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Two New Diane di Prima Books Capture the Brilliance of a San Francisco Treasure
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Two New Diane di Prima Books Capture the Brilliance of a San Francisco Treasure
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Book Launch for Mule Kick Blues: And Last Poems, published by City Lights. The last book by the late Beat Generation legend Michael McClure with Anne Waldman and Eileen Myles and featuring Garrett Caples.
The final book of poems from a Beat Generation legend, Mule Kick Blues finds McClure restlessly innovating until the end.
Mule Kick Blues is the final book of poems by Beat Generation legend Michael McClure. A powerful collection of new work written during the last years of McClure s life, Mule Kick Blues was readied for publication before the poet s death in May 2020. Its opening section gives us a rare view into his thoughts about his own mortality, particularly in the moving sequence Death Poems. The book takes its title from an innovative series of homages to blues musicians like Leadbelly and Howlin Wolf, and evoking Kerouac s concept of blues poems. Featuring shout-outs to lifelong friends like Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, and Gary Snyder, the long poem Fragments of
Kevin Canfield April 12, 2021
“Mule Kick Blues” by Michael McClure
We should never assume that a poet’s words are autobiographical, but it seems clear that Michael McClure’s irreverent verse about mortality came from a deeply personal place.
“TO GROW OLD IS A JOY PRECEDING THE BIG ONE,” McClure, the famed Bay Area writer who was 87 when he died in May, writes in this evocative collection of “last poems.” “Death is a dark chocolate cake,/ sweet, and filled with deep blue tortures.”
Intelligent, affable and flecked with unconventional typography as in previous books, McClure capitalizes numerous words and arranges others to run vertically down the page “Mule Kick Blues” is an estimable coda to a storied career.
Untitled, 1959. Art by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. Used by permission of Rich Shapero. © Rich Shapero.
The Combustion Cycle (Roof Books, 2021), by Will Alexander, gathers three long poems written over two decades: “Concerning the Henbane Bird,” “On Solar Physiology,” and “The Ganges.” At more than 600 pages, the book calls attention to one of the great originals of contemporary US poetry, and at the same time it’s a record of something else something that has less to do with contemporary US poetry and more to do with another model of time and tradition. It feels like a record of a shamanic engagement with nature, with geological time, and, perhaps most radically, with what the political theorist Jane Bennett has called “vibrant matter,” the movement of supposedly “non-living” materials, such as metals and rocks. Alexander seems to be both the most American of poets part of several US traditions and almost not even writing in Ameri
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