Literary Birthday – 20 October – Michael McClure

Michael McClure was born 20 October 1932 and died 4 may 2020.

1. I guess I don’t have any advice I’d give a young writer today except to make sure he or she wanted to write, which is the same advice I would have given twenty or thirty years ago. I think there are a lot of people, there always have been, who are under the illusion that they want to write. As an illusion, that’s okay. But to waste time following the illusion if it’s not coming from a real deep centre could be confusing. And those who are intensely centred don’t need any advice from me.
2. Impressionism means taking inspiration directly from nature, trusting your senses rather than what you think you know.
3. When you co-operate with an injustice, then a little bit of your spirit dies.

Michael McClure was an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. He was one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955. This was retold in fictionalised terms in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. He became a key member of the Beat Generation and is immortalised as ‘Pat McLear’ in Kerouac’s Big Sur. His works include Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GloriaGrahamMichael_McMclure2004.jpg

Onehandclapping, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Source for Quote

by Amanda Patterson

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