Michael McClure: Peyote Poem

Of the hundred and fifty copies of Peyote Poem that Beman published, several were sold in City Lights Books in North Beach (the old Bohemian and early Beat center near Chinatown in San Francisco). In the summer of 1958, Francis Crick, Nobel laureate and elucidator of the double helix of the DNA molecule, bought the broadside there. He included two lines of it in his book Of Molecules and Men:

THIS IS THE POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE
we smile with it

Crick's Use of those lines shows the important, yet little known reaching out from science to poetry and from poetry to science that was part of the Beat movement. My friends of the late fifties were mostly poets and painters; however, my closest friend was a scientist—a visionary naturalist. He was an uncannily gifted observer, who introduced me to the nature of California. Having spent much of my childhood in the evergreen rain forests of Seattle, I expected Nature to be green trees and wide rivers. My naturalist friend showed me the subtleties of the California hills and savannas—and introduced me to falcons and pack rats and owls and coyotes. In childhood I had intended to be a naturalist or biologist and he helped me keep that stream of consciousness vital. My interest in biology has remained a constant thread through my searching.

Much of what the Beat Generation is about is nature—the landscape of nature in the case of Gary Snyder, the mind as nature in the case of Allen Ginsberg. Consciousness is a natural organic phenomenon. The Beats shared an interest in Nature, Mind, and Biology—areas that they expanded and held together with their radical political or antipolitical stance.

Three years before the peyote experience just described, I had given my first poetry reading with Allen Ginsberg, the Zen poet Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and the American Surrealist poet Philip Lamantia. The reading was in December 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. The Six Gallery was a cooperative art gallery run by young artists who centered around the San Francisco Art Institute. They were fiery artists who had either studied with Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko or with the newly emerging figurative painters. Their works ranged from huge drip and slash to minute precision smudges turning into faces. Earlier in the year poet Robert Duncan had given a staged reading of his play Faust Foutu (Faust Fucked) at the Six Gallery and, with the audacious purity of an Anarchist poet, he had stripped off his clothes at the end of the play.

On this night Kenneth Rexroth was master of ceremonies. This was the first time that Allen Ginsberg read Howl. Though I had known Allen for some months preceding, it was my first meeting with Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. Lamantia did not read his poetry that night but instead recited works of the recently deceased John Hoffman—beautiful prose poems that left orange stripes and colored visions in the air.

The world that we tremblingly stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one. But San Francisco was a special place. Rexroth said it was to the arts what Barcelona was to Spanish Anarchism. Still, there was no way, even in San Francisco, to escape the pressures of the war culture. We were locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle—the Korean War. My self-image in those years was of finding myself— young, high, a little crazed, needing a haircut, in an elevator with burly, crew-cutted, square-jawed eminences, staring at me like I was misplaced cannon fodder. We hated the war and the inhumanity and the coldness. The country had the feeling of martial law. An undeclared military state had leapt out of Daddy Warbucks' tanks and sprawled over the landscape. As artists we were oppressed and indeed the people of the nation were oppressed. There were certain of us (whether we were fearful or brave) who could not help speaking out—we had to speak. We knew we were poets and we had to speak out as poets. We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead— killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life. We could see what Pound had done—and Whitman, and Artaud, and D. H. Lawrence in his monumental poetry and prose.

The Six Gallery was a huge room that had been converted from an automobile repair shop into an art gallery. Someone had knocked together a little dais and was exhibiting sculptures by Fred Martin at the back of it—pieces of orange crates that had been swathed in muslin and dipped in plaster of pans to make splintered, sweeping shapes like pieces of surrealist furniture. A hundred and fifty enthusiastic people had come to hear us. Money was collected and jugs of wine were brought back for the audience. I hadn't seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl—it was new to me. Allen began in a small and intensely lucid voice. At some point Jack Kerouac began shouting "GO" in cadence as Allen read it. In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before—we had gone beyond a point of no return—and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void—to the land without poetry—to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision.