Michael McClure's poetry first blossomed at the start of the Beat renaissance in San Francisco. He viewed the Beat movement as an intense "spiritual occasion," and his life has been a visionary quest marked by many such occasions. At each stage in his progress, he has assumed the mantle of bard and stepped forward as a poet-singer, giving testimony and witness to the times. He has read to college students and Zen monks, at rock concerts, at the Library of Congress, and to lions.

McClure is a kind of shaman-activist, cutting away at the webs of repression that in his view cripple American culture, using such traditional tools as chanting, mantras, ritual drama, music, and psychoactive drugs, and balancing himself between intensive discipline and Dionysian liberty. He has likened his poems to the medicine bundles of the American Indian, "bags of words" which have been restored to their...