Lighting the Corners

“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the Corners: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary draws together McClure’s crucial essays and interviews (many previously unpublished) ranging through such subjects as poetry as a “muscular principle,” theatre, the Beat Generation, and the psychedelic experience. Further, there are major pieces on such friends as Robert Duncan, Dennis Hopper, Richard Brautigan, Allen Ginsberg, Francesco Clemente, and Jim Morrison.

Michael McClure’s books of poetry include Dark Brown, Rare Angel, Star, Jaguar Skies, and Rebel Lions. His play The Beard, the subject of controversial censorship trials, is regarded as a seminal work of innovative American theater, while Josephine the Mouse Singer won the Obie Award for Best Play. Additionally, McClure has published two novels, two previous books of essays, and has collaborated on an autobiography of a Hell’s Angel, Freewheelin Frank, Secretary of the Angels. He is a professor at CCAC in Oakland, California. Currently, he performs his poetry with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek.

“Lighting the Corners is a luminous compendium of fascinating poetic and cultural history by one of our best and wisest bard/scholars. McClure’s thinking is brave, obdurate, passionate, complex. This book sparkles with bright panoramic reminiscences, wit, juice, and vertebraic insight.” —Anne Waldman