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Number
285
May June 2000
Accident
& Eternity
MARY MACKEY
Copyright
© 2000 Poetry Flash
RAIN MIRROR, new poems by Michael McClure,
New Directions, New York, 1999, 112 pages, $13.95
paper. [Michael McClure received the Bay Area
Book Reviewers 1999 Award in Poetry for
TOUCHING THE EDGE: Dharma Devotions from the
Hummingbird Sangha, Shambhala.
1999.]
Michael McClure is one of the best known of the
poets of the Beat Generation. Born in Kansas during
the Depression, he arrived in San Francisco in
1954, attended art classes at San Francisco State,
and took a poetry workshop from poet Robert Duncan
(an experience which McClure has called "one of the
most brilliant things" that ever happened to him).
The Six Gallery had recently been created by
converting a garage into an art gallery using a few
buckets of black paint and some plywood. In 1955, a
cross section of hip San Francisco attended a
reading at the Six; McClure read that night as did
Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and
Philip Lamantia.
A prolific poet filled with ferocious creative
energy, McClure has published over twenty
collections of poetry since that night at the Six;
written numerous essays (including his
mind-changing, aesthetic-altering "Meat Science
essays" published by City Lights in 1963); and is
the author of thirty-some plays (one of
which---The Beard---brought him national
notoriety in 1965 when, for fourteen nights in a
row, members of the cast were arrested and carted
off to jail by the Berkeley police for performing
simulated sex.)
McClure's stance toward poetry (and life) can be
roughly described as anti-Cartesian. For him, the
mind/body split simply does not exist. All human
existence is part of that great fusion of biology
and mysticism, flesh and soul, which he has called
"spiritmeat." In this universe, poetry is not so
much communication as personal expression. Its
flow, its lines, and its rhythms are all meant to
approximate the actual speaking voice of the poet.
"A poem," he writes , "is as much of me as an
arm."
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In the Preface to Rain Mirror [one of
three books he published in 1999], McClure
calls Rain Mirror "my most bare and
forthright book." This is an understatement.
Composed of two long and very different poems,
"Haiku Edge" and "Crisis Blossom," the collection
traces the impact of two extremely traumatic events
in McClure's life: a near-fatal plane crash and a
nervous collapse that put him into the
hospital.
As its title suggests, "Haiku Edge" is a series
of interlinked haikus which McClure often performs
to a piano accompaniment by Ray Manzarek in order
"to float the poems, like parchment or silk
supporting sumi ink." McClure credits poet and
retired Zen Buddhist abbot Philip Whalen for
showing him how haiku should be written in English;
and with Whalen's advice in mind he has abandoned
the seventeen syllable rule (which he calls
"over-ample" in English), to create fifty-eight
stunning, deftly crafted haikus, all of which exist
both simultaneously and separately in his mind, in
the reader's mind, and in that mystical
non-chronological space of the eternal present
moment where chance becomes inevitability. McClure
puts us on notice in the first haiku of the
collection that in these poems accident and
eternity will be united.
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OH ACCIDENT!
Oh,
per
fect
((CRUSHED))
snail
---LIKE
A
STAR
gone out
!
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Also glued together are technology and nature,
their unity forming one of his main themes.
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THE HERON
flies quickly
o
ver
your head
as you speak
on the
phone
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Although McClure usually renders these links
between things with a painterly verbal precision,
he can be playful in the haikus, even funny. In
one, he toys with questions of scale and point of
view in ways that are both comic and profound.
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THE FOX TURD
is a cliff
a
n
d
the
butterfly
is
a
condor
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In "Crisis Blossom," the second of the two long
poems, McClure leaves behind the staccato impact of
haiku to return to his signature poetic line: a
long rush of words, sounds, and mixed type faces
that flows down the page, hits the bottom, and runs
up to the top of the next with the intensity of a
waterfall. These are breakdown poems, pushed by the
sheer power of speech and breath, driven by
spiritmeat out of control; and as such, they take
serious chances.
"While writing 'Crisis Blossom,'" McClure has
said, "I was concealing my distress from the world.
Much of the energy of my body, memory, and
imagination, unable to expand into the world,
uncoiled into the writing. My psychophysical
state…carried me to the edge, where my
sizeless emotions of fear, suicidal ideation,
sleeplessness, and lack of grounding in the present
took me for the first time to a hospital."
The poem itself, which runs over sixty pages, is
divided into three sections: "Graftings," "After
the Solstice," and "After Meltdown." Taken together
these three very different poems-within-a-poem
represent three different explorations of poetic
form.
In "Graftings" each poem begins with what
McClure calls "bloom lines" taken from his earlier
poem "Stanzas in Memory" which appeared in his
collection Dolphin Skull. Very much rooted
in the moment, they explore the world of the
senses: the ecstasy, unwilling insights, and
hallucinations, the blunt raw maya of individual
consciousness. Like Blake (whom he quotes in a
later section), McClure's vision of ordinary things
is never ordinary. Take, for example, his mystical,
acid-trippish argument-prayer with God:
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...he yells in caps:
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DON'T DO THIS TO ME!
...
That twig has a rabbit's head!
The orange flesh of the apricot
where the mouth bites it
is a Hell/Heaven
a Hell/Heaven
of naked figure
. . .
DON'T DO THIS TO ME!
I love it!
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Sometimes these poems spin beyond the edge of
coherence in ways that are hard to follow as
McClure takes risk after risk; but there is never
any doubt what is at stake. "EVERYTHING/ is
shape-changing," he cries in "flower," one of the
few poems that is not grafted to "Stanzas in
Memory" by a bloom line. "Should I order cyanide or
should I order champagne?" he asks more bluntly in
"grafting ten." The world, or rather McClure's
consciousness in the world, clearly has come
unstuck from that limited social agreement we have
agreed to call reality.
In Part II, "After the Solstice," McClure shares
with the reader that moment when he realized a
truth that most of us (in the name of sanity) spend
our lives denying. As his plane begins to descend
(in a near fatal crash that luckily never
happened), he records the terror of Not-Being, the
fear he felt when he believed he might leave the
world of the senses forever and go forth "into the
indescribable endless / with no monkey mind to
speak to me." "GRAY / EMPTINESS / STRETCHING
FOREVER."
"After the Solstice" is terrifying; but in some
ways "After Meltdown," the coda section of "Crisis
Blossom" is even more so. Here his language breaks
down to a chilling state of pure simplicity, as if
even the act of forming a coherent thought is too
much to bear. You can feel McClure standing over
this poem like a man at a crash site, trying to
make sense out of the wreckage. "DREAD / SLIPPERY /
AS / GRINDING / PLANES / IT'S / OKAY / NOT" he
writes. "BIG / EMPTY / CRAZY ROOMS / SCARED / ON /
THE / PORCH / PLAID BATHROBE."
McClure himself has said that "After the
Meltdown" is not an attempt at style but a "rare
state of being" which "fortunately" he has not
often experienced.
Although it is easy to understand why he might
not count himself fortunate to have experienced the
pain that inspired these poems, we as readers are
fortunate to be able to read them. Rain
Mirror is an explosive collection: powerful,
brutally honest, and as beautifully crafted as
anything he has ever written.
Mary Mackey is a poet and a novelist. Her
most recent collection of poetry is The Dear
Dance of Eros (Fjord Press).
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