The final book of poems from a Beat Generation legend, Mule Kick Blues finds McClure restlessly innovating until the end. "Intelligent, affable and flecked with unconventional typography—as in previous books … Mule Kick Blues is an estimable coda to a storied career."—San Francisco Chronicle "What a beautiful book. … I can’t think of any contemporary artist who explores the interior, the inside-out of the dharma as magically and freely as McClure except maybe for David Lynch. Were they friends?"—Eileen Myles "This legendary rockstar eco-poet’s gemlike modal structures will keep humming while 'black ants circle a bubble of honey.' A final performance from a master poet."—Anne Waldman "These pyramids and lozenges of crystal and light point in all directions and pierce you with the sobbing foghorn lobs of the ever-morphing ripples of the San Andreas Fault Ensemble. Long live McClure and the Libratonic Scales of Interspecies Justice!"—Filip Marinovich "His dedication to the pursuit of liberation in craft and subject matter reveals him to be a powerhouse of wisdom, love, joy. In this book, his ferocity and tenderness intertwine. Here are poems of improvisational intensity. And they are great gifts to us."—Uche Nduka A powerful collection of new work written during the last years of McClure's life, Mule Kick Blues was readied for publication before the poet's death in May 2020. Its opening section gives us a rare view into his thoughts about his own mortality, particularly in the moving sequence "Death Poems." The book takes its title from an innovative series of homages to blues musicians like Leadbelly and Howlin' Wolf, and evoking Kerouac’s concept of "blues" poems. Featuring shout-outs to lifelong friends like Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, and Gary Snyder, the long poem "Fragments of Narcissus," and the eco-logical and zen-infused themes for which he is known, Mule Kick Blues is a definitive statement by one of the most significant American poets of the last sixty years. Introduction by poet Garrett Caples, McClure’s editor at City Lights.

In the Pacific Northwest and the Southeast the Hunt family symbolizes one thing-timber. Hundreds of thousands of acres of timber holdings, the foundation of the Hunt wealth, all controlled by one man, Marvin Hunt. The silver-maned man is the much-despised patriarch of the Hunt family, which consists of six sisters, each a beauty in their own right, and a baby brother with John Kennedy-like good looks and style. But Marvin, through his callous and unscrupulous past, has driven unseen predators, from outside and within the family, to a course of deception and death in an attempt to destroy the family and greedily seize the rights to the timber holdings for clear-cutting and a quick sale to Asian markets. "TIMBER"'s cutting edge touches on controversial environmental decisions that took place in the Pacific Northwest during the timber crisis in the 1990's, and the dilemma now facing the Southeast with the explosion of chip mills and their devastation of the forests in the region.

Innovative Beat poet Michael McClure has written a book of poems unlike any of his others. These dharma devotions are fruits of his Buddhist mediation practice. Like bold calligraphy moving vertically down a white scroll, they surprise the eye and mind, awakening us to a heightened sense of everyday things.

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.

This essential collection of Michael McClure's poetry contains the most original, radical, and visionary work of a major poet who has been garnering acclaim and generating controversy for more than fifty years. Ranging from "A Fist Full, " published in 1957, through "Swirls in Asphalt, " a new poem sequence, "Of Indigo and Saffron i"s both an excellent introduction to this unique American voice and an impressive selection from McClure's landmark volumes for those already familiar with his boldly inventive work. One of the five poets who heralded the Beat movement in the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, McClure reveals in his poetry a close kinship to Romanticism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Japanese haiku. These poemsOCogrounded in imagination and a profound regard for the natural worldOCochart a poetic landscape of utter originality.

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.

This essential collection of Michael McClure's poetry contains the most original, radical, and visionary work of a major poet who has been garnering acclaim and generating controversy for more than fifty years. Ranging from "A Fist Full, " published in 1957, through "Swirls in Asphalt, " a new poem sequence, "Of Indigo and Saffron i"s both an excellent introduction to this unique American voice and an impressive selection from McClure's landmark volumes for those already familiar with his boldly inventive work. One of the five poets who heralded the Beat movement in the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, McClure reveals in his poetry a close kinship to Romanticism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Japanese haiku. These poemsOCogrounded in imagination and a profound regard for the natural worldOCochart a poetic landscape of utter originality.

"NOW IT IS TIME FOR A NATION,/ a spiritual Nation/based/and formed on open freedom,/on flesh and biology..." The antipolitical activism, biologically based aesthetics, and exuberantly sensuous spirituality that have won Michael McClure acclaim since the birth of the San Francisco poetry renaissance in 1955 are affirmed with new range and eloquence in Fragments of Perseus. The title poem presents fragments of an imaginary journal by Perseus, son of Zeus and Danae, slayer of the snake-haired Medusa, and husband of Andromeda. With "The Death of Kim Chuen Louie," we move from myth to reportage, ancient Greece to modern San Francisco's Chinatown, where the poet has come upon a murder. Following are "Baja Bundle," six poems composed under the spell of travel through Baja California, Mexico, as well as invocations, proclamations, love poems, and dream narratives. Radiating symmetrically from a central axis, McClure's poems spiral across the page with the grace of organisms. As Aram Saroyan has noted, "he sees poetry itself as a 'muscular principle--an athletic song or whisper of fleshly thought,' and in his poems he is able to make his vision compelling."

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.

Huge Dreams republishes two books, out of print for thirty years, which together are a cornerstone of the Beat movement?The New Book/A Book of Torture and Star. Both were influential in expanding poetry into a larger world?the West Coast Beat phenomena, which focused on nature, the environment, antiwar activities, individual anarchism, Zen Buddhism, jazz, and a kind of romantic mystical thought. With these books Michael McClure brought an animal energy and a knowledge of art and physical human nature that was new to the scene.

The New Book/A Book of Torture was written spontaneously while McClure was in a "dark night of the soul" brought on by psychedelics. A single long poem of experience and exploration, it offers the means of liberation from the darkness it examines. Star is a wide-ranging book of chalice seeking, spiritual discovery, and political protest, grounded in the emotions and sensations of eros and play.

"Rain Mirror", writes poet Michael McClure, "is my most bare and forthright book. It contains two long poems, 'Crisis Blossom' and 'Haiku Edge' which are quite disparate from one another". Yet brought under a single cover, the poems compliment each other as do light and dark, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Yin and Yang. "Haiku Edge" is a serial poem of linked haikus in the American idiom. Often humorous, sometimes harsh, always elegant, they catch moments in the landscape of Oakland's East Bay Hills where McClure now lives. "Crisis Blossom" in contrast is a long poem in three parts ("Graftings", "After the Solstice", and "After Meltdown") that record the poet's months' long shock and recovery after a near-fatal airplane accident. It is, in McClure's words, "my state of psyche, capillaries, muscles, fears, boldnesses, and hungers, down where they exist without management". With Rain Mirror, the poet moves in two directions, inward and outward, to arrive at the balance point between the self and nonself: There's Me/and no me/on the other side/I'm here under hand/And There/where thoughts glide".

Readers of Michael McClure's play Gorf may be reminded of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, even if dancing TV sets and the "Middle American" protagonists Mert and Gert bring the surreal effect down to native ground. On another level Gorf is a ritual of regeneration, or, if you like, a kind of spiritualized Hellzapoppin. The "murdered" Mert and Gert are reborn in the search for their child, the Shitfer, who disintegrated when "hurled through Time and Space" is resurrected as his discrete "pieces" find and recognize their unity. And presiding over all is Gorf himself--the flying purple phallus, the cosmic joke and life principle, "Our fantasies," McClure explains, "when they are enacted, open infinite doors. A play may help us be what we truly are by showing us the possibilities of action." And John Lion, who conceived and produced the widely acclaimed 1974 Magic Theater production of Gorf in San Francisco, adds in his introduction that "man's capacity for renewal and rebirth is tied to his ability to remain in touch with his child self," With this in mind, Gorf is both a play and play itself--satire and myth, married to frivolity and fable. This edition includes photographs by Ron Scherl from the original stage production.