensity and his curiosity about the complexly diverse world in which we live is to me extraordinarily interesting."--Robert Creeley
Antechamber and Other Poems, Michael McClure's latest book with New Directions, joins a growing list of contributions that includes the verse collection September Blackberries (1974) and Jaguar Skies (1975) as well as the musical play Gorf (1976). His writing in recent years is "alchemical" in its intent, yet his twin declarations, "Biology Is Politics" and "I Am A Mammal Patriot," perhaps express more accurately both the universality of his outlook and its humane particularity. McClure's mysticism is vigorously scientific. Even the familiar patterned shapes of his poems remind us of the stars in the night sky and those we see when we shut our eyes. In the dancing lines of his newest work--the title poem "Antechamber" most especially--are the whirl of galaxies, the radiance of molecules, the energy lines of the double helix coiling around its core.
"The Mad Cub, " first published in 1970, is a sexual coming-of-age tale, illustrating how "a puzzled human cub" turns into a "transcendent lion-being of the universe." We see the novel's sensitive, artistic protagonist at age 12, feeling overweight and unable to compete with the other boys; at 18, as a college student involved with several women and hanging out in jazz clubs while experimenting with drugs and alcohol; and in his 20s, as a poet and playwright of the Beat era, tripping on peyote and trying to reconcile a series of affairs with the love for his wife and baby daughter. Written in the "spontaneous bop" style of some of author Michael McClure's fellow Beats, the novel has been called painfully honest in its recounting of adolescent memories.