" 'The God I Worship is a Lion' ” : Michael McClure’s Beast Language and Poetic Manifesto"
Résumé
Experimental poet Michael McClure is a singular voice in American poetry. Undisciplined disciple, affiliated with the Beats and the San Francisco Renaissance, he has definitely been associated with the West Coast counterculture. In 1967, at the San Francisco Human Be-in, he was singing "The God I Worship is a Lion" while playing his autoharp. The poem, embraced by a collage by Michael Bowen, had been published in the San Francisco Oracle before the Be-in. It developed pantheistic identification with nature and totemistic empathy with all beings, themes that largely found an echo in the philosophy of the times, but also tried to answer a question Keats had already addressed: "What weapon has the lion but himself?". If the influence of Blake, Whitman, the projectivist poets or Artaud is seminal on McClure's poetry, he has sought from the mid-1960s onwards to write a poetry of connections, breaking boundaries between biology and mysticism, body and mind, human and animal.
This paper exclusively explores the volume Ghost Tantras (1964), the recording of Tantra 49 at the San Francisco Zoo and the poem "The God I Worship is a Lion" performed at the 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco to see how, in the mid-1960s, Michael McClure sought to find a language that would articulate a state of consciousness in the making. The paper particularly addresses McClure's invention of a beast language, or of what Douglas Kahn calls "the sound of meat," at the core of a poetry that sought to be "one with creation of muscular music coming from the body and organs and inspiring sounds and 'pictures' from that source" (Ghost Tantras). By so doing, McClure not only sought to articulate a new poetry that would bring "changes to the universe" and to the self (Ghost Tantras) but to draft a manifesto ("The God I Worship is a Lion") that would be experienced as mystical, liberating and revolutionary.