Michael McClure Was a Poet at the Birth of Beat-—National Poetry Month 2025

 

            Michael McClure reading in 1957, two years after his debut at Gallery Six in San Francisco. 

Michael McClure was there—an attendant the birth when the squalling slippery babe nearly fell to the floor before ardent arms saved it.  Which is to say that he was one of the five young, obscure poets who read in the smoky confines of San Francisco’s Gallery Six on October 7, 1955. That was the famed event where Kenneth Rexroth, a Bay Area bohemian bard of an earlier generation, introduced largely unheralded young poets Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, as well as McClure.  Famously it is where Ginsberg first read Howl.  A drunk Jack Kerouac refused to read his own work but cheered the other poets on, shouting “Yeah! Go! Go!” during their performances. It was a memorable moment and was almost instantly mythologized as the “Birth of the Beat.”

McClure went on to be a continued counter-cultural presence in the Rock & Roll era hobnobbing and collaborating with the likes of Bob Dylan, the Doors, and others.

McClure with Bob Dylan and Ginsberg in the late '60s.

McClure, poet, playwright, novelist, and documentary filmmaker was born in Marysville, Kansas on October 20, 1932 and raised there and in Seattle. He was educated at the University of Wichita, the University of Arizona, and San Francisco State College—where he studied with poet Robert Duncan.

He was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Persian Pony (2017), Mephistos and Other Poems (2016), Of Indigo and Saffron (2011), Mysteriosos and Other Poems (2010), Rebel Lions (1991), and The New Book/A Book of Torture (1961).  

                                    One of McClure's many books of verse.

“McClure’s poetry combined spontaneity, typographical experimentation, Buddhist practice, and body language in performance to merge the ecstatic and the corporeal,” according to his Poetry Foundation bio.  Publishers Weekly noted of his work, “McClure infuses ecstatic direct address and colloquial diction with an exquisite sensibility, one that reveals the world in its ordinary complex gorgeousness.”  He frequently performed his poetry with musical collaborators, including composer Terry Riley, and recorded several CDs with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek.

He wrote more than 20 plays and musicals, several television documentaries, and the song Mercedes Benz, which was made famous by Janis Joplin. His 1965 play The Beard, which depicted an imagined sexual encounter between Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, gained notoriety when it was unsuccessfully brought to trial on charges of obscenity.  Kerouac based the character Pat McLear on him in his autobiographical novel Big Sur.

McClure's honors included a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred Jarry Award, a Rockefeller grant for play writing, and an Obie Award for Best Play.

                                                    McClure was even honored on a postage stamp.

McClure taught poetry at California College of the Arts for over 40 years. He lived in Oakland with his wife, the sculptor Amy Evans McClure, before his death on May 4, 2020 at age 87.

McClure burst on the scene reading this poem at the Gallery Six event.

For the Death of 100 Whales

In April, 1954, Time magazine described seventy-nine bored American G.I.s stationed at a NATO base in Iceland murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers, armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales to death.

 

Hung midsea

Like a boat mid-air

The liners boiled their pastures:

The liners of flesh,

The Arctic steamers

 

Brains the size of a teacup

Mouths the size of a door

 

The sleek wolves

Mowers and reapers of sea kine.

THE GIANT TADPOLES

(Meat their algae)

Leapt

Like sheep or children.

Shot from the sea’s bore.

 

Turned and twisted

(Goya!!)

Flung blood and sperm.

Incense.

Gnashed at their tails and brothers

Cursed Christ of mammals,

Snapped at the sun,

Ran for the Sea’s floor.

 

Goya! Goya!

 

—Michael McClure

 

McClure mature.  He would have enjoyed the rhyme. 

The Chamber, dedicated to Kerouac, was included in McClure’s Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems published in 2011.

 

The Chamber

for Jack Kerouac

 

IN LIGHT ROOM IN DARK HELL IN UMBER IN CHROME,

     I sit feeling the swell of the cloud made about by movement

 

                 of arm leg and tongue. In reflections of gold

           light. Tints and flashes of gold and amber spearing

                     and glinting. Blur glass…blue Glass,

 

             black telephone. Matchflame of violet and flesh

                 seen in the clear bright light. It is not night

 

                and night too. In Hell, there are stars outside.

            And long sounds of cars. Brown shadows on walls

                                       in the light

                           of the room. I sit or stand

 

                 wanting the huge reality of touch and love.

            In the turned room. Remember the long-ago dream

 

   of stuffed animals (owl, fox) in a dark shop. Wanting

             only the purity of clean colors and new shapes

                                     and feelings.

                 I WOULD CRY FOR THEM USELESSLY

 

                   I have ten years left to worship my youth

                      Billy the Kid, Rimbaud, Jean Harlow

  IN DARK HELL IN LIGHT ROOM IN UMBER AND CHROME I

                                                                                            feel the swell of

smoke the drain and flow of motion of exhaustion, the long sounds of cars

                                                                                                     the brown shadows

on the wall. I sit or stand. Caught in the net of glints from corner table to

                                                                                                                       dull plane

from knob to floor, angles of flat light, daggers of beams. Staring at love’s face.

      The telephone in cataleptic light. Marchflames of blue and red seen in the

                                                                                                                            clear grain.

I see myself—ourselves—in Hell without radiance. Reflections that we are.

 

              The long cars make sounds and brown shadows over the wall.

 

                               I am real as you are real whom I speak to.

                   I raise my head, see over the edge of my nose. Look up

 

                    and see that nothing is changed. There is no flash

                            to my eyes. No change to the room.

 

    Vita Nuova—No! The dead, dead world.

                     The strain of desire is only a heroic gesture.

                       An agony to be so in pain without release

 

                             when love is a word or kiss.

 

—Michael McClure

When Flower Power Took the Stage—Frisco’s Human Be-in

 

                                    A poster promoting the Human Be-in at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

It has been dubbed it birth of the Hippie Era.  It was more like a coming out party for a counterculture that had been developing in the Bay Area for more than a decade.  

The Human Be-In held on January 14, 1967 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park attracted as many as 20,000 people and got the attention of the national media as nothing else before it.  That night’s network television news shows featured film of the event that beamed into perplexed homes across the country.  That semi-official reflection of American culture, Life magazine affirmed its significance with a photo spread.

Soon Scott McKenzie’s Are You Coming to San Francisco? would hit the air waves and kids from across the continent would head to Haight-Ashbury for the Summer of Love.  By spring similar events were popping up around the country. 

Chicago’s first Be-In was held at The Point near the 57th Street Beach by Hyde Park in April.  But the one on May 14 in Lincoln Park and promoted by the Seed turned into a regular event every Sunday that year and again the following summer right up to when the park was taken over for the Democratic Convention protests in August.

                                        The Human Be-In was the inspiration of artist and San Francico Oracle founder Michael Bowen.

The San Francisco Be-In was the brainchild of 30 year old Michael Bowen, an artist and sculptor who had connections to the well established Beat culture and who dabbled in mysticism.  According to poet Andrew Cohen who co-founded the pioneering counter culture paper the San Francisco Oracle with him, Bowen hopped to unite different cultural elements in the Bay Area—the Beats with their interest in mysticism, Berkley radicals who were powering the growing Anti-war movement, and the relatively apolitical Hippie culture in San Francisco with its fascination with hallucinogens and rock and roll.  He hoped for an event with would meld and synthesize these sometimes contradictory currents.

The catalyst for the event was a new California law which went into effect in October 1966 which made the possession and use of LSD a crime for the first time.  Brown envisioned an event where the law would be challenged by massive, open defiance.  He created the term Human Be-In as a synthesis of Humanism and the civil disobedience of Civil Rights Movement lunch counter sit-ins.

                                    Bowen's classic cover creation for the Oracle.

The event was promoted heavily in the Oracle as A Gathering of the Tribes and featured on the cover of its fifth edition printed in an eye-catching purple ink.  Flyers and posters distributed at music venues like the Fillmore, Beat coffee houses and bookstores, and on the streets generated excitement.

The program was impressive.  Beat mainstays Allan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder were on hand to lend support and lead meditations.  Former Harvard professor Dr. Timothy Leary, already famous for his advocacy of LSD, made his first West Coast appearance and for the first time urged his audience to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” With him was his associate Richard Alpert, who would soon emerge as the guru Ram Das.

                          Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Freewheelin’ Frank, and Marcetta lead chanting at the Human Be-In.

Radical political figures including the comedian/Civil Rights activist Dick Gregory and student organizer Jerry Rubin spoke.  The only woman on the program, Lenore Kandel, read erotic poetry from The Love Book, her four poem pamphlet that was at the center of a celebrated censorship case.

Although the catch phrase had not yet been coined the Human Be-In was all about sex, drugs, and rock & roll plus a dash of mysticism and of revolution.

The program was energized by performances by some of the top bands of the emerging psychedelic rock scene—Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and The Grateful Dead.

Hell’s Angels were on hand to provide “security” and even conducted an operation to reunite lost children with their parents.  Hugh Romney and the Hog Farm were there to provide food—brown rice and veggies.  All of the classic elements of the counter culture were gathered together for the first time in one event.

                                    A rare photo of underground chemist Owsley who brought thousands of hits of pure and potent acid to the Be-In.

Most critically, the guerrilla chemist Owsley Stanley brought thousands of doses of powerful White Lighting Acid which he had manufactured just for the occasion and which was distributed freely to the crowd.

Inspired by the Be-In and Scott McKenzie’s song more than 100,000 kids descended on the overwhelmed Haight.  Despite the best efforts of locals to accommodate them, most ended up on the street and many were prey for sexual exploitation, violence, and hard drugs like heroin.  By Fall the organizers of the Be-In were eager to send a new message—don’t come to San Francisco.  Instead they wanted to young people to stay in their own towns and create community and social movements there.

Less than ten months after the Human Be-In the community staged a Death of the Hippy mock funeral to discourage the hoards of young people who had descended on the Haight during the Summer of Love.

So on October 6, 1967 The Death of the Hippie was staged as a mock funeral in the Haight.

By that time, however, pop culture had appropriated  Hippie and characters were popping up on television shows and in movies.  Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In premiered in January 1968.

In the boonies, kids still wanted to be Hippies.  They grew their hair long, smoked dope, dropped acid, and listened endlessly to rock and roll.  At the same time the escalating Viet Nam War and police repression of protests were radicalizing many.  In early ’68 Rubin and Abbie Hoffman would create the Yippies out of thin air to politicize the counter culture as never before.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti—American Poet and God Father to the Beats

Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti died on February 23, 2021 in the apartment over City Lights Book Store where he lived for decades.  He was just a month shy of his 102 birthday.  Somehow it seemed to many of us that he might just go on forever like a Lord of the Rings wizard.  He was active in the management of the book store until just a few years ago and sometimes made it downstairs on a good days even later.  And he continued to write including a cutting piece on Donald Trump that went.  His death was announced by the bookstore which recently had been threatened with closing until donors flooded a GoFundMe campaign with donations to keep the beloved institution alive.  The shop’s statement pledged to continue the master’s work and legacy.  The following was posted here in 2019 on his 100th birthday.

Ferlinghetti from the window of his apartment over the store.

Born on March 24, 1919 Lawrence Ferlinghetti celebrates his 100th birthday today, still active and apparently in reasonably good health.  Can’t keep a good poet down.  And for my money Ferlinghetti is the super-nova in the constellation of Beat poets even including other bright spots like Alan Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder—all of whom he befriended and published.

The poet was born in Yonkers, New York.  His father was an Italian immigrant auctioneer who had shortened the family name to Ferlin.  Young Larry did not know his real family name until he entered the Navy in 1942.  His mother was of mixed French, Portuguese, and Sephardic Jewish extraction.  He only began using the original family name for his published work in 1955 when his first collection, Pictures of the Gone World was published.

His father died before he was born and his mother when he was at an early age.  He was raised largely by a French aunt Emily who took her charge with her to France while she worked as a governess there for several years.  French became his first language.

Upon returning to the United States he was placed for a time in a Chappaqua, New York orphanage until his aunt could find a new position.  She was hired as governess to the daughter of Presley Eugene Bisland and Anna Lawrence Brisland, in Bronxville, New York.  Anna was the cultured daughter of the founder of Sarah Lawrence Academy.  The couple took a shine to the bright boy and eventually became virtual parents to him.  He stayed on their estate after Emily left.

The Bislands paid for his tuition at smart day and prep schools and at the University of North Carolina where the young man became interested in journalism and wrote for the college paper.

While on summer vacation in 1940 he and two classmates lived on an island off the coast of Maine making a living lobstering, fishing, and beach combing.  The experience cemented a lifelong love of the sea and the seacoast.

 

                                                  Ferlinghetti in the Navy as Captain of a sub chaser off the coast of Normandy.

When World War II broke out, Larry naturally enlisted in the Navy and was educated as a Midshipman and first shipped out as a very junior officer on J.P. Morgan’s former yacht which had been fitted out for anti-submarine patrol along the East Coast when those waters were among the most dangerous in the world.  He advanced and later served on three larger anti-sub ships.  He was Captain of the sub chaser USS SC1308 which served in the fleet protecting the Normandy invasion.  Later he transferred to the Pacific where he was navigator on a troop ship.

After his ship moored in Japan and transferred its troops to occupation duty, the young officer took time to visit devastated Nagasaki.  He was shocked, even traumatized by what he saw only weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped on the civilian population.  He became a lifelong, committed pacifist.

After the war he enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University in New York City with the help of the GI Bill.  He read widely and deeply in the classics of English literature and was influenced by American poets like Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings.  He also devoured American novelists Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos.  He was searching for an authentically American, democratic voice.  Instructors at Columbia included a who’s who of the New York literati—Babette, Deutsch, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and Mark Van Doren.  He earned his master’s degree in 1947.

Then it was off for further study at the Sorbonne in Paris.  He lived and studied in the City of Lights until getting his doctorate with honors in 1951.  One of his two main theses was on the city as symbolism in poetry, another recurring theme in future work.

 In 1953 Ferlinghetti and his wife, Selden Kirby-Smith who he had married after returning to the States from France, settled in San Francisco.  He taught and tutored French and spent most of his time painting and freelancing as an art critic.  His first foray into poetry was as a translator of work in French published by Peter Martin in his City Lights magazine.  It was the beginning of a close collaboration that really blossomed when the two men joined forces to open City Lights Bookstore in the heart of the bohemian North Beach area.  It was the first all-paperback bookstore in the U.S. and specialized in poetry, literary fiction, and a good supply of the latest European literature.

Ferlinghetti's first poetry collection  Number One in City Light Books Pocket Poetry series.

Martin opted out of the partnership in 1955 and Ferlinghetti expanded operations by launching its own publishing house.  The first volume in what would become the famous Pocket Poet series was Pictures of the Gone World.  It would be followed by volumes by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levitov, William Carlos Williams, and Gregory Corso.

City Lights was never intended to be exclusively a Beat imprint—it issued work by  a number of European writers and Williams who represented an avante garde of an earlier era—but it became the most important publisher of the movement.  He also published prose by Charles Bukowski, Neil Cassady and others and leftist essays by Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, and Howard Zinn.  Under Ferlinghetti’s still active supervision, it continues to be an important source of culturally cutting edge work.

Ferlinghetti first heard New York based Alan Ginsburg read Howl at the famous Six Gallery Reading in October 1956 which was the formal introduction of the Beat movement to the San Francisco arts community.  The next day Ferlinghetti sent Ginsburg a wire that began, “I greet you at the beginning of an illustrious career.”  Howl became the fourth volume in the Pocket Poet series.  It also became a famous cause célèbre.

Ferlinghetti proudly and defiantly displaying copies of Alan Ginsberg's Howl.  His obscenity trial for publishing and selling the book became a key case in ending censorship in literature.

Ferlinghetti and his book store manager were arrested by San Francisco police and charged with obscenity for publishing and selling the book.  The case against the manager was dropped, but the city vigorously went after the publisher.  It was a long trial and Ferlinghetti was represented by an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer.  Major literary and academic figures testified about the artistic merit of the book.  In the end judge Clayton Horn acquitted Ferlinghetti and ruled that Howl had significant artistic merit.  It was one of the cases that finally broke the back of censorship of literature.

The book that cemented Ferlinghetti’s own reputation as a poet was not published by City Lights.   A Coney Island of the Mind was issued by New Directions, a prestigious New York publisher in 1958.   It was both a critical and a popular success.  In a country that has largely rejected poetry as a popular medium, it has sold over a million copies over the last sixty plus years and has never gone out of print.

Ferlinghetti’s masterpiece, one of my own favorite books of poetry, was unlike the work of most of the Beats.  It was lyrical and often told a story.  But then the poet often said he didn’t personally consider himself a Beat, despite his fondness for them, but considered himself a bohemian in the tradition of Williams, E.E. Cummings, and Ezra Pound.

                                  I nearly wore out my copy of Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind.

50 Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti 50 Images by Armando Milani was published in 2010. The following year Ferlinghetti contributed two of his poems to the celebration of the 150th Anniversary of Italian unification—Songs of the Third World War and Old Italians Dying inspired the artists of the exhibition Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Italy 150 held in Turin, Italy.

Ferlinghetti always considered his art an extension of his personal anarcho-pacifist philosophy and socialist politics.  He echoed one of his heroes, Vachel Lyndsay in his Populist Manifesto, “Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds…Poetry should transport the public to higher places, than other wheels can carry it.”

                                      Ferlinghetti's 2019 novel/memoir.

Meaning what he wrote, he has often brought his poetry to the forefront of the struggle for peace and disarmament, civil rights, and justice. Most recently Ferlinghetti has published I Greet You At The Beginning Of A Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg 1955–1997 in 2015 and Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals, 1960-2010 the same year. Barely a week before his centennial his new novel/memoir/stream of consciousness screed Little Boy was launched.

The rise of the Age of Trump has spurred scathing poems that show none of the old fire has been quelled.

Ferlinghetti still lives above the Bookstore.  He travels as widely as he is able.  He continues to paint and in 2012 had a 50 year retrospective exhibit of his works on canvas. 

Ferlinghetti has always been an artist as well as a painter.  Liberty on Earth, 1992, mixed media.

His birthday will be celebrated with an open house party at City Lights Bookstore and neighboring cafés, bars, and galleries.  San Francisco Mayor London Breed has proclaimed March 24 Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day and several other events will be held across the city including a new solo exhibition of his paintings, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: 100 Years Without a Net at the Rena Branstein Gallery and a special screening of the documentary film Ferlinghetti by director Chris Felver at the Roxie Theater.

Way to go, master.  May we all live so long and so well.

Ferlinghetti at a jazz reading in the late 1950's.

Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)

 

Constantly risking absurdity

                                             and death

            whenever he performs

                                        above the heads

                                                            of his audience

   the poet like an acrobat

                                 climbs on rime

                                          to a high wire of his own making

and balancing on eyebeams

                                     above a sea of faces

             paces his way

                               to the other side of day

    performing entrechats

                               and sleight-of-foot tricks

and other high theatrics

                               and all without mistaking

                     any thing

                               for what it may not be

 

       For he's the super realist

                                     who must perforce perceive

                   taut truth

                                 before the taking of each stance or step

in his supposed advance

                                  toward that still higher perch

where Beauty stands and waits

                                     with gravity

                                                to start her death-defying leap

 

      And he

             a little charleychaplin man

                                           who may or may not catch

               her fair eternal form

                                     spreadeagled in the empty air

                  of existence

 

        —Lawrence Ferlinghetti from A Coney Island of the Mind

 

A gathering of Beat poets in 1971.  Ferlinghetti top row right with Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, Peter Orlovsky, and others.
 

Pity the Nation

After Khalil Gibran

 

Pity the nation whose people are sheep

And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars

Whose sages are silenced

And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice

Except to praise conquerers

And acclaim the bully as hero

And aims to rule the world

By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows

No other language but its own

And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money

And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people

who allow their rights to erode

and their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee

Sweet land of liberty!

 

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti  from A Coney Island of the Mind

 

Ferlinghetti reading Trump's Trojan Horse, repeating a Statue of Liberty motif that he often used in his art work,

 Trump’s Trojan Horse

Homer didn’t live long enough
To tell of Trump’s White House
Which is his Trojan horse
From which all the president’s men
Burst out to destroy democracy
And install corporations
As absolute rulers of the world
Ever more powerful than nations
And it’s happening as we sleep
Bow down, oh Common Man
Bow down!

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti