We are saddened to hear about Michael McClure’s passing at the age of 87. A crucial figure of the counterculture of the fifties and sixties, McClure was a vital member of the San Fransisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation, sharing the stage with Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, and others during the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading. He continued to write poetry, drama, and novels and to teach in the Bay Area, where he passed away last Monday, May 4.
In 2001, Stan Brakhage wrote of his friend in Chicago Review‘s pages: “McClure always, and more and more as he grows older, gives his reader access to the verbal impulses of his whole body’s thought (as distinct from simply and only brain-think, as it is with most who write). He invents a form for these cellular messages of his, a form which will feel as if it were organic on the page; and he sticks with it across his life “like a solid moving through an inferno.”
Chicago Review was also fortunate to publish the early poetry of McClure in 1958, in a dossier edited by Irving Rosenthal on contemporary poetry from San Francisco. “The Mess,” the first of four poems he published in that issue, appears below.