Michael McClure

Michael McClure (born October 20, 1932) is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and is immortalized as "Pat McLear" in Kerouac's Big Sur.

Biography

Educated at the University of Wichita (later Wichita State University), the University of Arizona, and San Francisco State College, McClure's first book of poetry, Passage, was published in 1956 by small press publisher Jonathan Williams. His poetry is heavily infused with an awareness of nature, especially in the animal consciousness that often lies dormant in mankind. Not only an awareness of nature, but the poems are organized in an organic fashion, continuing with his appreciation of nature's purity. Stan Brakhage, friend of McClure, stated in Chicago Review that: