Ghost Tantras

Michael McClure is a living legend. One of the poets who participated in the famous Six Gallery reading that featured the public debut of Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem Howl , he was immortalized by Jack Kerouac in his novel Big Sur . A central figure of the Beat Generation, McClure collaborated with Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner and was later associated with San Francisco's psychedelic counterculture. Originally self-published in 1964 and long out of print, Ghost Tantras is one of McClure's signature works, a book mostly written in "beast language." A mix of lyrical, guttural and laryngeal sound, lion roars and a touch of detonated dada, this is one of his best-known but least available books, a deep well from which decades of poetry have drawn. McClure's inspiration has always been the animal consciousness that still lives in mankind, and he has had a consistent "When a man does not admit that he is an animal, he is less than an animal." Ghost Tantras is his original and singular manifesto for a poetry that relies not on images and pictures, but on muscular, sensual, energetic sound. Praise for Michael "Michael McClure shares a place with the great William Blake, with the visionary Shelley, with the passionate D.H. Lawrence."—Robert Creeley "McClure's poetry is a blob of protoplasmic energy."—Allen Ginsberg "Without McClure's roar there would have been no Sixties."—Dennis Hopper