This insider's view of the Beat scene of the fifties and early sixties vividly marks the advancement of a new perception of art as "a living bio-alchemical organism" through essays by a poet and playwright who helped shape the movement.

Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac

Biographies & Memoirs

McClure, Michael

Arts & Literature

Penguin Publishing Group

From Publishers Weekly McClure's (Fragments of Perseus) standing as an original Beat poet will not be much modified by Three Poems. Of the three long works assembled here, only one, ``Dolphin Skull,'' is new, while ``Rare Angel'' dates to 1975 and ``Dark Brown'' to 1961. All three are electrically charged and vertically centered on the page--qualities for which McClure is well-known. They were written, McClure says, spontaneously. And it shows, as he leaps from subject to image to rant, making the reader work to find--or invent--any meaningful correlation or pattern. In ``Dolphin Skull,'' he attempts to compress the depth of history into one illuminated moment; the poet's cry to ``STOP,/ HOLD, LET THIS MOMENT never cease'' provides a romantic prelude to the apocalyptic terror of the two older poems. ``Rare Angel'' leads readers through primordial prehistory and out through the Zen tentacles of the modern unconscious self--arriving again and again at a certain poeticized fallout, ``the shapes of bookends, rugs, and tractors.'' The most convoluted and seamy of the three, ``Dark Brown'' shrieks page after page of tormented self-realization. The ordering of these poems, moving from most recent to earliest, feels right, allowing the reader to move backward into the inferno from which McClure's distinctive, if sometimes alienating, voice springs. Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Three Poems (Poets, Penguin)

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Penguin??Books

Huge Dreams republishes two books, out of print for thirty years, which together are a cornerstone of the Beat movement: The New Book/A Book of Torture and Star. Both were influential in expanding poetry into a larger world:the West Coast Beat phenomena, which focused on nature, the environment, antiwar activities, individual anarchism, Zen Buddhism, jazz, and a kind of romantic mystical thought. With these books Michael McClure brought an animal energy and a knowledge of art and physical human nature that was new to the scene.The New Book/A Book of Torture was written spontaneously while McClure was in a "dark night of the soul" brought on by psychedelics. A single long poem of experience and exploration, it offers the means of liberation from the darkness it examines. Star is a wide-ranging book of chalice seeking, spiritual discovery, and political protest, grounded in the emotions and sensations of eros and play.

Huge Dreams: San Francisco and Beat Poems (Penguin Poets)

United States

In a searing analysis of the most recent political issues raised by the religious right in both the United States and Great Britain, including homosexuality and the churches, abortion, feminism and the collapse of the nuclear family, this controversial book exposes the hypocrisy, arrogance and self-interest that motivate hard-core Christian campaigners. It draws a clear distinction between faith and belief in God and the political agenda of the religious right, thus giving hope and encouragement to lesbians and gay men disillusioned with Christianity.

Moral Panic: Exposing the Religious Right's Agenda on Sexuality (Listen Up!)

Murray, Theresa

LGBTQ+ Books

UNKNO

The Beard; [a Play] [paperback] McClure, Michael [Apr 01, 1967]

The Beard; [a Play]

Poetry

Grove Pr

Two plays dramatize the conflict of American myths in a confrontation between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow, and retell the story of Orestes and Elektra

The Beard & Vktms: Two Plays

Dramas & Plays

GROVE PRESS

The Beard and Vktms: Two Plays by Michael McClure

Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems

This essential collection of Michael McClure's poetry contains the most original, radical, and visionary work of a major poet who has been garnering acclaim and generating controversy for more than fifty years. Ranging from A Fist Full, published in 1957, through Swirls in Asphalt, a new poem sequence, Of Indigo and Saffron is both an excellent introduction to this unique American voice and an impressive selection from McClure's landmark volumes for those already familiar with his boldly inventive work. One of the five poets who heralded the Beat movement in the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, McClure reveals in his poetry a close kinship to Romanticism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Japanese haiku. These poems―grounded in imagination and a profound regard for the natural world―chart a poetic landscape of utter originality.

History & Criticism

University of California Press

Scalapino, Leslie

In the Pacific Northwest and the Southeast the Hunt family symbolizes one thing-timber. Hundreds of thousands of acres of timber holdings, the foundation of the Hunt wealth, all controlled by one man, Marvin Hunt. The silver-maned man is the much-despised patriarch of the Hunt family, which consists of six sisters, each a beauty in their own right, and a baby brother with John Kennedy-like good looks and style. But Marvin, through his callous and unscrupulous past, has driven unseen predators, from outside and within the family, to a course of deception and death in an attempt to destroy the family and greedily seize the rights to the timber holdings for clear-cutting and a quick sale to Asian markets.TIMBER's cutting edge touches on controversial environmental decisions that took place in the Pacific Northwest during the timber crisis in the 1990's, and the dilemma now facing the Southeast with the explosion of chip mills and their devastation of the forests in the region.

TIMBER: A CONTROVERSIAL THRILLER

Contemporary

iUniverse

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McClure, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by McClure, Michael

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McClure, Michael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac

Three Poems (Poets, Penguin)

Huge Dreams: San Francisco and Beat Poems (Penguin Poets)

Moral Panic: Exposing the Religious Right's Agenda on Sexuality (Listen Up!)

The Beard; [a Play]

The Beard & Vktms: Two Plays

The Beard and Vktms: Two Plays by Michael McClure

Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems

Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems

TIMBER: A CONTROVERSIAL THRILLER