Poet, novelist and playwright Michael McClure, who was part of the Beat literary movement when it began in the mid-1950s in San Francisco, died Monday, May 4. He was 87. McClure, along with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and many others, helped usher in the counter-culture movement that still resonates today.
With news of Michael McClure’s death, I dug out a few items from the day I interviewed him in Miami in 1999.
I recorded a brief interview with McClure on Nov. 21, 1999 while he was in Florida to take part in a lecture at the Miami Book Fair titled “The Beats Now: Talks with Icons and Editors of the Beat Generation.” My questions were a bit dorky, but I was trying to get him to discuss a few key points about what the movement was truly about.
“I would say that it was about going for the deepest level of the imagination possible,” McClure said. “We discovered it was inevitable to speak out against the cold, gray, fascist American way politics of the ‘50s and also to begin speaking out in favor of the environment. That’s not quite the way it’s pictured with people sitting around with spaghetti in their beard playing bongo drums and wearing splotchy berets.”
At that time, he was performing with keyboardist Ray Manzarek, formerly of the Doors. A book of Zen poems had been released that year, while Penguin Books had reissued two books from decades earlier that had been out of print.
Asked if he was surprised at the resurgence of interest in the Beats, McClure told me no.
“We’ve had a good three revivals already and I don’t know if there’s going to be more, maybe I won’t be around for the next one. Each one of these rivals gets more serious and they begin being taught in classes and things like that.”
AUDIO: My interview with Michael McClure, recorded at the Miami Book Fair on Nov. 21, 1999.
I was grateful to McClure for giving me a few minutes of his time. I dug out my minidiscs from that day in 1999 to digitize the audio of the interview.
I also spoke with writer Diane di Prima, who also took part in the lecture. I had recently read her book Memoirs of a Beatnik, which was full of lots of sex and drugs. I asked her about the book, what it was like being a woman in the Beat movement, and her relationship with Kerouac.
AUDIO: Hear my interview with Diane di Prima, recorded at the Miami Book Fair on Nov. 21, 1999.
Director of Public Affairs at Arkansas PBS, 35-year broadcasting veteran, photographer, interested in radio, TV and railroad history, author and host of the book and podcast series Rock Island Railroad in Arkansas.
