BEGINNING WITH LINES BY THE POET

BEGINNING WITH LINES BY THE POET
for JACK FOLEY

By Michael McClure

“THIS MAN LOOKS OUT AT ME
eyes full of interest and perhaps suffering
whatever he looks at registered on his face . . . ”
Just that much and not more would be enough,
always though he is dancing like his dad, shuffling
canny strange steps of thirties and 3000 a.d.
KNOWLEDGE OF POETRY
Finds him and Adelle
opening Clyfford Still’s mystery:
Let figure and ground fuse into one.
Eyes tell a little more than the ear hears.
Yes, his poetry breathes intelligence
BUT
it’s also aloft with intuition.
He recreated the Batman Gallery
but did not ever touch his winged
feet on those Fillmore Street boards.
Bards welcomed him there and then,
and inspired artists painted his
IMAGINATION.
He goes on to triumph through the modes:
from archetypal Olsonian projectivity
of post–heroic deconstruction
to eructation of naughty nursery rhymes
without a solecism in sight.

Like Cocteau, “Radio Daddy”
made tubes and circuits sing Poetry
in voices of Whitman and Gertrude Stein
(and, almost, Emily Dickinson).

He
oped
airways
multiculturally,
and with catholicity
speaks the finest and sees
the highest possible
in other.
IN CREATING THE INEFFABLE
POETRY TIME LINE OF CALIFORNIA
he presented it as most effable,
and in the loop and trajectory
of the unknown, but now known,
history of the work he became
at one with
the work. (The POEIN )

— Did Goethe create Faust
or vice versa? —

Loving all poesy from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
to dangling American foot
he uncovered the root
of unpremeditated wit
AND IN THE PASTURES
flowered by their strophes,
he sings forth with his better
half,
THE LADY
A
D
E
L
L
E
:

Shepherd and shepherdess of vocable
and volta
with joyful tongue
and breeze–stroked lyra.

“Thus are things decreed by fate.
Esti gar eimarmena pantos . . . ”

Manannan mac Lir
(Michael McClure)