Out of the Cage -  Michael McClure and Ghost Tantras

In this annotated recording listeners will hear the American poet Michael McClure (1932-2020) recite two poems from his book *Ghost Tantras* (1964) during a reading with Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) on June 16, 1976 during a summer session of the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. This recording is held in both the Naropa Archives and the Michael McClure fonds at Simon Frasier University, a SpokenWeb partner. The reading by McClure and Ginsberg was planned as a Beat retrospective of sorts. In Ginsberg's own words, "Michael and I decided that, for the evening, it would be interesting to go back historically and read some of the same texts that we first read together the first time we read together . . . this evening we're going to . . . alternate readings, beginning with a very brief presentation by myself and then a brief presentation by him, and then longer trading back-and-forth, five- and ten-minute sections, improvising the time as we go." Ginsberg begins by reading a selection from "Howl" and McClure by reading "For the Death of 100 Whales," two poems that were both debuted in 1955 at the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco. In her introductory remarks, Anne Waldman shares a brief account of their friendship, beginning with their first "official meet[ing]" at a party for W.H. Auden in 1954 and extending to previous collaborations between McClure and Ginsberg, including readings together in 1965 during the Berkeley Vietnam peace protests and in the 1967 "Be-in" in San Francisco, "with Suzuki-Roshi [Shunryū Suzuki] on the stage," as well as a host of other "Timothy Leary benefits" and "om orgies." Waldman concludes that "this reading is a continuation of some kind of poetic-karmic link between these two poets."

I'm going to read a couple of poems in Beast Language which are actually from the early '60s and not the '50s, and then we're going to take a break—ten minutes or so.

The poems in *Ghost Tantras* dip in and out of what McClure calls “beast language,” an ecstatic register of leonine nonsense that mimics the guttural growls and roars of large mammals. Beast Language was McClure's attempt to activate “the biological bases of poetry” (Scratching 43), a practical application of what he dubbed “Meat Science.” “For McClure, humans are meat," writes Michael Davidson, "and one’s expression—in its ideal state—is an incarnation of one’s mammal nature” (Davidson 87). Rather infamously, McClure read a selection of these poems to the lions at the San Francisco Zoo, an escapade captured in a 1966 episode of the documentary series USA Poetry, developed by poet and Beat associate Richard O. Moore.

McClure reads the first three and a half lines of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It was a regular habit of McClure's to recite these lines before public performances of Ghost Tantras. The gesture "suggest[s] the origins of his poetry in early English verse," as Michael Davidson notes (86). On the day he shot the USA Poetry episode at the San Francisco Zoo, McClure also recited Chaucer to the tree kangaroos, for whom "beast language was not right" (Kahn 340). Several months after the reading at Naropa, on November 25, 1976, McClure recited from the opening of Chaucer's prologue on stage at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom during The Band's famous farewell concert, immortalized in Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz (1978).

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in switch licour Of which vertu

That's Chaucer actually. It makes a nice introduction.

McClure reads Ghost Tantra 51 (51). As in many of his printed poems, McClure centers the Ghost Tantras down the page's middle, an aesthetic strategy Davidson regards as beastly in its own right: "McClure compares the physical shape of his poems to biological organisms. Instead of returning to the left margin, the line asserts itself boldly as a free image, connected to the other lines like ribs to the spinal column" (86). In light of McClure's performance, Davidson's observation that this meaningful shapeliness makes the line not "a score for the voice" but "a separate object among other objects" takes on curious significance. By what means can we account *both* for the line's printed objecthood *and* the sonorous objecthood captured and audible, in this instance, on digitized tape? Even more to the point, how can we account for the historically-specific performance of McClure's recitation--his expressive re-citation of a printed text on June 16, 1976, the dynamic relation between page and speech, his 'Michael McClure, Reading voice.' I have taken advantage of the fact that McClure's recitation precisely reflects the printed version to respect the poem's printed lineation in my transcriptions below. Ideally, the critical act of reading and listening simultaneously will evoke the tension at the heart of the Michael McClure reading voice.

I LOVE TO THINK OF THE RED PURPLE ROSE

IN THE DARKNESS COOLED BY THE NIGHT

We are served by machines making satins of sounds.

Each blot of sound is a bud or a stahr.

Body eats bouquets of the ear's vista.

Gahhhrrr booody eyes eers noze deem thou.

NOH. NAH-OHH

hrooor. VOOOR-NAH! GAHROOOOO ME.

Nah droooooh seerch. NAH THEE!

The machines are too dull when we are lion poems that move & breathe.

WHAN WE GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOR hann dree

myketoth sharoo sreee thah noh deeeeeemed ez.

Whan. eeeethoooze hrohh.

Applause

To listen for the social voice is to apprehend the lived histories telescoped in a performer's embodied vocal expression. McClure's speech is the liquid instrument of an avid performer, one that betrays no especially particular regional distinctiveness save perhaps the slightly nasal, subtly ironic casualness of his generational milieu. As McClure moves in and out of beast language, letting the phonemic order of English dissolve into long vowels wrapped in deliciously indulged alveolar approximates and glottal fricatives, he means for us to hear the body, as it were. More particularly, though, we hear the 43-year-old male-gendered body that spent its childhood between Kansas and the Pacific Northwest and its adulthood in countercultural California.

I was always afraid to recite this other one. Although I knew it by heart, I was afraid to recite it because I thought I might not be able to stop.

It's very mantric. And I thought I'd be giving a reading and they'll carry me away at the end. I'll still be going Grahhr! Grahhr! So,

recently I was in one of John Lilly's isolation tanks and I thought, what a perfect time to do this thing I've always been afraid to do. [Audience laughs] What difference would it make here? So I did, and I did know it by heart, but I think I'll read it here anyway.

The reference to John Lilly, the neurophysicist-turned-cetologist-cum-“cosmonaut of heightened consciousness,” is curiously overdetermined (Burnett 14). Emerging from the same incipient “culture of feedback” that would come to characterize ecological thought in the 1970s, McClure’s beast language parallels, in an eccentric key, the experimental work Lilly had begun in the late 1950s on the intelligence of bottlenose dolphins and possibilities for interspecies communication, as documented in *Man and Dolphin* (1961) and *The Mind of the Dolphin* (1967) (see Belgrad 138-73). And yet at the same time that he was researching dolphins, Lilly was also responsible for major contributions to the field of sensory-deprivation research, including the invention of the water-immersion isolation tank. Lilly’s *The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique* (1977) was published the year after McClure’s reading. It includes the logs of “scores of men and women volunteers,” from Gregory Bateson to Burgess Meredith, “who have recorded their extraordinary experiences” in a Malibu facility with five isolation tanks. Though McClure is not featured in the book, it seems likely he made the trek, and this presumption entails an irony worth pausing over. For Lilly, the isolated flotation tank is a therapeutic means of probing interior experience by cleaving mind from body: “For a businessperson, a scientist, a professional of any sort, this is a boon: to be able to think, free of physical fatigue of the body. The method allows one to become free within a few minutes” (22). Meanwhile, the zoological expression of McClure’s beast language precisely refuses any distinction between the mind and body. “I knew that consciousness was part of the physiological body,” writes McClure, “and not separate from the rest of nature—that it was wound through, woven in, bursting out from, and pouring through all nature” (Scratching 28). In the *Ghost Tantras,* the unprepared passage from English to beastly nonsense and back performs the extreme dissolution of the Cartesian subject. And given that beast language so exuberantly infuses body, meat, and muscle with capacities for expression, we have to ask: why should the experience of floating in Lilly’s tank, designed to banish the body, license McClure’s reading in beast language before the Naropa audience in 1976? I have never recited a poem in an isolation tank, but I suspect that one hears one’s voice as if from the inside, by means of what the poet calls “the inner organs of perception” (Scratching 156). In this way, the notion of reciting beast language in an isolation tank, the supposed spur to McClure’s performance of Ghost Tantra 49 (49) offers an arresting counter-image of what is interpretatively salient in what actually happened at Naropa on June 6, 1976. The isolation tank, in other words, is a foil for that set of difference-making material contexts to which critical readings of the audio archive might attend—and all the more successfully so when equipped with platforms like AVAnnotate. Because it allows one to layer observations and interpretations across a single time axis, this flexible annotation tool enables close listening to the multiple voices one hears in the audio record.

SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE SENSES!

Drive drooor from the fresh repugnance,

thou whole, thou feeling creature.

Live not for others but affect thyself

from thy enhanced interior--believing what thou carry.

Thy trillionic multitude of grahh, vhooshes, and silences.

Oh you are heavier and dimmer than you knew

and more solid and full of pleasure.

Grahhr! Grahhhr! Ghrahhhrrr! Ghrahhr! Grahhrrr.

Grahhrr-grahhhrr! Grahhr. Gahrahhrr Ghrahhhrrrr.

Ghrarrrr. Ghrahhr! Ghrarrrrr. Gharrrr. Grahhrr.

Ghrahhrr. Ghrahr. Grahhr. Grahharrr. Grahhrr.

Grahhhhr. Grahhhr. Gahar. Ghrahhr. Grahhr. Grahhr.

Ghrahhr. Grahhhr. Grahhr. Gratharrr! Grahhr.

Ghrahrr. Ghraaaaaaahrr. Grhar. Ghhrarrr! Grahhrr.

Ghrahrr. Gharr! Ghrahhhhr. Grahhrr. Ghraherrr.

Applause