Details

ISBN-10: 0889226881
ISBN-13: 9780889226883
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publish Date: 05/29/2012
Dimensions: 8.80" L, 5.90" W, 0.30" H

Specks

Foreword by: Paul E Nelson

Paperback

Price: $16.95

Overview

Widely noted for the popularity of his dynamic performances, Michael McClure has been celebrated since his first poetry event. At twenty-two years old, in San Francisco’s legendary Six Gallery, McClure, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg gave their first poetry reading–Ginsberg read “Howl” that night. McClure’s writing followed his deepening environmental awareness and biological studies, and he became an outspoken advocate, through his essays, music, theatre and novels, for the protection of all living beings.

When McClure’s Specks was first published in 1985 by Talonbooks, it was a revelation in terms of its transcending the proprioceptive poetic methodology of Charles Olson and entering an Aristotelian realm of metaphysical questions that alchemically combined matters both scientific and mystical. In this much-anticipated return, with incisive and bombastic projective verse, McClure’s stance in the face of futurity is even more topical, as the senses of the physical-poetic body explore its properties, powers and limitations, expanding forth as the benevolent love child of its own consciousness.

Specks assumes the form of a blastula, offering a poetic model of embryonic development that arises from the cellular division known as “cleavage.” Specks presents groupings of ideas that mimic and challenge one another in a deep biological state. With mind aglow in recognition of muscular imagination and the intelligence of the sensorium in all its unapologetic tonality, McClure’s luminous journey leaps with the grace of Muhammad Ali and Fred Astaire, and tempts the reader into the mysterious abyss of dark energy that Federico García Lorca calls duende.

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Reviews

"a serious, though lively, work of poetry, and one could argue that you shouldn't simply read it, but study it, and be deeply rewarded by that endeavor. ... What is striking about Specks is that it embodies the philosophy it espouses. It is a wide-reaching open form that absorbs, activates, and is influenced by all it encounters. ... an appropriative modernist text, with a multitude of sources woven into an all-encompassing lingual texture ... a book that should be studied with the hope that it may startle our dull minds alert, so to speak, allowing us to achieve greater heights of personal transformation. ... we need things to intensify life, not dull it, and Specks is one of those things."
Prick of the Spindle

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Details

ISBN-10: 0889226881
ISBN-13: 9780889226883
Publisher: Talonbooks
Publish Date: 05/29/2012
Dimensions: 8.80" L, 5.90" W, 0.30" H
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