Mnemosyne's Jukebox

Smell doesn’t work for me. Not when it comes to memory. If I make a list of odors in my life I discover that they are all too common to attach to any particular incident or gestalt. Coffee, bacon, scrambled eggs, gasoline, cleansers, perfumes, shampoos, fish, waterfronts, forests, drugstores, hospitals, Laundromats, delicatessens or barns are all too general and prevalent and arbitrary to attach to anything specific. For me, what triggers memory is music. Usually a specific song. “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” “Paint It Black,” “She’s Not There,” “Go Now,” “Paperback Writer.” Songs, quite generally, of the mid to late sixties, when my brain was young and boiling over with hormonal Sturm and Drang.

The 70s would prove a very different time and my response to the music would be accordingly different. This was a time characterized by a great deal of personal frustration, intellectual growth, romantic confusion and broadening of the emotional spectrum.

There are a lot of songs I remember from the 70s that attach to very specific feelings and incidents, most being very unpleasant. Every time I hear “Black Water” by the Doobie Brothers, a song I came to positively loathe, I remember the months I spent looking for a job in Seattle after moving back to Washington State from California. They played the shit out of that song in the mid-70s, although I pretty much hated it the first time I heard it. I don’t know why. It’s not a bad song. Maybe it’s because they were singing about having no worries and I was stuffed with worries. I was choking with worries.

Any song I heard in the 70s was either going to grab me or piss me off. Most likely piss me off. I did not like the change in Zeitgeist. I did not like the altered direction . I did not like boogie this and boogie that. I did not like the sudden trend toward career and money and social status. The songs remembered from that era are remnants of incongruity and pain.

Another was “I’m Not In Love” by Ten CC. That song I really liked. It was so moving and dreamy. I really liked the feeling of it, the way it moved like a slow wave on a foggy sea full of mood and sweetness. I was lying on a mattress when I first heard it. It was late and I couldn’t sleep. The mattress was on the floor because I couldn’t afford to buy a bed. The radio was right by my head. I had just moved into a studio apartment on Capitol Hill after finding a job folding towels and gowns in the laundry at University Hospital. I had been divorced three years but was still obsessing about my marriage and feeling profoundly lonely and dejected. Romance seemed like light years away. I was in my mid-twenties, a poet whose job prospects would probably never amount to much, and the Zeitgeist had changed from a celebration of life’s sacred principles to one of unabashed materialism. I liked the feeling behind that song, someone evidently falling in love while simultaneously trying to deny it, and succumbing to it, dissolving into its bittersweet recognition. It was a great song to listen to if you were feeling isolated and lonely.

Songs get muddled with videos in the 80s. I remember Simply Red’s beautiful song “Holding Back the Years” and how much Mick Hucknall reminded me of Dylan Thomas as he wandered what appeared to be a rural town on Britain’s northern or western coast.

Bob Dylan all but disappeared. There is nothing by him that I remember with any degree of intensity or charged feeling throughout the 70s and 80s. Then, in 1997, he put out Time Out Of Mind, which had several songs on it that would come to mingle with the events of my father’s death. “Not Dark Yet,” which is one of the most beautiful and meaningful songs I’ve ever heard filled a big part of my emotional life in 2001 as my father withered away from cancer, and the long rambling “Highlands,” because it reminded me of my wife’s mother, who passed away in 2004. She was from Methilhill, Scotland, and Dylan borrowed his imagery from Robert Burns.

There are songs that relate to specific times and places for reasons too elusive for me to figure out. Why should I remember so vividly the temperature and smell and details of the basement room in my father’s house circa age 16 (ostensibly my room, though it never felt like my room, I had three other siblings and we were always trading rooms) when I heard “She’s Not There” one afternoon? Or “House of the Rising Sun” one summer afternoon at a beach on Lake Washington? Or “Smells Like Teen Spirit” one evening as I was leaving work and stopped to hear the song even though I was risking missing my bus it was so captivating and powerful?

When I say remember, I mean really remember: the sound of the Pitney –Bowes machines, the chatter and laughter of my co-workers as they were rushing to take care of loose ends and close things down for the night, the darkness because it was winter, my eagerness to get the hell out of the mailroom, and then that sound, the ambiguous, dislocated chord progression and syncopated sixteenth notes, dit dah, dit dah, dit dah, ominous and rueful and hypnotic, the savage punctuations of Cobain’s Fender Mustang roaring its distortion like a mortally wounded leviathan , and Cobain’s anguished cry, I feel stupid and contagious / Here we are now; entertain us / A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido / Yeah, hey, it was haunting, and powerful, and I stopped in my tracks, as they say, to listen. What is this? I wondered. It was the first rock song I’d heard in years that really grabbed my attention.

There are some songs that connect deeply with me and when I first hear them the moment, however banal the actual circumstances, become vivid and strangely enduring.

But then, why should I remember Paul McCartney’s stupid “Admiral Halsey” and the afternoon in San José, California circa 1971 that I was driving a used Volvo to work in my ex-mother-in-law’s modeling agency as a janitor? I hated that song. What I remember was thinking how perplexing it was that the same man that wrote “Yesterday” and “Penny Lane” and “Eleanor Rigby” and co-wrote so many unbelievably great songs with John Lennon like “A Day in the Life” could write something so vapid, so monotonous, and so inane as to want me to have a car accident just to stop it. And the change that occurred. Every time I go online and google up the hit songs from the early 70s I am amazed at how shitty the music became. How shallow and infantile and imbecilic all those songs were. “The Candy Man,” “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree,” “Tubular Bells.” “You’re Having My Baby.” What the fuck happened?

“Admiral Halsey” played almost exclusively on AM. AM was totally, aggressively, shamelessly commercial.

Those were the FM years. If you wanted to hear something decent you had to find a radio with FM. But even there, the DJs would play a song I really liked, “Cowgirl in the Sand” or “Light My Fire” or “Stairway to Heaven” or “Free Bird” and play it and play it and play it until I either had no feeling for it anymore or I just began to hate it.

It wasn’t just the 70s. Songs have had an impact on highly specific moments of my life since Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (Banana Boat Song)” when, at age nine in the summer of 1956, I sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor of a friend’s bedroom in Golden Valley, Minnesota. We played the 45 over and over on a tiny record player, shouting Day-O at the top of our lungs, daylight come and we want to go home. It wasn’t until many years later that I discovered why these workmen were going home at daybreak instead of nighttime like most people.

That same year, Presley’s “Hound Dog” knocked me out. It was wild. It was my first big connection to the thrill of rock. But then it was followed by “Love Me Tender” and I felt betrayed and turned all my allegiance to Fess Parker’s Daniel Boone.

“Everybody Wants To Rule The World” reminds me of a sunny Colorado morning in early October, 1984, a trip I made to Denver with my brother to help our schizophrenic mother move out of her mother’s posh condo apartment to far more modest digs in another apartment building. A sad occasion. I remember how the song, which was coming out of a bedside clock radio in our motel room, made me momentarily happy. I still really like that song.

“Lies,” by the Knickerbockers, is forever ingrained in my mind as the song that came out of George’s ’55 Plymouth sedan radio the night I got beat up at a New Year’s Eve party in 1965. It’s the first thing I heard when George started the engine to his car and the radio came on. I remember how strange it felt to be so collapsed in pain and humiliation while such an energetic rock song was filling the interior of the car. The song continued to get some airplay into 1966, but hardly at all after that. It didn’t even get much play on the oldies stations. I didn’t hear it again until a few years ago, on YouTube. How strange to hear it again. It all came back. My missing teeth, the blood in my mouth, the black eye, the feelings of confusion and shame, the acute betrayal of friends.

In December, 1966, at the house of some people I did not really know but who were all dropping acid together I heard “Strawberry Fields Forever” come out of a radio atop a refrigerator just as the acid was kicking in and I had begun getting that ineffable feeling of cosmic giddiness, an ecstatic feeling of unreality and ultimate ontological silliness, the universe with a clownish aspect, but also a little ominous. Events that night turned horrific and ugly and my body atomized into ghostly incorporeality and I ended up spending the night in the hospital along with several others of that group that had dropped the same powerful shit, one of whom, an Asian man in a pea jacket, had been dragged in by the police, unable to walk apparently. So that years later, whenever I hear the opening refrain of that song, let me take you down, cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields, nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about, I get excited and nervous.

I wonder what song would serve me in the same way Proust’s madeleine triggered À la recherché du temps perdu? Is there one particular song that could so transport my mind and imagination to a time and place fraught with so many sensations and charged with so much significance I could write volumes of prose out of it? I would not choose, for instance, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” because that was event in which I had stood outside of my life, and it would not serve as an inspiration for an extended work, unless I wanted to represent my life as a phantasmal dispersion of atoms adrift in a tumult of tinsel and AM radio.

I could choose “Like A Rolling Stone,” a seminal song for me in many ways, but my feeling for that song has changed over the years. The same emotion isn’t there. The excitement is gone. Now when I hear it, I concentrate on its lyrics , which have never ceased to enthrall and fascinate me, but time has dimmed their luster. I percolate their tincture and dye, squeezing them for every last drop of residual stimulation, or steep my reflections in curious details about the song’s genesis, such as Al Kooper’s organ playing, a parable of serendipity. Kooper, who had initially been enlisted to play guitar but deferred to Michael Bloomfield’s matchless wizardry, was just using the organ as ruse to continue to be a part of the song’s making, so that he could remain in the studio and contribute something, anything, and even though Kooper’s unrehearsed and awkward switch to the organ had put him an eight note behind the rest of the band, and the recording engineer was surprised to find him sitting there, but too late to yank him out of there, he stayed, and it ended up adding a key element to the character of the song.

I used to be enthralled by the song’s anthemic jubilation, the exhilaration of homelessness and raw impulsive freedom, the vertigo of its dazzling surreal images as it itemized the weirdness of modern urban life, the tumultuous excitement of its headlong dereliction shouted poignantly in the refrain how does it feel, and although many years later I can still hear these things, they’re initial propulsive thrill has gelled into granite. The song is a monument. “Like A Rolling Stone” has become a kind of Mount Rushmore. It feels public and open and belongs to everyone, like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” or Francis Scott Key’s “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Excitement remains for a few other songs I haven’t played to death on YouTube. But they’re recent. I really like Adelle, for instance, and her magnificent “Rolling in the Deep.”

Songs are like smells in that regard. I love the smell of bacon, but after a while it becomes just that: the smell of bacon. Nothing more, nothing less. It is what it is.

If I could smell a song, what would Dylan’s “Lonesome Day Blues” smell like? Alfalfa? Diesel? Dirt?

I know what greasy spoon restaurant kitchens smell like. That would be the smell of the Dylan and Robert Hunter collaboration “It’s All Good,” in which politics is mingled with bad hygiene: “Big politician telling lies; Restaurant kitchen all full of flies.”

Edith Piaf’s haunting “La Vie en rose” has always made me feel nostalgic for a time and place I never actually experienced but intensely imagined as my true reality. I place the song not when it was first released as a single (1947, the year of my birth), but the Belle Epoque, the 1890s of Paris, when figures like Mallarmé and Proust and Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant and Eric Satie were around. That’s the time and place in which I should have lived. That’s where If find my deepest rapport. It’s weird having memories for a time and place in which you did not exist. I might be persuaded to think it’s all just fantasy, an illusory bit of time travel, but when I hear “La Vie en rose,” it feels quite real.

Queen Jane Redux

I’m invisible. I float through conversations sparkling and esoteric. I am on the periphery, always. The periphery is where margins of darkness are etched in the blood like skeins of delicate abstraction, where life is fringed with vast, unfathomable tempests, and one is at home in shadows, bathing in afterglow and purifying the crude wax of the honeybee. The periphery weighs less than the wing of a dragonfly. I watch as the local politicians put a dead idea in a burlap sack and the sky weeps and I erupt into moss because I am a wall of stone and dead ideas look like squids that have washed ashore and the sprawl of their tentacles and foul bloated bodies and dead jelly eyes invoke the hollow communion of rule and putrefaction. It is the kind of depravity that fuels the cynicism of the boardroom and predations of joyless men. Trees are different. Trees argue with the wind. Trees fidget and toss finding the sky boiling in their leaves. Water crawls into being as scarabs and frogs and I rejoin the herd of mankind growing antlers whose syntax incubates moonlight. I eat Chinese roots and blush to see reality walk on bones. Look: the grammar of steam absolves the ceiling of the monstrosity of birth. The tarantula, meanwhile, delights in solitude. This sentence once harbored a laugh but it burned into ash. All that was left was the sound of boots crunching in the snow. If you haven’t already guessed, I live in a library. I celebrate the improbability of molasses. I watch people read. Those who read books are totally immersed. Those who read electronic gadgets are outside themselves. Poetry walks on tiptoe. The door misquotes its hinges. Fingers dance on shrines to digital gods. It is all so vain and vapid. The laptop has ruined the sanctity of the library. And so I get up and go see Queen Jane. If you’ve been wondering where these words might be headed they’re headed toward Queen Jane. Queen Jane sits on a sofa sewing syllables into frost and romance. Her needles are icicles. Her threads are dreams. Don’t be frightened by my wealth, she says. I’m not, I tell her. You can drop your pretense, she responds. And so I do. And I stand there naked, trembling and real and out of the periphery and into the light.

Reflections in Late September

Why does a candy wrapper look so trashy and unattractive when it is crumpled and empty, but so happy and pretty when there is candy in it?

I know. It is a stupid question. But if I apply the same question to animals, it acquires a deeper significance. A body with a living being in it is far more attractive than a body with no one living in it. Even old people with all their wrinkles and blotches and liver spots and varicose veins and scabrous sores and gnarled, arthritic hands are more attractive when there is life behind the eyes and breath going in and out of their lungs and animation and speech and warmth in the flesh and crotchets and idiosyncrasies then when the body is stiff and the eyes (if they are still open) are balls of lifeless jelly.

There is in all things, even objects, a certain quality that is the source of their appearance. It is indefinable. There is more to life than breath and blood and enzymes. There is a pulse behind the pulse that is divine and unnameable.

Can you go on strike against yourself if you don’t treat yourself fairly? September is the month of encroaching austerities. Harvests. Curfews. Return to school.

I like autumn. This is strange. Because I hate winter. I hate the cold. So why do I like autumn? Autumn should fill me with gloom. But instead it makes me feel happy.

Here is one reason: it is quieter. There are fewer children in the park, fewer people playing with their dogs, and the woman next door has finally closed her window so that I do not hear her shrieking baby anymore.

There are fewer kids setting off fireworks at night. Fewer festivals involving pirates and jets.

Movies are always better in the autumn. Maybe because the kids have all gone back to school so the movies with fewer special effects and fart and poop jokes and Adam Sandler are gone and the movies with greater substance and humanity and quieter narrative arcs have a better shot at getting an audience without being in competition with the blockbuster junk.

The air is still fairly warm in late September but possesses a chill that gives it a vividness and edge that is pleasant to the skin invigorating and silver.

There is also that underlying sadness implicit in loss. Though as autumn progresses, loss becomes less implicit and far more explicit. That maniacal grin of pumpkins lit from inside by a candle eye sockets gold and flickering teeth sharply silhouetted against that inner light says it all: death is pretty. Strangely, wonderfully pretty.

The Color of Sleep

Have you ever seen a body of words give birth to a paragraph? I won't lie. It's a little gross. But quite moving. First there is the biology of reproduction. A blackbird living in an electric guitar, for instance, and its inexplicable urge to mate with an elephant. The noise of which sounds like a croque-monsieur falling through a sheet of plywood. There are screams and moans followed by the roar of Jules Verne speeding through Nice in a sports car. This is what makes writing such a strange occupation. It is like sewing a haunted temperature to an oasis of inalienable yearning. Paint becomes an animal and the wealth of unbridled idea dangles its power from the end of a stick. Or pen. Or keyboard. Doesn't matter. It's all symbolic. All a matter of signs and omens and anonymous tips. Think of a lotus blossoming on a sheet of paper. It pops open like church doors after a wedding and is then washed by the tears of the sky soon after reality sets in. Thunder breaks on the face of a mountain and in the distance can be heard rings of the Viking swordmaker as he brings his hammer down on a blade of hot steel. My comprehension of time is imperfect, I know, but bear with me. I've been fired several times already and I know what that feels like. I can share that with you later if you'd like. But for now I'd just like to draw attention to my new wallet. It's whalebone and leather and big as a library. It is the product of many forces. Mass, velocity, torque, and friction. It is why I am including it in this paragraph, because this paragraph needs a direction, and must eventually learn to walk on its own. When the world was newly formed, a body of water crawled into an amphibian and began to crawl around nibbling on ferns. Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Except for this paragraph. Death is the ultimate voyage, but this isn't that. This is a body of words pushing meaning to its furthermost frontier. That place where the earth is freshly awakened by rain and the roots of speculation multiply in the fertility of darkness. We see a body of words oozing from the canal of a fertile imagination and find that is we ourselves who have formed this thing in our minds, and later heard tinkling in the kitchen, and awakened to possibilities so nebulous they resembled blackboard crickets sneezing the color of sleep.

A Basket of Rain

The poem dilates in turmoil. Syllables engorge with blood. The feeling is violet and silly, but I’m not authorized to be sticky. Vertigo is good for you. Please believe me. If I tell you there is a cow wandering the garden, it does not necessarily mean I have a new wallet. It means that the lobster has turned into a prince and an aging widow is gazing out of the window. This is how words work. They groan into action, lifting big ideas out of a well encrusted with lichen and moss.

If I happen to say anything at all, it’s because I have to go to a wedding next month. I will arrive, white eyebrows under a black fedora, and introduce myself as Walt Whitman.

Or Madonna. Growing a personality is hard. It’s an ugly process, and has very little to do with writing poetry.

Please sit down and tell me what you think. About anything. As for me, I never thought I’d live long enough to see the end of capitalism. I savor the taste of maladjustment. I love its awkward speculations and tart atomic enzymes. There is no true answer for the phantom bikini as it crashes through a wall of Montmartre plaster. Life is a beautiful disease. One might speak of an Ovidian feeling, or pound or two of effervescent poverty, but nothing compares to the fierce sexuality of nitroglycerin.

And yes, life can be lonely. It helps to float through a conversation, meander in talk, follow a strange eccentric thread of meaningless jabber, enter a bistro in muddy boots or open a box of incandescent perception. My name is Abraham Lincoln and I approve this message.

Here comes the night. Darkness hugs the horizon. A sheet of paper offers itself as a trampoline for the bounce of ideas. I carry a basket of rain and spill it onto the paper where it becomes a gardenia, a long augmentation of muscle. The sky weeps. Trees argue with the wind. Hope explodes and the walls drip with scarabs and hummingbirds.

Creation simmers in the sugar of a word. Whorls of color in the hollow of a shell.

I was asked, just the other day, what I thought about innovation in poetry. I didn’t know what to say. I mean, I was totally at a loss for words. And that’s when I realized that the force that drives biology is the same as the force that drives poetry. Letters crawl toward the vivifying power of breath and the syntax of existence incubates in appearance. That’s all anything is: appearance. Fill an alphabet with breath, though, and those appearances can awaken the most distant stars frozen in eternity.

I remember when I was in high school trying hard to learn algebra. Algebra taught me a lot about language, which can be dissolved by boiling. Sex is faster than language. It is similar to the flickers of television in a late night living room when no one is paying attention to anything but their own strange feelings and sensations.

The retina is buttered with color. The chiropractor explodes into cats. Don’t worry. Think of me as a misdemeanor in the mirror. Think of me as a glandular malfunction. Opals and denim applauding the smell of light. I have sewn these syllables together for a reason. Not a very good reason. In fact I forgot the reason. There is no reason. There is only December. Chimney sparks. The naked splendor of a lost black shoe.

The Everlasting Universe of Things

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings-

                  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mont Blanc, 1817


McClure’s poetry, which has been a remarkable force in world literature for over five decades now, has evinced one consistent property that marks it immediately as a creature born out of McClure’s hand and brain: it is alive. Each poem is a lump of jelly startled by its own energy. Each appears to have its own DNA. Each undergoes a metamorphosis of self-perpetuating change. Each is a theatre of mutation and flux. Emotion rides into the world on the back of desire. Wings form in a pod of silk. Words form on a palette of flesh. Senses bloom “in tendrils of spirit.” Dramas of soul tremble and incandesce “in the sky of the room.”

Transmutation has long been a driving force of poetry. Imagery jubilates in transition. Words thrive in interrelation. Two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Ovid composed a long narrative poem called The Metamorphoses whose very theme was transmutation. He presents a world of exciting instability in which universal being comes to life in a war of winds and fills with images of its own kind. Change follows change. The elusive Daphne, whose floating hair falls in tendrils at her throat and forehead, runs from Apollo’s lust, “swifter than light air that turns to nothingness as we pursue it,” and turns into a laurel tree, her “white thighs embraced by climbing bark, her white arms branches, her fair head swaying in a cloud of leaves.” We hear in Ovid’s lines the “roaring echoes of the ceaseless river pour from cliffside and cave.” Jove turns the young maiden Io into a cow. The ever-shifting Proteus rides two great whales, “gliding through glassy waves.” The young Phaethon drives the chariot of the sun across the sky, pulled by a team of horses “fed with ambrosia and breathing fire, wing-spread and flying feet through cloud and wind, charging, wild, wherever their desire turned, tossing their chariot through wilderness of air.”

Ovid used the mythology of his time to enact his poetry of change. McClure draws from a cauldron of multiple ingredients, a mélange of biology and eastern philosophy, Whitehead and Blake and Shelley and Francis Crick. Schiller and Goethe and Kerouac and Zen Master Dogen. McClure’s blending of biological science with older mythologies and classic Greek and contemporary philosophy reveals a stronger link with Ovid’s predecessor Lucretius than with Ovid. Or perhaps Augustus Caesar’s wild granddaughter Julia, who may have been partly to blame for Ovid’s banishment to a coastal town in Romania on the Black Sea, and in whom I imagine a Jean Harlow of flippant disdain for stodgy Roman convention. It is not so much Ovid the man - Ovid the old Roman poet who was married three times and went shopping for onions and garlic in Rome’s hectic streets - in whom I find McClure. I do not sense much rapport there. Ovid is too distant in time for me to flesh him out, and the overall architecture of his poetry is as classic as a colonnade. It is in the theme of metamorphosis that is enacted so brilliantly and with so much imaginative force and psychological realism that I see parallels with McClure’s protean energy.

McClure’s poetry evolves and expands the meaning of being itself in its celebrations of the genius in nature. Transformation is experienced as immanence, transcendence, ecstasy, apricots, hailstones, lichen, and modalities of birth and death. “Mozart playing with the universe.” “Ants / celebrating rites / of blackness / in the sweetened air.” The landscapes are large and thick with the kind of oil Van Gogh gobbed on his canvas in swirls and whorls of dynamic exploration.

The same energies that drive biology drive poetry. In nature we find caterpillars becoming butterflies, tadpoles becoming frogs, and tiny seeds becoming giant sequoias. Thunder breaks on the face of a mountain and minutes later raindrops plop from the brim of an old man’s hat. Mass, velocity, torque and friction combine to produce waves of pulsing energy, “A LAUGH / OF / PASSION / with the nothingness of meat / expanding in all directions.”

Nietzsche refers to the “I” in lyric poetry as an expression of human consciousness that is as much a phenomenon of nature as a sunrise or rainbow. This is most definitely the case in McClure’s poetry where the identity involved with the writing has less to do with personality than with a harmonizing and dilation into cosmic realities. “It is the edge of the precipice that the Fool on the tarot card is strolling along,” McClure remarks in a short essay titled “Self-Experience of the Other.” “It is the edge of matter, of what the Greeks call φύσις [physis: nature, natural bent, or outward form] where material and spirit come into being in nothingness. We write ourselves, our bodies, on what we presume is a common darkness behind our eyes.”

It is the sense of otherness that Rimbaud had in mind when he wrote “I is other.” Rimbaud used the predicate for third person singular to emphasize just how other that sense of being happened to be. What we think of as personality is a crazy-quilt amalgam of incidents, accidents, random occurrences. It is superficial. Soul, or essence, is where the ghostly other scintillates from nothingness into being. It might be described as a form of systole and diastole, a rhythm of being and nothing ness in which both are the same and both are different.

For example, in the poem “Portrait of the Moment,” from which I’ve been borrowing lines, we find the play and energy of transmutation everywhere. “Maya and molecules / and nothing are the same” McClure proclaims. The ultimate reality is change. Nothing is static. The universe is everywhere. Scales of big and small are collapsed. We find the huge in the small and the small in the huge. It is a world of quantum flux where nothing of real value is quantifiable, or frozen, or twinkles expensively and ridiculously in a diamond engagement ring. It is all a continuous melting and fusion. “All there in the iris / WHICH / IS / THE / WHORLING, / / WHORLING / CONDENSATION / / of / the / moment / into the purr and feather of hands / with the mouth slightly open / in a pose.”

“A creature is about itself,” McClure observes in his collection of essays Scratching the Beat Surface. “A living organism is perceived as a complex chunk, or lump, or bulk, or motile body of reproductive plasm. And of course it is that.” “A way of seeing an organism,” McClure continues,

…. other than as a lump or bulk of self-perpetuating protoplasm (and there’s nothing wrong with that) is the view that the organism is, in itself, a tissue or veil between itself and the environment. And, it is not only the tissue between itself and the environment - it is also simultaneously the environment itself. The organism is what Whitehead and Olson would think of as a point of novelty comprehending itself or experiencing itself both proprioceptively and at its tissue’s edges and at any of its conceivable surfaces.

There is, in fact, a central force in the organism and it IS the environment.

The organism is a swirl of environment in what the Taoists call the Uncarved Block of time and space (a universe in which time and space are not separated into intersecting facets by measured incidents).

The veil, the tissue (or the lump or bulk), is created by the storms from which it protects itself - and is itself the ongoing storm. Herakleitos saw it as a storm of fire, the raging of an active and energetic principle.

The organism is a constellation (like a constellation of stars or molecules) or resonances between itself and the outer environment. The organism is a physical pattern of reflections and counterreflections that we call a body and we see it clearly as a physiology. Ourselves. A rose bush. An amoeba. An apple.

One of the reasons I have always felt at home in a McClure poem is the warmth and sensuality that animate his lines. He is not at all like the more forbidding modernists Stevens and Pound and Marianne Moore. He is scholarly, but not like the regal Kenneth Rexroth, or stentorian Charles Olson.The only other poet that offers such warmth is Robert Duncan, in whom I find many similarities. Proust also comes to mind because he was able to theatricalize a very intimate experience of human consciousness while simultaneously preserving a sense of universality. I despise aristocrats and snobbery. I cannot, in fact, stand most of Proust’s characters. I pretty much hate them. But Proust allows me entry into this world at a very deep level, a phenomenological level, where I can see Henri Bergson’s philosophy of thought and movement come to life.

McClure’s world is one I am far more familiar with. It is fundamentally that of biology and creation itself. Raw, unmitigated being. It is a world in which, as Zukofsky put it, “contemporary particulars may mean a thing or things as well as an event or a chain of events.” McClure’s eye for detail is positively exquisite. He is able to find such remarkable beauty in the everyday, in much the same way the eighteenth century French painter Jean Baptiste Chardin was able to paint objects into existence so that they veritably glow with phenomenal, palpable charm. His mugs and partially eaten fruit and wine glasses are imbued with a voluptuous numen.

McClure is about to turn eighty. This is a venerable age. And yet he doesn’t seem old. He is wrinkled, his hair is blazing white and his body may creak like an old galleon after many a rough sea voyage, but there remains a spirit that is quick and mercurial. There is a very moving poem in a recent collection of his work called Mysteriosos in which he addresses the pathos of growing old. The poem is situated in one of those coin-operated photo booths like the one that plays such a pivotal role in the movie Amélie. They used to be a common sight at bus stations and fairgrounds and have all but disappeared, gone the way of the pinball machine and jukebox.

The poem appears in a section titled (appropriately) “Dear Being,” and is dedicated to his wife Amy. I will conclude by presenting the poem in its entirety:

NOW I UNDERSTAND, THE SEXUAL ADDICTION
         of my young manhood
was a CRUCIFIXION –
glittering and lovely
                           AS
an ostrich boa and smashed mirrors
                  seen on acid.
Now: I am an old man with a handsome face
         and after the bloody movie full of guns and stabbings         
         and helicopters, I stop at the photo booth
and in the mirror is a dog with jowls, a silver fox,
         an eagle in the whirlpool. Here’s the strip of four photos
         a sincere man with white hair and eyebrows,
                  eyes almost inside-out, staring from a black
                           Armani collar
         Then the same man , still in front of scarlet drapes, with his eyes
         looking up into science fiction in his forehead.
Now his head rests dazed against the side of the booth.
         In the last photo I am fully alert: JUST AS I ALWAYS AM,
                  A SUICIDAL CHILD IN LOVE WITH EXPERIENCE         
         RISKING ALL TO BE ONLY WITH YOU
as the dragon world with its hundred eyes passes.
         
         - And I still long to be Shelley.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

                           Works Cited

McClure, Michael. 3 Poems. New York, New York. Penguin Books. 1995.

McClure, Michael. Mysteriosos and Other Poems. New York, New York. New Directions Books, 2010.

McClure, Michael. Scratching the Beat Surface. San Francisco. North Point Press, 1982.

Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Translated and with an introduction by Horace Gregory. New York, New York. Signet Classic, 2001.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins. New York. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967.

Zukofsky, Louis. Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky. Berkeley, California. University of California Press, 1981.

The Story of the World

I’m carrying a gun. It’s an imaginary gun. It shoots hungry words. The words are hungry because the stars savor of oblivion. Because the ghost of an emotion sparkles in a pronoun, and horizontal feelings trigger tinfoil snakes.

I want out of the world. I’ve had enough of the world, and now I want out of it. The time has come to construct a rocket. Time has no texture. Inflation is attacking our money. The Kantian definition of the sublime is driven beyond its boundaries. A mongrel vowel crawls into a consonant and barks. No one listens. No one listens to poetry anymore.

Here is the world in a nutshell: an old woman with long gray hair shoveling dirt into the back of a battered truck. Self-reflection anticipates reconciliation with nature. And sometimes that happens. Evaporation never ceases to amaze me. Thick wet secrets of existence turn to vapor and float west.

Or east. It depends on the prevailing winds. Air pressure gradients and temperature. The colors of Corot, undulations in a field of alfalfa, a crack in the wall, a goldfish pausing to gaze out of its bowl.

Analysis is muscle. Opinion is spit.

My grip is strong. My spin is explicit. A metaphor writhes in a strangled lake. How do I explain incense to a bottle of gin?

Memories sleep in the morphine of wood. Bas-relief divinities hammer the stars. Kettledrums ooze from the syringe. I remove my sweater and hug the sky.

The house of poetry is made of air. It’s a haiku for refrigerating snow. It was that type of summer. The staircase exploded into birds.

Denim absorbs the attention of elves. I tell a joke. The joke drills into a buffalo and dances on a heresy of grass. I look at the buffalo. The buffalo looks at me. Its eyes are castles of ice.

It’s tempting to inflate our conversation with the helium of orchids. Energy lingers in the tide. My emotions turn into squirrels. The garden is hard to decipher, but with enough effort, we will come to understand the architecture of dirt.

I don’t like to travel. I like to flirt with metaphysics. My pancakes swim with blueberries and syrup. The atmosphere stirs with oracles. Each blueberry is a chapter in a novel of bald telepathies.

Symmetry is always a little intimidating. The oboe laments the inherent sadness of aluminum. I yearn for the endurance of fish. My chemicals release adjectives into the atmosphere. Swimming deepens my feeling for water. I would describe water as wet and clear and charming, like the shampoo of angels.

Have you ever been to North Dakota? You can go miles without seeing anyone. It’s marvelous to plunge a shovel into the dirt. They say that musicians paint with sound. Solitude paints with dirt.

Poets sell insinuations of elsewhere. Elsewhere is anywhere there is a stirring in a flower. The song is varnished with tears. Grebes swirl in the morning light.

I hate noise. I prefer the odor of thought. I prefer ink and emotion. The odor of thought is warm and gold. The hills of Iceland are stupefyingly green. The sky postulates rain. Morphine travels through my arm like a chocolate airplane. Elves ride by in chariots pulled by magnificent swans. You can’t beat elsewhere for its scenery.

The older you become, the weirder life gets. A headlight crawls out of the sand and points to the horizon. The leaves of perception eat the scorching sunlight of truth. Gravity has an ugly disposition, but beautiful imperatives. Light is transcendent. Ice cubes are ventriloquists.

I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. Early in life, you learn how to fake it. You fake smiles. You fake civility. You learn to restrain your more primitive urges. You discover the grammar of the universe. You discover nouns and oceans. Clouds are paragraphs. Lightning is punctuation. Eggs inspire participles. Verbs thrive in diversion. Indirect objects induce silhouettes, and cork.

The poem runs on eye gasoline. The tongue is a truck of emotion. Emotions are pulled from the deep swamps and bayous of one’s inner being and rolled out onto the highway. The cracks in the asphalt imitate the democracy of time. There is always a sense of urgency surrounding insects. Gas stations are chapels of extraversion. The wind fingers a vocabulary of iron. The sympathy of vagabonds is never restrained. Have you ever had an itch you couldn’t find? Follow your bones. Rejoice in the serenity of autumn.

I make abstractions of henna and lace. I make elevators of sticks and glucose. I’m hungry for altitude. I carve daybreak out of a vowel. I wander through books looking for cerebral sugar. The rattle of coffee cups. Heavy machinery, shouting men. Jack Kerouac sits in an armchair watching TV. The brain crawls to the horizon and cries.

I like the feeling of old shoes. I spread raw umber on my voice. Each time we write, we struggle to remove ourselves from our habits. An idea is just a caged utterance. If you open the cage, the idea disappears. The idea becomes a string in a jar of awkward guitars.

I live in a violent culture. The story of the world smells of blood and rain. Borders are hallucinations. I hover the world on crystal wings.

Inflammations of experience generate proverbs of scope and acceleration. Grape juice dribbles down the chin. Infrared bullfrogs hop into the future. Sweet melodic sounds swirl in the jukebox. There are over 300 songs in the jukebox. But only of one them burns like snow.