Voices: Micro-editions of Readings by Marlatt, McClure, and Rukeyser

Out of the Cage -  Michael McClure and Ghost Tantras

U.S. poet Michael McClure (1932-2020) reads from his book Ghost Tantras (1964) at the Naropa Institute on June 16, 1976. Transcripts and editorial notes by Matthew Kilbane.

00:00 / 00:00

Annotations

58:42 - 58:53

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.

Speaking
Transcription
Michael McClure

58:57 - 59:14

McClure reads the first three and a half lines of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, drawing laughter from the audience. 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).

Situational
Notes

58:58 - 59:07

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

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

59:07 - 59:08

That's Chaucer actually.

Speaking
Transcription
Michael McClure

59:08 - 59:10

The audience laughs.

Audience
Situational
Notes

59:10 - 59:14

It makes a nice introduction.

Michael McClure
Transcription
Speaking

59:14 - 59:18

The Audience laughs.

Situational
Notes
Audience

59:19 - 1:00:29

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 "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 McClure's reading voice.

Reading
Notes

59:20 - 59:23

I LOVE TO THINK OF THE RED PURPLE ROSE

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

59:24 - 59:26

IN THE DARKNESS COOLED BY THE NIGHT

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

59:27 - 59:31

We are served by machines making satins of sounds.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

59:32 - 59:36

Each blot of sound is a bud or a stahr.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

59:37 - 59:40

Body eats bouquets of the ear's vista.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

59:41 - 59:48

Gahhhrrr booody eyes eers noze deem thou.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

59:49 - 59:51

NOH. NAH-OHH

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

59:51 - 59:56

hrooor. VOOOR-NAH! GAHROOOOO ME.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

59:57 - 1:00:00

Nah droooooh seerch. NAH THEE!

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:00:00 - 1:00:06

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

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:00:06 - 1:00:12

WHAN WE GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOR hann dree

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:00:12 - 1:00:17

myketoth sharoo sreee thah noh deeeeeemed ez.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:00:17 - 1:00:19

Whan. eeeethoooze hrohh.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:00:22 - 1:00:30

The audience applauds.

Notes
Situational
Audience

1:00:29 - 1:00:29

To listen for the social voice is to apprehend the lived histories telescoped in a performer's embodied vocal expression. 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.

Social
Notes

1:00:30 - 1:00:36

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.

Speaking
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:00:38 - 1:00:47

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! [Audience laughter] So,

Speaking
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:00:48 - 1:01:01

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.

Speaking
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:01:01 - 1:01:01

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).

Situational
Notes

1:01:03 - 1:01:08

SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE SENSES!

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:01:09 - 1:01:14

Drive drooor from the fresh repugnance,

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:01:14 - 1:01:17

thou whole, thou feeling creature.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:01:18 - 1:01:21

Live not for others but affect thyself

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:01:22 - 1:01:26

from thy enhanced interior--believing what thou carry.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:01:26 - 1:01:32

Thy trillionic multitude of grahh, vhooshes, and silences.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:01:32 - 1:01:36

Oh you are heavier and dimmer than you knew

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:01:36 - 1:01:38

and more solid and full of pleasure.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:01:38 - 1:01:47

Grahhr! Grahhhr! Ghrahhhrrr! Ghrahhr! Grahhrrr.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:01:47 - 1:01:54

Grahhrr-grahhhrr! Grahhr. Gahrahhrr Ghrahhhrrrr.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:01:55 - 1:02:03

Ghrarrrr. Ghrahhr! Ghrarrrrr. Gharrrr. Grahhrr.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:02:03 - 1:02:10

Ghrahhrr. Ghrahr. Grahhr. Grahharrr. Grahhrr.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:02:10 - 1:02:21

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

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:02:21 - 1:02:30

Ghrahhr. Grahhhr. Grahhr. Gratharrr! Grahhr.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:02:30 - 1:02:39

Ghrahrr. Ghraaaaaaahrr. Grhar. Ghhrarrr! Grahhrr.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:02:39 - 1:02:47

Ghrahrr. Gharr! Ghrahhhhr. Grahhrr. Ghraherrr.

Reading
Transcription
Michael McClure

1:02:48 - 1:02:48

The audience applauds.

Notes
Situational
Audience

“Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure reading - Part 2." Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, 16 June, 1976. Genre: Poetry Reading. The Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/naropa_allen_ginsberg_and_michael2.

Project By: Tanya Clement, Matthew Kilbane, Emily Murphy, Karis Shearer, Trent Wintermeier
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