WHAT A WONDROUS MARVEL THE PHENOMENAL WORLD IS WITH POET MICHAEL MCCLURE!

(Image of poem retrieved from https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-20-at-9.46.14-AM.png&imgrefurl=https://paulenelson.com/2019/10/20/happy-87th-michael-mcclure/&docid=u-UEBxTXjdgn7M&tbnid=SX4t5o76wPIrkM&vet=1&w=356&h=667&hl=en-US&source=sh/x/im   and I have no claims to any copyright on this poem or Piper's Creek who posted it)

You see, he roars! The rebel lion roars in all CAPS!

Note his form. While e. e. ceased necessity of capital letters and other matters of formal punctuation, grammar, and form, thus breaking new ground in poetry on the page, Michael McClure often has fun being bombastic as he capitalizes words and phrases that would not normally be capitalized. Like e.e. cummings, he also plays around with the positions of the lines on the page and the words that would normally in prior times be all in rows of lines. But the shouting! The exclamations! It is there that McClure most emphasizes his sheer wonderment, delight, or surprise in this world! (It becomes thus in some ways too then like one's dream world in which there are many surprises and twists and turns of play or drama from out of one's psyche or dreaming mind!)*

Inside one of McClure's poems, it becomes an exclamatory phenomenal world! HOW MARVELOUS IS THAT???!!!! It is rather child-like, happy it's Saturday! Thus is it nice to study poetry and techniques lest we think this is a rude poem yelling at us in childish fashion rather than recognizing its intent in form in its technique played out in which he displays how content dictates form-- or as I prefer to say, how form takes dictation from content. Thus the poem itself becomes a SYMBOL of archetypal play (!) within the play of language (!) This discussion of it also points out the difference between being child-like and being child-ish, in poetry as in all things. Not all play is child's play, either, even when it is child-like. He is kind of aa Dr. Suess for poetry and adults. 

This post concerns the play of language. 

*

Snyder so visibly plays with the language also, in a different way. By Snyder I refer to Gary Snyder of course. 

Here in the following paragraph is a link to one of Snyder's poems which I think expresses the idea of word play by using it to reflect upon the goings-on in the natural world and what it has in common with poetry--or how it is mirroed in poetry. I particularly like the wordplay that reflects the wind playing in the second stanza about the "Air Poets" and how they work/write: The Air Poets/ Play out the swiftest gales/ And sometimes loll in the eddies./. Poem after poem,/ Curling back on the same thrust.// [...] Here is the whole poem:

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/as4poets.html

*Which we see also in Snyder's twists and turns in the lolling eddies.

I envision McClure's poems to be shouted out at the opposite mountain walls across a wide stream. Some of the echoes loll in the eddies as they twist around in the wind, turning back upon themselves. 

Published on

4/13/22 5:54 PM

Upodated on:

 3/14/2023 7:05 PM