Out of the Cage: Michael McClure and the Digital Lyric Archive
In the annotated recording below, listeners will hear the American poet Michael McClure (1932-2020) read from his book Ghost Tantras (1964) at the Naropa Institute on June 16, 1976. This recording is held in both the Naropa Archives and the Michael McClure fonds at Simon Frasier University, a SpokenWeb partner. The poems in Ghost Tantras dip in and out of what McClure calls “beast language,” an ecstatic register of leonine nonsense that mimics the guttural growls and roars of large mammals. Beast Language was McClure’s attempt to activate “the biological bases of poetry” (Scratching 43), a practical application of what he dubbed “Meat Science.” “For McClure, humans are meat,” writes Michael Davidson, “and one’s expression—in its ideal state—is an incarnation of one’s mammal nature” (Davidson 87). Rather infamously, McClure read a selection of these poems to the lions at the San Francisco Zoo, an escapade captured in a 1966 episode of the documentary series USA Poetry, developed by poet and Beat associate Richard O. Moore:
Michael McClure on Poetry USA (1966)
Ten years later, during a whistle-stop retrospective of Beat history with Ginsberg at Naropa, McClure makes a show of his hesitance to read “Ghost Tantra 49,” one of the very same poems he had triumphantly declaimed to a cage of lions the decade prior.
I was always afraid to recite this other one. Although I knew it by heart, I was afraid to recite it because I thought I might not be able to stop. It’s very mantric. And I thought I’d be giving a reading and they’ll carry me away at the end. I’ll still be going Grahhr! Grahhr! (1:00:30-1:00:47)
As you’ll hear in the recording, McClure explains his newfound resolution to read the poem by pointing to a recent experience in an isolation tank. In the Ghost Tantras, the unprepared passage from English to beastly nonsense and back performs the extreme dissolution of the Cartesian split. And given that beast language so exuberantly infuses body, meat, and muscle with capacities for expression, we have to ask: why should the experience of floating in an isolation tank, which allows one to become free within a few minutes” (Lilly 22), license McClure’s reading in beast language before the Naropa audience in 1976?
Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Dick Gallup, Anne Waldman and Michael McClure at Naropa Institute, 1976
I have never recited a poem in an isolation tank, but I suspect that one hears one’s voice as if from the inside, by means of what the poet calls “the inner organs of perception” (Scratching 156). So interiorized is this mode of listening that McClure demurs at any suggestion of materialization. In his essay “A Mammal Gallery,” he describes listening to a tape recording of a snow leopard’s performance—“more beautiful than any composition of Mozart”—and studiously declining to privilege its preservation (156). “The tape is a work of art as we listen. But we have no desire to add it to the universe of media and plastic artifacts. We see, hear, feel through the veil. WE are translated.”
The digitized recording annotated here surely belongs to that “universe of media and plastic artifacts.” I’ve seized on this bit of paratextual patter from McClure’s reading because the idea of reciting beast language in an isolation tank, the supposed spur to McClure’s performance of “Ghost Tantra 49,” offers an arresting counter-image of what is interpretatively salient in what actually happened at Naropa on June 6, 1976. The isolation tank, in other words, is a foil for that set of difference-making material contexts to which critical readings of the audio archive might attend—and all the more successfully so when equipped with platforms like AudiAnnotate. Because it allows one to layer observations and interpretations across a single time axis, this flexible annotation tool enables close listening to the multiple voices one hears in the audio record.
The keyed annotations on the next page pursue this possibility by mapping McClure’s performance in three dimensions: that of the reading voice, the situated voice, and the social voice. Attention to the reading voice strives to restore the difference made by the dynamic relationship between the performative voice and the printed page. The situated voice, meanwhile, attunes us to the institutionally mediated relation between the performer and the audience. Finally, listening for the social voice requires tarrying with the grain of address and its expressive physiological textures–the “unique voice that signifies nothing but itself,” in Adriana Cavarero’s phrase–as much as the compacted social histories those textures index (7).
Just as he feared, online collections like SpokenWeb (2010), PennSound (2005), and UbuWeb (1996) entail the permanent possibility that McClure will be “carr[ied] away” from the irenic plentitude of a lost moment in time—on digitized tape, he’ll “still be going Grahhr! Grahhr!” as long as we care to listen. At the same time, by bursting the isolation tank of the poetry reading, we can give speech a measure of its body back, the gurglings, drips, rumblings, heart, and pulsebeats. In the process, as listeners at the remove of the present “WE are translated” indeed–into the sonorous language of differences that history makes.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Tony Power at Simon Frasier University’s Bennett Library for his help navigating McClure’s audio record.
Works Cited
Belgrad, Daniel. The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in Seventies America. University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Bernstein, Charles. “Introduction.” In Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, edited by Charles Bernstein, 3-26. Oxford University Press, 1998.
Burnett, D. Graham. “Adult Swim: How John C. Lilly Got Groovy (and Took the Dolphin with Him), 1958-1968.” In Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation & American Counterculture, edited by David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, 13-50. University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Cavarero, Adriana. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Phenomenology of Vocal Expression. Translated by Paul Kottman. Stanford University Press, 2005.
Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. MIT Press, 2001.
Lilly, John C. The Deep Self: Consciousness Exploration in the Isolation Tank. Gateway Books and Tapes, 2007.
McClure, Michael. Ghost Tantras. City Lights Publishers, 2013.
—. Scratching the Beat Surface. North Point Press, 1982.
| Time | Annotation | Layer |
|---|---|---|
| 58:41 | The following recitations occur midway through McClure’s reading with Allen Ginsberg on June 16, 1976 at the Naropa Institute’s summer session (the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics). The plan was to offer attendees a Beat retrospective of sorts. In Ginsberg’s own words, “Michael and I decided that, for the evening, it would be interested to go back historically and read some of the same texts that we first read together the first time we read together…this evening we’re going to…alternate readings, beginning with a very brief presentation by myself and then a brief presentation by him, and then longer trading back-and-forth, five- and ten-minute sections, improvising the time as we go.” Ginsberg begins by reading a selection from “Howl” and McClure by reading “For the Death of 100 Whales,” both poems debuted in 1955 at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco. In her introductory remarks, Anne Waldman shares a brief account of their friendship, beginning with their first “official meet[ing]” at a party for W.H. Auden in 1954 and extending to previous collaborations between McClure and Ginsberg, including readings together in 1965 during the Berkeley Vietnam peace protests and in the 1967 “Be-in” in San Francisco, “with Suzuki-Roshi [Shunryū Suzuki] on the stage,” as well as a host of other “Timothy Leary benefits” and “om orgies.” Waldman concludes that “this reading is a continuation of some kind of poetic-karmic link between these two poets.” It is also, implicitly, a continuation of illustrious Beat history. | Situated voice |
| 58:57 - 59:14 | McClure reads the first three and a half lines of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It was a regular habit of McClure’s to recite these lines before public performances of Ghost Tantras. The gesture “suggest[s] the origins of his poetry in early English verse,” as Michael Davidson notes (86). On the day he shot the USA Poetry episode at the San Francisco Zoo, McClure also recited Chaucer to the tree kangaroos, for whom “beast language was not right” (Kahn 340). Several months after the reading at Naropa, on November 25, 1976, McClure recited from the opening of Chaucer’s prologue on stage at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom during The Band’s famous farewell concert, immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978). | Situated voice |
| 1:00:22 - 1:00:30 | Applause | Situated voice |
| 1:02:48 - 1:03:00 | Applause | Situated voice |
| 58:58 - 59:07 | Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in switch licour Of which vertu | McClure reading |
| 59:20 - 59:23 | I LOVE TO THINK OF THE RED PURPLE ROSE | McClure reading |
| 59:24 - 59:26 | IN THE DARKNESS COOLED BY THE NIGHT | McClure reading |
| 59:27 - 59:31 | We are served by machines making satins of sounds. | McClure reading |
| 59:32 - 59:36 | Each blot of sound is a bud or a stahr. | McClure reading |
| 59:37 - 59:40 | Body eats bouquets of the ear's vista. | McClure reading |
| 59:41 - 59:48 | Gahhhrrr booody eyes eers noze deem thou. | McClure reading |
| 59:49 - 59:51 | NOH. NAH-OHH | McClure reading |
| 59:51 - 59:56 | hrooor. VOOOR-NAH! GAHROOOOO ME. | McClure reading |
| 59:57 - 1:00:00 | Nah droooooh seerch. NAH THEE! | McClure reading |
| 1:00:00 - 1:00:06 | The machines are too dull when we are lion poems that move & breathe. | McClure reading |
| 1:00:06 - 1:00:12 | WHAN WE GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOR hann dree | McClure reading |
| 1:00:12 - 1:00:17 | myketoth sharoo sreee thah noh deeeeeemed ez. | McClure reading |
| 1:00:17 - 1:00:19 | Whan. eeeethoooze hrohh. | McClure reading |
| 1:01:03 - 1:01:08 | SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE SENSES! | McClure reading |
| 1:01:09 - 1:01:14 | Drive drooor from the fresh repugnance, | McClure reading |
| 1:01:14 - 1:01:17 | thou whole, thou feeling creature. | McClure reading |
| 1:01:18 - 1:01:21 | Live not for others but affect thyself | McClure reading |
| 1:01:22 - 1:01:26 | from thy enhanced interior--believing what thou carry. | McClure reading |
| 1:01:26 - 1:01:32 | Thy trillionic multitude of grahh, vhooshes, and silences. | McClure reading |
| 1:01:32 - 1:01:36 | Oh you are heavier and dimmer than you knew | McClure reading |
| 1:01:36 - 1:01:38 | and more solid and full of pleasure. | McClure reading |
| 1:01:38 - 1:01:47 | Grahhr! Grahhhr! Ghrahhhrrr! Ghrahhr! Grahhrrr. | McClure reading |
| 1:01:47 - 1:01:54 | Grahhrr-grahhhrr! Grahhr. Gahrahhrr Ghrahhhrrrr. | McClure reading |
| 1:01:55 - 1:02:03 | Ghrarrrr. Ghrahhr! Ghrarrrrr. Gharrrr. Grahhrr. | McClure reading |
| 1:02:03 - 1:02:10 | Ghrahhrr. Ghrahr. Grahhr. Grahharrr. Grahhrr. | McClure reading |
| 1:02:10 - 1:02:21 | Grahhhhr. Grahhhr. Gahar. Ghrahhr. Grahhr. Grahhr. | McClure reading |
| 1:02:21 - 1:02:30 | Ghrahhr. Grahhhr. Grahhr. Gratharrr! Grahhr. | McClure reading |
| 1:02:30 - 1:02:39 | Ghrahrr. Ghraaaaaaahrr. Grhar. Ghhrarrr! Grahhrr. | McClure reading |
| 1:02:39 - 1:02:47 | Ghrahrr. Gharr! Ghrahhhhr. Grahhrr. Ghraherrr. | McClure reading |
| 1:00:29 | To listen for the social voice is to apprehend the lived histories telescoped in a performer’s embodied vocal expression. McClure’s speech is the liquid instrument of an avid performer, one that betrays no especially particular regional distinctiveness save perhaps slightly nasal, slight ironic casualness of his generational milieu. As McClure moves in and out of beast language, letting the phonemic order of English dissolve into long vowels wrapped in deliciously indulged alveolar approximates and glottal fricatives, he means for us to hear the body, as it were. More particularly, though, we hear the 43-year-old male-gendered body that spent its childhood between Kansas and the Pacific Northwest and its adulthood in countercultural California. | Social voice |
| 59:19 - 1:00:29 | McClure reads Ghost Tantra 51, page _____. As in many of his printed poems, McClure centers the Ghost Tantras down the page's middle, an aesthetic strategy Davidson regards as beastly in its own right: "McClure compares the physical shape of his poems to biological organismsÉ.Instead of returning to the left margin, the line asserts itself boldly as a free image, connected to the other lines like ribs to the spinal column" (86). In light of McClure's performance and the digital lyric archive more broadly, Davidson's observation that this meaningful shapeliness makes the line not "a score for the voice" but "a separate object among other objects" takes on curious significance. By what means can we account *both* for the line's printed objecthood *and* the sonorous objecthood captured and audible, in this instance, on digitized tape? Even more to the point, how can we account for the historically-specific performance of McClure's recitation--his expressive re-citation of a printed text on June 16, 1976, the dynamic relation between page and speech, his 'reading voice.' I have taken advantage of the fact that McClure's recitation precisely reflects the printed version to respect the poem's printed lineation in my transcriptions below. Ideally, the critical act of reading and listening simultaneously will evoke the tension at the heart of the reading voice. | Reading voice |
| 58:42 - 58:53 | I'm going to read a couple of poems in Beast Language which are actually from the early '60s and not the '50s, and then we're going to take a break-ten minutes or so. | McClure speaking |
| 59:07 - 59:15 | That's Chaucer actually. It makes a nice introduction. | McClure speaking |
| 1:00:30 - 1:00:36 | I was always afraid to recite this other one. Although I knew it by heart, I was afraid to recite it because I thought I might not be able to stop. | McClure speaking |
| 1:00:38 - 1:00:47 | It's very mantric. And I thought I'd be giving a reading and they'll carry me away at the end. I'll still be going Grahhr! Grahhr! So, | McClure speaking |
| 1:00:48 - 1:01:01 | recently I was in one of John Lilly's isolation tanks and I thought, what a perfect time to do this thing I've always been afraid to do. [Audience laughs] What difference would it make here? So I did, and I did know it by heart, but I think I'll read it here anyway. | McClure speaking |