Perhaps
because he went through a period of such intense notoriety for his plays in the
late 1960s – The Beard was the focal
point of a major obscenity case – the poetry of Michael McClure never has
received the degree of attention accorded his peers – Rod Phillips’ monograph
in the Boise State Western Writers Series standing out as one notable
exception, a symposium in the Margins series
back in the 1970s being another. It’s a situation McClure shares with some
poets of his own age cohort who got to be better known for their fiction than
for their verse – Richard Brautigan & Gilbert Sorrentino, to name two. Yet
one might fairly call both Sorrentino & Brautigan novelists who started as
poets. McClure, on the other hand, has always been a poet who also wrote plays.
Even in his theater, the centrality of poetry to his art & life has always
been evident.
Fifteen Fleas, his latest book, published by the Nijinsky
Suicide Health Club, contains 15 pieces from a much longer 1960s project
entitled just Fleas. The larger
project consists of 250 stanzas, “rhymed and spontaneous and written as fast as
I could type on an electric typewriter.” If you want an ethos of a generation
in a single phrase, that one’s not too far off, at least for a certain segment
of the world that came through the Beat & Hippie eras with its sense of
optimism intact. The entire project took just over one month, between
When I
first glanced at the title however, I misconstrued its implications. To a
degree that has never been approached by an another American poet, McClure has always
been fascinated by the sciences, ranging wide from biology & zoology to
astronomy & physics.* My first thought was that Fleas implied a worldview as envisioned from the minute vantage of
a parasite. That is the sort of project that McClure has been willing to
tackle, often to great profit. But if insects & parasites are at play here,
it’s only at the level of a pun – the actual horizon of this text is a series
of childhood memories processed through McClure’s remarkably aural language
engine. Here is a not atypical stanza:
BUT WHY
NO FACES IN THE BUNCH OF GRAPES
I REMEMBER THE APES
(Chimpanzees)
in
Multiple sex on a trapeze
(try a trampoline)
LINOLEUM
Schweinhundt
Kleine hund
My hund
LOKI
Smokey
Rikki-tikki-tavi
MONGOOSE
on the loose
Huge
blue and bruises on the legs.
Under the Y in the giant cave amongst
the pylons.
Secret
cave somewhere in the Flint Hills.
The chamber of farts.
On
belly through the slickery passages.
Robbery
of
and
bananas and a tin can full of change.
Prattle.
Several –
not all – of the Beats thought that poetry should be fun & McClure’s
orality does a superb job of communicating this – pleasure has a lot to do with
its popularity as a literary tendency (and, coincidentally, is what McClure has
in common with a seemingly dissimilar poet such as
Like flarf in the 21st century,
McClure’s Fleas are happy to announce
their existence as prattle, the arts hidden literally in farts. It’s the kind of play we associate with children’s rhymes or
Dr. Seuss, but with a scatological (& sociological) dimension that is
anything but kid-lit (or at least that was the case in 1969, long before the
rise of Captain Underpants). As such,
it’s a poetics of process not product – rather than well-wrought urn, McClure’s
focus is on the spinning of the wheel & its rhythm, the physical sensuality
of all that wet clay, on the being shaped
rather than the shape made.
* Indeed,
the best known critique of McClure’s poetry is this piece
by Frances Crick, co-discoverer of DNA.
