Annotations for Voice: Reading

i

that petal’s veins
rift blue
pared with razor

edge
tired eyes against the
gold dust, daisies

in a jug dyes
slowly into water
seeping pink.

ii

moon drops
early

roused rocks
dry already a
fire fly

threats rain it
flickers
greenlight over
night
sink’s
rust.

iii

white hood of a white
pickup parked on
green

trucks can be
steam risers, lettered
white

hollyhocks

of a sun a whirl,
cezanne, in a

tall tree.

iv

like it
flowers hai

l outside our
back door stars

saw as worm
clots trod

morning

glories in deeper
small shells.

made tenuous
love is not
the line’s run into
fishwater pulls up

nothing, loses

whatever named tree
silk or wet sleeves
hustle sky

love a word
without roots, light
bends a line going under
water as forms do, that wait to be gript

provocative extent a
jerk
not to be measured

no
sky bends down shoulders’
force the
fluttery tree
burns against it

growth measured form
shoulders care for
such extent.

down be
low the river
blows

caught
in its stride ice
sharpened houses
fishing for

out
the house, love’s
tyrranized yr mouth
throws up gates

hold?

if you think
so then let’s
go or let

some rapid’s in the ditch

yr cheek how
light pinkens on the in
side step
thru windows &

sun its starred
tongue!

the ways we’ve taken any
ways congeal &
glitter.

lynne who has been
shoveling snow

wet hair a cold the
cold gleams you wet
fortune’s turned

yr card given
crystals reflect you
rains enrich
yr finger ex
tended wants to know

you type?

showing you my fingers do
walk their, speak hair caught
dropt water barrettes
better than a million
movies kept

when they tore off the
roof rain bowed the
tractor’s claw dug walls fell
a pack of cards topt
the whole

hell

o face you aren’t
accustomed to look at life
savers you
offered me lime
greens yr mouth

bird dropt in, linnet
how’s yr new house?

moon accoutered
faces
home in on
field mist

wheels float the
pavement
pillows back

we can expect
crickets

but the windows
close to tight
sided lanterns

shield our ears our
inexplicable hurry

as moth furred faces
toward light

“sun rises moon
rises too
in the east”

white
they stand long
leg’d in grass

their shadows in
star’d under
earth.

so
good the
morning ghostless
peaches here

bear room now
sun’s
done jealousy
as a wreath

bread tastes
sweet, peaches
fur to
hands’ feel

all that’s ripe
is.

i

these imprints
periods be
speak an anger
presses

keys

till such dark
holds the house
flares up a draft or

draught you spelt it
letting
in a wind no man
Stands the “trees

are all turning…
brown & yellow from the
draught”

as if the land were

an empty
hole with no
obscure fog
to mend it turns

integrate a
rime of hard like
lihoods these

days mean nothing looks
but looking out in fine
drizzles

draw me
to
the eucalyptus

leaves

i

who moves as she
can will or choose
the body of her

wordless downspine the

choice’s non
existent place a
star vertebra’s
sun does
glow/grow a pace

contractions measure

extent as the upshot of her
radiance/raindance/dalliance

timing of a sort
of pleasure

ii

her

means are made
light of

iii

energy coiled
at spine
tip you touch
hisses

heat
too in
friction

that I want & not
wanting turn
sinister
(half of the moon lies

but that’s no star
light

all of a piece

iv

left is what I’m glad of some
times tired love
should be so mouthed about
this area of our
habitual pull, scarcely
luminous by such day dark is
what I love you in

after all given to
sun

in you (that, coming
stars in
eyes’ night

v

gravity lies in
yr weight, mass, under
stand

pull exerts a continual
skin to skin weather in
ternal or out
(as you said it’d
orbit:

how little that is, love, I do
go from you.

this door I thought
went under
(ground being
no house, or

door that was a thought
caught, creeks, houseless
in the wind on weak
hinges
left a

jar’s a limb one
live oak on
another.

ab
sent ab
sunt

frogs in
short grass hands
turn off the hose

hop in
simul
taneous thot/

jumps you there
where it stays
hot nightlong

hours till dawn down
the dropt wind’s audible
steps now as walnuts
hit
ground.

Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis. Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt. Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child. Resurrection, music, silence, and surf.

No longer speaking. Listening with the whole body. And with every drop of blood. Overtaken by silence. But this same silence is become speech, with the speed of darkness.

Stillness during war, the lake. The unmoving spruces. Glints over the water. Faces, voices. You are far away. A tree that trembles. I am the tree that trembles and trembles.

After the lifting of the mist, after the lift of the heavy rains, the sky stands clear and the cries of the city risen in day. I remember the buildings are space walled, to let space be used for living. I mind this room is space this drinking glass is space whose boundary of glass let’s me give you drink and space to drink your hand, my hand being space containing skies and constellations. Your face carries the reaches of air. I know I am space my words are air.

Between between, the man, act exact. Woman, in curve senses in their maze, frail orbits, green tries, games of stars, shape of the body speaking its evidence

I look across at the real, vulnerable, involved, naked; devoted to the present of all I care for. The world of its history leading to this moment.

Life the announcer. I assure you there are many ways to have a child. I bastard mother promise you there are many ways to be born. They all come forth in their own grace.

Ends of the earth join tonight with blazing stars upon their meeting. These sons, these sons fall burning into Asia.

Time comes into it. Say it. Say it. The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

Lying, blazing beside me, you rear beautifully and up—your thinking face—erotic body reaching in all its colors and lights—your erotic face colored and lit—not colored body-and-face but now entire colors, lights. The world thinking and reaching.

The river flows past the city. Water goes down to tomorrow making its children. I hear their unborn voices. I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.

Big-boned man young and of my dream. Struggles to get the live bird out of his throat. I am he am I? Dreaming? I am the bird am I? I am the throat? A bird with a curved beak. It could slit anything, the throat-bird. Drawn up slowly. The curved blades, not large. Bird emerges, wet, being born. Begins to sing.

My night awake staring at the broad rough jewel, the copper roof across the way, thinking of the poet yet unborn in this dark who will be the throat of these hours. No. Of those hours. Who will speak these days, if not I, if not you?

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.

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

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.

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.