THE MAN WHO ONCE SAID DYLAN ‘WAS A DANGER TO POETRY’ HAS REACHED HEAVEN’S DOOR, AGED 87
Michael McClure, beat poet and eventual friend to Bob Dylan, said this a while ago in an interview with Rolling Stone: “In December 1965, when we had been bombing Vietnam for eight months, Dylan read Poisoned Wheat, a long anti-war poem of mine.
“Later I gave the copy to a girl who wanted Bob’s fingerprints.”
Sadly, Michael McClure is no longer with us. He died at the age of 87, a good age for a man who rocked and rolled with the best.
Beat poet, playwright, novelist, and documentary film-maker Michael McClure was born in Marysville, Kansas. He gave his first poetry reading in 1955 with Allen Ginsberg.
McClure was the author of many 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).
He performed his poetry with musical collaborators, including composer Terry Riley, and recorded several CDs with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek.
The first person to play a Dylan album for him, he said, was the poet David Meltzer. “It was Dylan’s first album, and I heard it shortly after it came out in March or April of 1962. I could not understand what David heard in the album. In high school I knew people at the University of Chicago and in New York City who were singing like that — just some hillbilly-intellectual music that I’d gotten bored with earlier. In retrospect, Dylan must have shown a direct creative thrust without the “Art” self-consciousness of other singers.
“In 1965 everyone had been after me to listen to Dylan carefully — to sit down and listen to the words and the music. I absolutely did not want to hear Dylan. I imagined, without admitting it to myself, that Dylan was a threat to poetry — or to my poetry. I sensed that a new mode of poetry, or rebirth of an old one, might replace my mode. In the long run, rock lyrics have sensitized many people to words and brought them to discover poetry.”
Dylan gave him an autoharp early in 1966, he said “It sat on the mantelpiece for six weeks before I picked it up and strummed it. A black and magical autoharp. Afraid of music, I had always felt totally unmusical — except in appreciation. Bob had asked me what instrument I’d like to play (I was writing song lyrics). I said autoharp out of the clear blue though I had no picture of what an autoharp looked like. There must have been people playing them on farms in my Kansas childhood.
Michael McClure, was 87 when he died.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that he died in Oakland, California, after suffering a stroke last year.
A then 22-year-old McClure helped organize the famous Six Gallery beat poetry reading on Oct. 7, 1955, and later read at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park that launched the Summer of Love in 1967 and at The Band’s “Last Waltz” concert at Winterland in 1976.
“Without the roar of McClure, there would have been no ’60s,” actor Dennis Hopper once said.
TAGS: #Dylan #1965 #Micheal McClure #Beats #Ginsberg #Citylights #Shebelongstome #autoharp #poetry