Michael McClure
Wednesday, May 19th

Pre-reading reception at 7pm, reading at 7:30
Moe's Books
2476 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley (510) 849-2087

At the age of 22 Michael McClure gave his first poetry reading at the legendary Six Gallery event in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read Howl . Today McClure is more active than ever, writing and performing his poetry at festivals, and colleges and clubs across the country.

McClure reads with an actor's command and a singer's timing, his impact "transports audiences to a very different and intriguing place." He has given hundreds of reading in venues as varied as the Fillmore Ballroom, Yale University, Stanford, The National Biodiversity Conference at the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress. His audiences have ranged from an intimate dozen at a tiny Maui bookstore, to tens of thousands at San Francisco's Human Be-in in San Francisco, and to multitudes at Airlift Africa. One of the poet's readings was to, and with, four lions at the San Francisco Zoo -- a film of it is is sometimes shown on TV. McClure's world-wide performances include Rome; Paris; Tokyo; Lawrence, Kansas, London, a bull ring in Mexico City, The Whitney Museum, and a steam room in Nairobi for a group of African businessmen.

Mysteriosos Readings & Events

The first reading of Michael McClure's new poetry collection, Mysteriosos, will take place for the Grolier Poetry Bookshop at the Pierre Menard Art Gallery in Harvard Square on Sunday, April 11.

The second event will be a performance with Ray Manzarek at the Jazzmouth Festival in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Saturday, April 24. Ray and Michael will present Mysteriosos and Michael will do signings.

City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco will host a reading and a book party for Mysteriosos on May 4.

Two weeks later, date not set at this moment, Moe's Books in Berkeley will have a reading and party for Mysteriosos.

Headz, by J.J. Colagrande

Like Coachella, Lollapalooza, or Bonnaroo, festivals like the fictional Oracledang attract more than 100,000 people each year. This is a world Colagrande knows well from his time following the Grateful Dead and Phish in the 1990s.

The book currently has sold out of its first printing.

Praise for Headz

The novel also has a companion website, www.headzthenovel.com, with bonus features and deleted scenes. The website creates a literary journey that goes beyond the written page, and pushes the bounds of fiction.

"17 Reasons I Love the Work of Michael McClure"

Alone in the Yard: Buddhist, Beat & Otherwise
by Leo Racicot

"In Alone in the Yard, Leo Racicot writes of love, loss, and memory with skill, poignancy, and an understanding heart. With careful use of metaphor and surprising connections, he creates images that express our deepest feelings. In these wonderful poems, he is able to universalize the particular so that we know him and, through him, know ourselves. These poems are worth reading again and again." IF Miller, Moonburn

"Alone in the Yard – Buddhist, Beat & Otherwise is an engaging assortment of poems infused with the spirit of the beat generation; reminiscent in method of the San Francisco Renaissance with all its poetic avant-garde. Leo Racicot's poems are accessible, intelligent and unquestionably charming, incorporating a skillful blend of humor with sadness and sorrow with wit. In 'What I Meant' he writes, 'This isn’t the life I meant to give you. I meant to stand on the stern of great ships and rooster your name ‘til my cheeks puffed up like a trumpeter’s.' There’s a genuineness exposed in every verse that transcends the page. We become vulnerable, trusting the truth in his voice. This is the voice of a poet's heart." Carol Lynn Grellas, Object of Desire and Litany of Finger Prayers

"There is great satisfaction to be found in Racicot's journeys through memories of laughter and loss as he pursues the possibilities of love, gardens, and The Buddha. His singular ability to describe loneliness as a comfortable place makes this one of the year's highest recommended collections." Doug Mathewson, Blink-Ink Magazine

You can purchase this book on the Big Table Publishing website.

If you can't attend, send for a signed edition of my new book of Poetry:"Death Kick" - 10 bucks plus 2 for postage - 1731 10th St. Apt. A Berkeley, CA 94710 Here's a moem:

Wonderful one
trapped in a living jewel
monk calculus grids the scrim
exchanging identities with no-self or ultimate freedom
necessity vying ifs, down opens beginning’s alembic
there’s wiggle-room for certain fuzzy vibes
insight sawing through the duration walls
palimpsest maps echoing beneath the surface of geometry
entombed in look-a-likes unrepeated continuum waving to the last domino
numberless as a purple-pansy, breathing all-in, spherical ragas hug you
voids of utopia sail goodbyes’ immunity over the finite
quarks tempest within every belief
mystery that never knows, returns
& how gets newly out

An Evening of Romantic Poetry
with
Michael McClure, Jerome Rothenberg, Leslie Scalapino

In the spirit of an experimental and visionary romanticism that links closely with the experimental modernisms of where we are right now, McClure, Rothenberg and Scalapino will read from and discuss the works of acknowledged Romantics and postromantics like Blake, Shelley, Goethe, Hugo, Whitman, Dickinson, and Rimbaud, as well as poems of their own in the newest and oldest of romantic traditions.

The reading will also include works outside of conventional literatures and national boundaries, sound poems and non-sense poems, prose poems and visual poems, journal poems and fragment poems, outsider poems and aboriginal poems, shouted poems and whispered poems. The evening will let new ideas fly from the poems, the audience, and the readers.

Michael McClure's next two books are Of Indigo and Saffron from UC Press, and Mysteriosos and other poems from New Directions. McClure performed on December 8th with The Charles Lloyd Quartet in Los Angeles at Disney Hall.

Jerome Rothenberg is the author of over seventy books of his own poetry (thirteen from New Directions) and major assemblages of experimental and traditional poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium, the third volume of which is a no-holds barred anthology of romantic and postromantic poetry.

Leslie Scalapino is the author of thirty books of poetry, fiction, essays, and poem-plays, the most recent being: Day Ocean State of Stars' Night published by Green Integer; and It's go in horizontal, Selected Poems 1974-2006 published by UC Press, Berkeley, 2007.

Copies of the book are available for $19.95 each plus $4.00 shipping by sending a money order to Michael Jernigan, 14295 Spruce Forest, Lowell, MI 49331, or by www.PayPal.com to jernigan@iserv.net. You can also purchase your copy at The Lowell Ledger, 105 N. Broadway, Lowell, MI 49331.

Just Published by Burning Deck:

PETER WATERHOUSE
Language   Death   Night   Outside

Now available from www.burningdeck.com, www.spdbooks.org, and in Europe: www.audiatur.no/Bokhandel

An "I” between languages. A text between the genres of poem and novel. 3 cities, 3 poems, 3 philosophers. A life takes shape through precise particulars in short, staccato sentences. But the effort toward the definite stands in tension with the boundlessness of thought where a flower in Vienna can touch the sand dunes of North Africa.

"Though Waterhouse evokes experience he does not resort to narrative, exactly....
There is a relentless multiplicity of reference — to experience, to ideas, to cultural detritus, to memory. There is the death of an Austrian grandfather. There is a questioning of what it means to be a German of the post-war generation…. There is a desire to be inclusive that makes the book a sort of masterwork.... I want to make the point here that the experiential aspect of LANGUAGE DEATH NIGHT OUTSIDE is often in relation to a kind of abstract thinking or reading that is as compelling a part of the non-narrative as cityscapes, colors, art, people, the seasons, meetings." —Laura Moriarty
[full text: http://atonalistdoc.blogspot.com/]

Please Help: Poets Need Help To Pay for Health Care

Dear friends of Sam Hamill and Gray Foster, Copper Canyon Press, and Poets Against the War:

You may have heard that Sam and Gray have had some financial reverses lately. Both have also have had recent hospital stays and still need treatment not covered by insurance. Because of impaired hearing, Sam can no longer teach classes. He survives on his pension but has no room for emergency expenses.

We think that their friends will want to help Sam and Gray get through a difficult patch, and that¹s why we are raising funds in their behalf. No contribution is too small, and the names (though not the amount of donation) will be given in a few weeks to Sam and Gray, along with the total of contributions. This kind of fund doesn¹t qualify for tax-exempt status, so we suggest that those for whom this is a concern first determine the amount they would like to donate and then deduct from it the figure they estimate they would save if the contribution were deductible.

Because Alfred is in the U.S., he has set up a dollar account for the fund and checks or money orders (in dollars) should be made out in his name and sent to P.O. Box 214, Hopkinton, RI 02833 U.S.A.

This effort is probably best described not as charity but as compensation for unpaid labor involved in the founding and management of Copper Canyon Press and the website Poets Against the War, both extraordinary achievements for which we would like to show gratitude.

If you can forward this letter to those on your mailing lists, that would be great. Thank you for your interest and cooperation.

Sincerely,
Alfred Corn
Marilyn Hacker

From Palomar Grove Press: No Room For Buddha.
A new book of poems by A.D. Winans

Send payment to:

A.D.Winans
PO Box 31249
San Francisco, Ca. 94131

DEER BOY

The event will feature a reading at 7 pm by Michael McClure of his poem, "Deer Boy," composed especially for this publication.

Please don't miss the chance to encounter this handsome book, to meet the artists behind the project, and to hear a Bay Area literary icon read one of his most evocative works.

Rena Bransten Gallery is located at 77 Geary St in San Francisco (click for map) and can be reached at (415) 982-3292 or at renabranstengallery.com.

For more information about the book, please consult Magnolia's press release.

UNDER THE DOME: WALKS WITH PAUL CELAN
by Jean Daive
translated from the French by Rosmarie Waldrop

An intimate portrait of Paul Celan in his last, increasingly dark years. Celan and Daive translate each other, walk, talk. Tensions, silences and, discreetly, Celan's crises and suicide. The book blurs the time of these encounters (1965 -1970) with the present of the author writing, 20 years later, on a Mediterranean island.

Jean Daive's impressive oeuvre alternates between poetry, narration and reflective prose. He has also translated Paul Celan and Robert Creeley. His first book, DÉCIMALE BLANCHE (1967) was translated into German by Paul Celan, into English by Cid Corman. Our book is volume 5 of the prose series, LA CONDITION D'INFINI (1995-97: 7 volumes).

Newly available from SPD Books, Burning Deck, and in Europe at Audiatur.