September Blackberries

“Poetry and theatre are organisms and biological extensions of the artist,” says Michael McClure. “My unusual line and shape of poems is a feedback between poems as living beings and knowledge of traditional shapes. I believe in inspiration. I am especially fond of wild flowers, mastodons, and stars.” In September Blackberries, a collection of seventy-five of his recent poems, McClure demonstrates this “bio-alchemical” aesthetic with his usual prodigious verbal energy. Readers familiar with the work of the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance will recognize at once, in such long sequences as “The Skull,” “Xes,” and “We,” the poet’s characteristic typographic display, the breath-line that verges on the primal scream.

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