Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems

Beat writer Michael McClure’s final, posthumous collection―assembled before his death in 2020―offers, as editor Garrett Caples puts it in his introduction, “a fitting capstone to an extraordinary body of work.” In the opening section, “Mortalities,” McClure confronts death with frankness, setting the mood for the entire collection. Here readers will immediately encounter the poet’s signature formal techniques: the reuse of certain phrases that fit like modular blocks; the visually captivating all caps; and, especially, McClure’s center-justified line, which is destabilized with slight errancies that lend a delightful wobble or curvaceousness to the page.

McClure engages familiar Buddhist themes in compositions that mix profound philosophical and spiritual statements with painterly deployments of deep image. The results are often arresting: 

Each tip of every feeling
is the whole of experience
smeared
on white velvet
with dark
cherry juice

The titular second section has McClure in a performative mode, singing visceral blues poems, while the third section, “Fragments of Narcissus,” offers a hipster-infused reimagining of Greek mythology: “TIRESIAS is hobbling / this way // that old fuck, // he swings both ways.” “Rites of the Beast,” the book’s fourth section, includes a series of dedications to poets of McClure’s milieu, among them Beat and San Francisco luminaries like Philip Whalen, Jack Kerouac, and Diane di Prima. Drawing on Buddhist mantras, McClure enters a meditatively energized mode, sharpening his visuals into bold statuaries of affirmation―many standalone pages would make lovely broadsides of concrete poetry: 

SMALL
POEM
is a soul
like an opal
a
hardening
OF THE REAL THRILL
OF DELUSION
into
V
I
S
I
O
N

As a whole these poems demonstrate McClure’s ongoing innovation to the very end of a lifelong practice. Sometimes his experimentations retain a youthful frivolity, but more often they capture the mature, spiritual attunement of a poet facing his own ephemerality.