GRAHHH! GRAHH! GRAHH! He’s the character in Kerouac’s Big Sur with a hawk on his shoulder, Pat McLear, whose poem “Dark Brown” Kerouac insists is “the most fantastic poem in America.” Bob Dylan gave him an autoharp, “a black and magical autoharp,” that sat on his mantelpiece for six weeks before he was brave enough to pick it up; he was “afraid of music.” In a 1974 Rolling Stone article, he writes, “Bob had asked me what instrument I’d like to play (I was writing song lyrics). I said autoharp out of the clear blue though I had no picture of what an autoharp looked like. There must have been people playing them on farms in my Kansas childhood.” As one of the founders of Beat poetry, McClure said, “We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead—killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life…” He had dropped out of college and apprenticed himself to the poets Robert Duncan and Charles Olson instead. He participated in the infamous reading at Six Gallery where Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl.” Michael McClure’s “Beast Language” debuted in his collection Ghost Tantras, put out by City Lights in 1964. Grah gooooor! Ghahh! Graaarr! Greeeeer! Grayowhr! I just watched a video from 1966 of Michael McClure reading poetry to lions: “I was interested in that time in the way I saw lions looking…a lucidity of consciousness.” The lions don’t look like they give a shit about his poetry, until Michael starts growling, and then, they growl back.
-Morgan English