Out of the Cage -  Michael McClure and Ghost Tantras

…[Allen Ginsberg] was cofounder and codirector of the Kerouac School. Allen first laid eyes on Michael McClure… [inaudible]…that Kenneth Rexroth had advised him to visit in 1954 in San Francisco. But they did not officially meet until a party at Ruth Witt-Diamant’s for W.H. Auden later that year. They spoke for five or ten minutes at this party. Michael gave Allen his address and Allen visited him several weeks later with Jack Keroauc. Okay, that was in 1954. The famous Six Gallery reading—that was the name of the gallery, the Six Gallery; it was run by six artists—took place in 1955 and Allen read the first part of Howl, Michael read “For the Death of 100 Whales,” among other things. Since that time, Michael and Allen have frequently shared the stage with each other and jointly with others through the years. The second big historical reading in Berkeley in 1955, I think part of the “Poetry Apocalypse,” where Allen read his poem “America”—“American I am putting my queer shoulder to the wheel”—and Michael read his—what is this?—“Mantric Cadence Poem Called Light,” which is, uh, a repetition of the word “light” several hundred times. Towards the end of the poem, the words “elbow” and “nostril” appear.” 

Waldman and the audience laugh.

They read together in 1965, in Berkeley, as part of the Vietnam peace protests, and in February 1967, they read at the “Be-In” in San Francisco with Suzuki Roshi on the stage. They did three Timothy Leary benefits from 1965 to ’72, and there were numerous other ‘om orgies’ and ‘monster’ poetry readings and ‘return of the monster’ poetry readings in California. They picketed the Varig Airlines together for the Living Theater, and were among the original circumambulators of Mount Tamalpais. They read together at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church at the Bowery in 1974, and also at a benefit for his holiness Gyalwa Karmapa in San Francisco, also in ’74. So this reading is a continuation of some kind of poetic karmic link between these two poets, between Michael and Allen, so, we’re witnessing this [Waldman laughs]. Michael’s most recent books are Jaguar Skies, published by New Directions this year, and Rare Angel, published by Black Sparrow, and he tells me he’s recently revised his novel, The Adept, or he’s in the process of revising his novel, The Adept. Allen’s most recent book is First Blues: Rags, Ballads, and Harmonium Songs, published by Full Court Press this year. Welcome. 

The audience applauds.

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.

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).

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.

The audience laughs.

It makes a nice introduction.

The audience laughs.

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.

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.

The audience applauds.

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.

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!

The audience laughs.

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.

The 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).

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.

The audience applauds.