Upcoming Events in the UK

On July 3rd there will be screenings of the Michael McClure bio documentary Abstract Alchemist, a film about Gary Snyder and another about Frank O'Hara, all by Colin Still. Michael McClure will introduce the films.

On July 8th, Michael McClure will give a reading in London at the London Review Book Shop, where the film Abstract Alchemist will also be presented.

Wednesday, May 19th

Pre-reading reception at 7pm, reading at 7:30
Moe's Books
2476 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley (510) 849-2087

At the age of 22 Michael McClure gave his first poetry reading at the legendary Six Gallery event in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read Howl . Today McClure is more active than ever, writing and performing his poetry at festivals, and colleges and clubs across the country.

McClure reads with an actor's command and a singer's timing, his impact "transports audiences to a very different and intriguing place." He has given hundreds of reading in venues as varied as the Fillmore Ballroom, Yale University, Stanford, The National Biodiversity Conference at the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress. His audiences have ranged from an intimate dozen at a tiny Maui bookstore, to tens of thousands at San Francisco's Human Be-in in San Francisco, and to multitudes at Airlift Africa. One of the poet's readings was to, and with, four lions at the San Francisco Zoo -- a film of it is is sometimes shown on TV. McClure's world-wide performances include Rome; Paris; Tokyo; Lawrence, Kansas, London, a bull ring in Mexico City, The Whitney Museum, and a steam room in Nairobi for a group of African businessmen.

Mysteriosos Readings & Events

The first reading of Michael McClure's new poetry collection, Mysteriosos, will take place for the Grolier Poetry Bookshop at the Pierre Menard Art Gallery in Harvard Square on Sunday, April 11.

The second event will be a performance with Ray Manzarek at the Jazzmouth Festival in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Saturday, April 24. Ray and Michael will present Mysteriosos and Michael will do signings.

City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco will host a reading and a book party for Mysteriosos on May 4.

Two weeks later, date not set at this moment, Moe's Books in Berkeley will have a reading and party for Mysteriosos.

An Evening of Romantic Poetry
with
Michael McClure, Jerome Rothenberg, Leslie Scalapino

In the spirit of an experimental and visionary romanticism that links closely with the experimental modernisms of where we are right now, McClure, Rothenberg and Scalapino will read from and discuss the works of acknowledged Romantics and postromantics like Blake, Shelley, Goethe, Hugo, Whitman, Dickinson, and Rimbaud, as well as poems of their own in the newest and oldest of romantic traditions.

The reading will also include works outside of conventional literatures and national boundaries, sound poems and non-sense poems, prose poems and visual poems, journal poems and fragment poems, outsider poems and aboriginal poems, shouted poems and whispered poems. The evening will let new ideas fly from the poems, the audience, and the readers.

Michael McClure's next two books are Of Indigo and Saffron from UC Press, and Mysteriosos and other poems from New Directions. McClure performed on December 8th with The Charles Lloyd Quartet in Los Angeles at Disney Hall.

Jerome Rothenberg is the author of over seventy books of his own poetry (thirteen from New Directions) and major assemblages of experimental and traditional poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium, the third volume of which is a no-holds barred anthology of romantic and postromantic poetry.

Leslie Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, fiction, essays, and poem-plays, the most recent being: Day Ocean State of Stars' Night published by Green Integer; and It's go in horizontal, Selected Poems 1974-2006 published by UC Press, Berkeley, 2007.

DEER BOY

The event will feature a reading at 7 pm by Michael McClure of his poem, "Deer Boy," composed especially for this publication.

Please don't miss the chance to encounter this handsome book, to meet the artists behind the project, and to hear a Bay Area literary icon read one of his most evocative works.

Rena Bransten Gallery is located at 77 Geary St in San Francisco (click for map) and can be reached at (415) 982-3292 or at renabranstengallery.com.

For more information about the book, please consult Magnolia's press release.

FRIDAY, September 25, 2009
8:40pm – "Curses and Sermons" — An acid cowboy flick by London director Nic Saunders, based on Michael McClure’s poem about Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, starring Philip Bulcock and Kasia Halpin.

SATURDAY, September 26, 2009
8:00pm - "Cracked Goddess" — A lyrical trip among the sculptures of Amy Evans McClure with a poem by Michael McClure and music by Terry Riley. Directed by Colin Still / Optic Nerve, London

Hope to see you there. The director of Curses and Sermons is flying in from London for this screening.

Books Inc. at Opera Plaza is pleased to announce a book launch event and reading for Poems for The Millennium, Volume 3: The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson.

Like its two twentieth-century predecessors, Poems for the Millennium, volumes 1 and 2, this gathering sets forth a globally decentered approach to the poetry of the preceding century from an experimental and visionary perspective.

Joining Rothenberg and Robinson in the reading and performance are six major Bay Area poets:

Books Inc. is located at Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco. You can reach them by telephone at 415.776.1111 or through the Books Inc. website.