“Without McClure’s roar there would have been no sixties, and it has not diminished,” wrote Dennis Hopper. Over the past four decades, Michael McClure has been at the center of the “New American” artistic storm—as a major innovative poet, and also as a playwright, novelist, lyricist, and environmentalist.

Lighting the Corners: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary draws together McClure’s crucial essays and interviews (many previously unpublished) ranging through such subjects as poetry as a “muscular principle,” theatre, the Beat [...read more...]

In this collection of essays, poet anad playwright Michael McClure reviews his own career and the contributions of his contemporaries over the past three decades to develop a new perception of art as a living “bio-alchemical organism.”

Included are poems by Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Robert Creeley, Jack Kerouac, Hart Crane, and others, as well as selections from McClure’s own work. The poems, selected with remarkable sensitivity, form integral parts of the arguments advanced in the [...read more...]