Michael McClure has long been noted for the popularity of his dynamic poetry readings. At the age of 23 he gave his first reading at the legendary 6 Gallery event in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read Howl. Today McClure is more active than ever, performing his poetry at colleges and clubs across the country.
"The role model for Jim Morrison," as the Los Angeles Times characterized Michael McClure, has found sources in music from Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis to the rock with which his poetry readings frequently share a bill.
For the last six years, McClure has been working with his old friend Ray Manzarek, former Doors' keyboardist: McClure recites his poetry with piano accompaniment by Manzarek. Mystic Fire Video released a 70-minute performance tape of the duo, and Shanachie has issued a McClure/Manzarek compact disc, Love Lion, recorded at the Bottom Line in New York.
McClure reads with an actor's command and sense of timing, bringing an impact to "transport the audience to a very different and intriguing place." He has given hundreds of readings in venues as varied as the Fillmore Auditorium, Yale University, and the Library of Congress. His audiences have ranged from an intimate dozen at a tiny Maui bookstore to a multitude of 40,000 at the Airlift Africa benefit in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
The Poetry Flash described a reading by the poet: "McClure -- dressed in black -- stood and uttered his words with a sort of sultry precision. His gestures punctuated his words (a poetry of the body), enthralling, enlisting a dynamic tension between audience and performer that didn't let up until the words stopped."
McClure has written more than twenty plays and musicals which are still performed regularly in the U.S. and abroad. His play The Beard provoked a censorship battle in L.A. as the cast was arrested after each performance on nineteen consecutive nights.
The poet is featured in several films, among them Scorsese's Last Waltz, in which his reading of a poem by Chaucer "lilted, rolled, and seduced the audience into the lyric tonality of Middle English" (Atlanta Poetry Review). McClure and Rip Torn portray outlaw motorcyclists in Norman Mailer's Beyond the Law.
McClure has made two television documentaries -- The maze (1968) and September Blackberries (1973). His books of poetry include Dark Brown, Jaguar Skies, September Blackberries, Selected Poems, and, most recently, Rebel Lions, which contains many of the poems McClure performs with Ray Manzarek. He has published two novels (The Mad Cub, The Adept), eight books of plays (including his two Obie winners, The Beard and Josephine the Mouse Singer), and three collections of essays (Scratching the Beat Surface, Specks, Meat Science Essays).
Michael McClure has collaborated extensively: he has written the autobiography of a Hell's Angel friend (Freewheelin' Frank, Secretary of the Angels: As Told to Michael McClure), and worked in the fine arts field with Bruce Conner and Wallace Berman. McClure's songs include "Mercedes Benz," popularized by Janis Joplin.
University of New Mexico Press has published McClure's collection of essays and interviews entitled Lighting the Corners: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary. It is "a luminous compendium," writes poet Anne Waldman, "fascinating poetic and cultural history by one of our best and wisest bard/scholars. McClure's thinking is brave, obdurate, passionate, complex."
McClure's poetry is published by Penguin and New Directions.
