McClure Michael - Of indigo and saffron: new and selected poems

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the
generous support of the Simpson Humanities
Endowment Fund of the University of California
Press Foundation.

IMPRINT IN HUMANITIES

The humanities endowment
by Sharon Hanley Simpson and
Barclay Simpson honors
MURIEL CARTER HANLEY
whose intellect and sensitivity
have enriched the many lives
that she has touched.

Also by Michael McClure

POETRY

Hymns to Saint Geryon

Dark Brown
The New Book/A Book of Torture
Ghost Tantras
Dark Brown and Hymns to Saint Geryon Star
Rare Angel
September Blackberries
Jaguar Skies
Antechamber
Fragments of Perseus
Selected Poems
Rebel Lions
Simple Eyes
Three Poems: Dolphin Skull, Rare Angel, and Dark Brown
Huge Dreams: San Francisco and Beat Poems
Touching the Edge: Dharma Devotions from the Hummingbird Sangha
Rain Mirror
Plum Stones: Cartoons of No Heaven
Mysteriosos

PLAYS

The Blossom

The Beard
The Mammals
Gargoyle Cartoons
Gorf, or Gorf and the Blind Dyke
The Grabbing of the Fairy
Josephine: The Mouse Singer
The Beard & VKTMS: Two Plays

ESSAYS, INTERVIEWS, BIOGRAPHY

Meat Science Essays

Wolf Net
Freewheelin Frank: Secretary of the Angels, as Told to Michael McClure
Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac
Specks
Francesco Clemente: Testa Coda
Lighting the Corners: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary, Essays and Interviews

FICTION

The Mad Cub

The Adept

COLLABORATIONS

Mercedes Benz, with Janis Joplin
Mandala Book, with Bruce Conner
The Adventures of a Novel, with Bruce Conner
Lie, Stand, Sit, Be Still, with Robert Graham
The Boobus and the Bunnyduck, with Jess
Deer Boy, with Hung Liu

FILMS, CDS, AND DVDS

Love Lion, with Ray Manzarek
The Third Mind, with Ray Manzarek
Theres a Word, with Ray Manzarek
I Like Your Eyes Liberty, with Terry Riley
Rock Drill
Abstract Alchemist
Rebel Roar
Touching the Edge

DOCUMENTARIES

The Maze
September Blackberries

Of Indigo and Saffron

MICHAEL M C CLURE

New and Selected Poems

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Leslie Scalapino

University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England

2011 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

For acknowledgment of previous publication, please see credits, page 311.

McClure, Michael.

Of indigo and saffron : new and selected poems / Michael
McClure ; edited and with an introduction by Leslie Scalapino.

p. cm.

Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-520-26287-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
I. Scalapino, Leslie. II. Title.
ps3563.a262038 2011

Manufactured in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 50% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/ NISO z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For the protection of all beings

Introduction: The instant is the giant lamp we throw / our shadows by
Leslie Scalapino

Written above the Sierras/in the Flyleaf of
Regis Debrays/Revolution in the Revolution

I want these poems to be soft and vigorous as the breath of a sparrow on the redwood deck rail and as tumultuous as a lion purring in the rain by the roadside in Kenya. These are poems from what love I have invented, what soul I have made, and the anger that has grown inside me at the biocidal war.

I have breathed the inspiration of countless many.

LESLIE SCALAPINO

Michael McClure, renowned as a poet and playwright, and associated with the Beat Movement and San Francisco Renaissance, participated in the famous 1955 Six Gallery reading that inaugurated the Beat Movement. While noting the streamlining effect that eliminates difference by categorizing as movements individuals who are originating new gestures, McClure was living and writing alongside poets, artists, composersdear friendsincluding (listing just a few): Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Bruce Conner, Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, Terry Riley, Francesco Clemente, Joan Brown, Wallace Berman, Jack Kerouac, Stan Brakhage, Jay Defeo, Joanne Kyger, and Jim Morrison.

McClures Josephine: The Mouse Singer won an Obie for Best Play. The Beard and other plays, still performed, are regarded as seminal works of American theater. McClure is also an essayist, environmentalist, and lyricist (he wrote the lyrics, with Janis Joplin, for Mercedes Benz). He collaborates in performance of music and poetry with Ray Manzarek of The Doors. As collaborative dictation in conversation with Hells Angel Frank Reynolds, McClure transcribed Reynoldss autobiography, Freewheelin Frank: Secretary of the Angels, as told to Michael McClure.

Of Indigo and Saffron is a selection of McClures poems, the earliest of which were published in 1956; the most recent, a new sequential poem, Swirls in Asphalt, was completed in 2008. This is not a traditional selected poems. It does not seek to represent the body of work of a poet by encapsulating the books in excerpts. Rather, my choice of poems was based on tracing certain gestures as related to vital elements in Michael McClures poetry: particularly, a struggle evident in his work for apprehension of being as that is (and is in relation to) language of poetryas that language is enactment of being.

Theater for Michael McClure is a seminal route of enactment (of live exchange); the gesture of his poetry is similar, a form of being in the instant. The line in a poem is trace of being as speaking voice and as sense of sensation (what McClure called writing the body). This tracing (as if reading body as mind/shape), sometimes tracing even the separation from oneself and from the instant, is akin to and uses as source Robert Creeleys poetry starting with Le Fou. McClure particularly loved Pieces. His recurrent gesture, which I would describe as split from ones own being, striving to be in it, is comparable to Creeleys conflict, McClures writing being simultaneous in time with Creeley rather than derived. McClures early works track, and thus produce, a conflict as the means of its articulation, the sense of one being divided by language itself. His poems are sometimes an interior sense of division, conflict