“What’s in a deck? Words! Words! Words! And more! — McClure’s 1960s Personal Universe Decks”
Résumé
Among McClure’s poetic experiments or conceptual poetry of the 1960s are a series of deck of cards, made on his own — LION FIGHT, DREAM TABLE, MAN & WOMAN, PERSONAL UNIVERSE DECK — or in collaboration with Bruce Conner — MANDALA DECK, CARDS, most of them printed by Dave Haselwood. These decks are first and foremost challenging as they need to be examined equally for their singularity and/or generic status, and for their place within the experimental poetic range McClure was exploring in 1960s, thus questioning their status as medium, poems or both medium and poems/medium-poems. Therefore, one cannot just be satisfied with the idea that a personal universe deck is just a brainstorming tool, an inspiration machine, a divination, or a game deck.
The paper is part of a wider research on McClure’s experimental work in the 1960s, his various collaboration with San Francisco Bay artists, his gradually becoming an iconic countercultural poetic figure of the Bay Area over a decade from the mid-1960s onwards, and the writing of Ghost Tantras.
It contextualizes the production of these decks on a local but also national poetic stage at the time, examines their structural or compositional differences and similarities, to eventually question their use and status as a poetic medium and consider them as a possible linguistic and imagistic DNA to McClure’s poetry, one deeply rooted in these mid-1950s-mid-1960s experiments, which sought to engage in a larger questioning of the role and modes of poetic expression in relation to human consciousness.