A very intelligent review of Michael McClure’s new book Mysteriosos has been written by Joel Weishaus. He spots the prophetic in McClure’s latest work:
Before April 20, 2010, when news spread of the disastrous sinking of BP’s oil-drilling platform, Deepwater Horizon, in the Gulf of Mexico, with each day for months millions of barrels of oil—life-blood of contemporary economies that is poisoning the planet—polluting the already ecologically fragile sea and marshlands, killing untold numbers of marine life, and depressing local economies, along with failure after failure of corporate technological solutions to plug the hellish hole they had drilled—McClure’s vatic voice had already described how “the lapis lazuli kingfisher…
hovers
over
the
crystal
pool
as we float on a sea
of petroleum.
The essay is linked here:
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/weishaus/Poetica/blog-4.htm
About Splabman
Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
