Inside Dolphin Skull
In his seminal post-modern essay “Projective
Verse,” Charles Olson suggests that the “stance toward reality that
brings such verse into being” is a change “larger than the technical” and may
“lead to new poetics and new concepts from which some…epic may …emerge” (Olson
239). Surely the epic Olson had in mind was something along the lines of his
own Maximus, or perhaps Robert Duncan’s Ground
Work, yet no projective poem has the force of this organismic
worldview, with a myriad-mindedness, consistent energy and literary skill, more
than Michael McClure’s “Dolphin
Skull,” his long projective poem published in 1995. At sixty-six pages,
it cannot be seriously considered an epic poem, though it does have the history
and culture of post-World War II America all over it. Yet the poem certainly is
the pinnacle of projection as far as 20th century poetry is
concerned due to the consistently high level of consciousness it enacts in the
reader open enough to take it in. “Perhaps
it will please someone else and they may appropriate it for their own
consciousness.” (71).
Michael McClure was born in
I love the
vividness of his reactions and the very personal turns and swirls of the lines.
The worlds in which I myself live, the private world of personal reactions, the
biological world (animals and plants and even bacteria chase each other through
the poems), the world of the atom and molecule, the stars and the galaxies, are
all there; and in between, above and below, stands man, the howling mammal,
contrived out of "meat" by chance and necessity. If I were a poet I
would write like Michael McClure-if only I had his talent. (Crick)
Crick won a Nobel
Prize for his investigation into the structure of the DNA molecule, the double
helix. McClure understands the intersection of poetry and science perhaps
better than anyone ever has, but says if either is not used to “change one’s
life they are meaningless” (McClure xvi). McClure states this in the author’s
preface to Three Poems, the book in which “Dolphin Skull” was first published. It is one of the most
succinct, clear and knowledgeable statements on projective verse ever, clearly
showing with the enclosed poems, that McClure is the prime projective
practitioner. Yet his is an art discipline that amounts to the practice of
consciousness science, and his work radiates stronger energy fields as his
career continues, demonstrating the success of his “experiment in soul-building” as Keats might call it.
While the non-linear (chaotic?)
nature of projective verse can be obtuse to some, the best advice for its
appreciation is McClure’s suggestion that: “What is urgent is not the quantity
that is understood as one reads a poem, but how much one uses the richness of
one’s being to have the experience of the poem” (McClure xvi). As a projective
poet for over half a century, he understands that: “To write spontaneously does
not mean to write carelessly or without thought and deep experience. In fact,
there must be a vision and a poetics that are alive and conscious…When the poem
is finished I listen to it…and see that it has a deeper consciousness and
brighter thoughts than I was aware of while writing.” (xv). This fact is what
the poet writing in the projective (open, organic) will, over time, come to
understand, trust and develop, yet it is also what makes writing projectively
very difficult. Vision and rigorous discipline rarely come easily. When the
writer composing organically is in the flow (when she is tapped-in), there is a
consciousness available at a deeper level. It is similar to the practice of the
jazz soloist, the action painter, the calligrapher or the experience of any
number of other spontaneous art form practitioners. They are lost in the moment
of the creative act. McClure has so perfected his craft that he has access to
myriad deep fields of resonance which inform his poems like few others writing
in post-World War II North America. It is the long practice of the projective,
combined with the poet’s talent and the power of the fields, including the
ultimate field, the collective unconscious into which he taps, which accounts
for the power behind this poem and the best of McClure’s work.
A Personal Universe
In a lecture given at the Naropa Institute on July
17, 1976, McClure gave students the rules for constructing a personal
universe deck. This deck was to be the personal universe of willing
participants signified in one hundred words. The rules included that words
chosen for each student’s deck exemplify the past, present and future of the
student, that they sound good together, that they show the bad side of the
student as well as those words coming from “your angel-food self” (Waldman, Webb 89). All but one of these words were to be concrete and to be evenly divided between the
five senses. Of course this process is steeped in the Ezra Pound–William Carlos
Williams school of imagism, but the notion of
constructing cards to create a personal universe also gets the student
practitioner into the realm of personal mythology, a deep level of
consciousness. The opening lines of “Dolphin
Skull” are certainly taken from McClure’s personal universe and they
show, from the very beginning of this poem, the power and consciousness of his
craft:
SO THE OWL
HOOTS: Turquoise. Musk. White linen.
Deer
in the yard – a stag with antlers.
(3)
There is so much
in these first two lines. The first thing one notices is that all but one of
the five senses are immediately engaged and the fifth,
taste (in the image of blackberries) is not too far away. So,
on to the depth of McClure’s personal mythological universe. The owl is
seen in many cultures as a harbinger of death. In American Indian culture it
also evokes wisdom and divination (Cooper 124). Of course something must first
die so that the energy can be transformed. Death/Rebirth is one of the seven
basic archetypes (Williams 271) and this is where McClure begins his own
journey. Turquoise is another image which evokes Native America. It is also
associated with a definition of spiritual health and well-being (Rain 619), as
well as with the throat, or communication chakra (Martin 40). In fact, Joseph
Martin suggests it increases energy levels, enhances connections to spirit
energy, and keeps one open and alert or as he says: “keeps your body in a
‘ready to move state’” (40). Musk evokes the sense of smell, something we get
over and over in the poem, from the smell
of mackerel baking to the
leaves and odors of Vietnamese basil to the smell of the pot roast and the noodles. This last image comes
after the line “I/ have/ blown up!/ Blown up and cooked myself over a fire” (10). So
the notion of death/rebirth not only starts the poem, but is a key theme. But
we are only on line one, with musk, which “connotes a down to earth
personality; one close to the earth; possessing primal (basic) spiritual
beliefs without superficiality” (Rain 396). The last of the first four senses
engaged, “White linen,” evokes
another key theme of “Dolphin Skull,”
sensuality. There are many passages which are quite sexy and McClure’s
sensuality is part of the fire that underlies the potency of this poem. One
such passage suggests, in McClure’s unique typography:
COVERS
OF OLD MAGAZINES
are glossy, erotic, my
sexuality
grows underneath them
like a rock rolled up on a beach
by the edge of huge waves.
I’M
LISTENING
to you in my mind.
A MUSEUM OF DIRTY PICTURES (15)
Yet McClure’s
passion is a bloodfire tempered by the wisdom of
experience. Later in the book we get a sense of his early sensual life in the
poem “Dark Brown” which has a
graphic description of analingus decades before
anyone put ads in the local alternative weekly seeking rimming. But at
only the end of the third stanza of “Dolphin
Skull,” he likens the sexual addiction of his young manhood to a
CRUCIFIXION and gives us the capital letters to drive home his point.
So in this poem we will have a DEATH/REBIRTH, done with a spiritual health and
well-being that suggests we be ready to move along with some unpretentious
spiritual beliefs into something that feels very good. This is what is evoked
in line one. In line two there is a deer in the yard. But not just any
deer, “a stag with antlers.” Of
course there is the immediate connection with nature, even though this nature
is only
We’re only fourteen lines in and we’ve skipped over other powerful attractor
fields such as the ocean, aging, the dream realm and love. Yet there are at
least three other fields of energy expressed in the imagery of the first stanza
of “Dolphin Skull” that deserve
examination. The first is from the line “As I get huger I become streams / stretching into shadows of memories.”
Yes, certainly memory is a powerful attractor field. The epigraph McClure uses
for the poem is a Lapp proverb that says: “The memories of one’s youth make for long long
thoughts” (3). I asked him about the meaning of “as I get huger” and he suggested it was a state of
consciousness. Without further elucidation from the author this remains
somewhat mysterious and I am sure McClure does not have a problem with that
notion. There is hugeness in the consciousness of this poem and because of
McClure’s depth of experience, writing skill and process, he is able to bring
those who are open into that hugeness. The poem has transformative
capabilities. The second of the final three images of stanza one is blackness,
as in “Blackness is just a mask of fat
for somebody” (4). This is the second time in the book McClure evokes
the image of blackness, the first being the books’ epigraph “Once this was all Black Plasma and
Imagination”(vii). Black is, of course, not a
color, but the absence of reflected light, as we learned in grammar school
science. Yet it also is an archetypal strange attractor and a powerful one at
that. Think Black Holes. In McClure’s projective practice we can take black for
whatever it evokes in us, as his is a process which allows the reader equipped
with negative capability to draw their own conclusions. (You might counter that
all poetry is this way, but not all poetry is written from the state of
consciousness in which Negative Capability is at play. Language designed to
persuade is one sign that this element is missing, which is why poets Robert
Duncan and Jack Spicer could recognize the use of persuasive language as a
failing of the projective, or organic, impulse. )
In
McClure’s universe, you can bet that black is the stage before something huge
begins to emerge. The final notion in stanza one is: “The clouds are alive” (4). This can be seen simply as animism
(in itself not such a simple concept, but one ascribed to so-called
primitive cultures,) but in truth, it is where McClure lives, in the
crossroads where shamanism meets 20th century science. Everything IS
alive and it is another of the themes of “Dolphin Skull.” McClure abstains from the word shaman,
feeling it overused but does suggest everything has consciousness. Yet
McClure’s notion of consciousness is sourced in a very old world view not only
akin to the holistic stance toward reality Olson referenced in “Projective Verse,” alluded to at the
top of this essay, but one that may be traced through Olson’s source, Alfred
North Whitehead, to the cultures that were (and to some degree still are) much
more partial to the holistic/interconnected world view McClure references with
the above line and others from “Dolphin
Skull.”
Hua-Yen
Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra
One
of McClure’s source texts is Francis Cook’s book Hua-Yen
Buddhism and Hua-Yen is mentioned as a source in the
introduction to Three Poems. It refers to a Chinese
Michael
Faraday is credited with the early scientific work in Field theory, preceding the scientists to whom Cook refers and Faraday, working in
the 19th century, noted that “an electric charge must be considered
to exist everywhere.” Cook also points out that Whitehead paraphrased that by
saying: “the modification of the electromagnetic field at every point of space
at each instant owing to the past history of each electron is another way of
stating the same fact” (17). Here I am reminded of a section of the second part
of “Dolphin Skull” which is
entitled: Portrait of the Moment:
Point Lobos as it always is
with a whale skeleton
and molecules
of Robinson Jeffers’
breath and shoe soles
looking
up
out
of my eyes
(sensing back and outwards into
a vision)
at the camera. (51)
The remnants of
the electrons that once made up the
Not only are there
no hierarchies in the Hua-Yen view, an emperor is as
important as a sand-flea, but the alternative name Hua-Yen
gave itself was “The Interdependent
Origination of the Universe,” thus, according to this world-view,
everything is essentially empty, (as the quantum physicists of the 20th
Century began to realize) because everything depends on everything else for its
existence, two themes which McClure suggests in the following manner:
“Mind” means nothing but consciousness –
a rock has it and a toadstool
and a field of subparticles in a
complex protein
as it loops, tying a knot. A mouth
with a cock in it. Babies
crying in the next
room. Blackberries
glisten with it and the webs covered
with dust and particles from car fumes
and the
pollen of eucalyptus. (27)
And also:
You are
everyone
BUT
I am nobody.
Nobody is very large
and
powerful.
(21)
More
of the Hua-Yen worldview, intentionally or not, is
reflected in Dolphin Skull through the amazing imagery which reinforces
(or creates) the powerful energy at work in the poem. Cook suggests:
…the effort of
self-transcendence, by which egotism, pride and delusion are destroyed, is
accompanied by a parallel immersion even more deeply than before into the
concrete world of things. Rather than banish things as unworthy such a vision
reinstates the common and ordinary (as well as the “horrible” and “disgusting”)
to a position of ultimate value (88).
I’m
reminded of William Carlos Williams dictum: “no ideas but in things” as well as his appreciating the old man
picking up dog lime in the gutter as much as the preacher at his pulpit. I am
also reminded of McClure’s references in the poem, admitting to being “sneaky
and proud” as well as his likening the small “s” self to a parasite as in “the
parasite of personality,” as well as unorthodox references to “cracker barrels
where the dog pissed” or “eyes of starving families,” or “a friend blown up in
a car wreck” (The friend in this case was Emmett Grogan of Diggers fame).
Ultimately,
Cook suggests the function of Hua-Yen thought
…is to be a lure
which attracts the aspirant to the practice which will presumably culminate in
an existential, or experiential validation of what was
before only theory. At the same time it guides the aspirant in actual
interrelationships, serving as a kind of template by means of which the
individual may gauge the extent to which his actions conform to the reality of
identity and interdependence (109).
McClure
is successful, largely through his expertise at the projective practice, in
translating this kind of experience into verse. Poet and Grateful Dead lyricist
Robert Hunter points out in the introduction to Three Poems that McClure
“reports with …fastidious exactness” and that his objects (images) are “clear
and present” (McClure ix). In my view, Dolphin Skull is the
crowning achievement of a consciousness and practice which enacts one of the
most powerful attractor fields, that of compassion, which in the Hua Yen view of things is “inextricably bound up with
perception” (121). It is for these reasons I feel that “Dolphin Skull” will still resonate 1,000 years from now and so
far is the primary evidence that a projective practice leads to a deepening of
consciousness. One need only be interested in transcendence for the poem to
begin its magic of transformation, or as McClure said:
pretend this is not blackness.
This is not blackness, this
is a bell ring. (36)
WORKS CITED
Barlow, Bernice. “Title.”
<http://pages.prodigy.net/groovyskye/2.html>
Barlow, Bernice, ed. “Llewellyn's 1999 Magical
Almanac.”
Cook, Francis. “Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra.”
Cooper,
J.C. “An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional
Symbols.”
Hunter,
Paul. “Ode to the Blackberry.”
McClure, Michael. “Three Poems.”
Olson, Charles. “Collected Prose.”
Rain, Mary Summer. “In Your
Dreams: The Ultimate Dream Directory.”
Waldman, Webb, eds. “Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute.”
Williams, Strephon Kaplan. “Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork
Manual.”
also, websites: http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/mcclure/mc-crick.htm
and http://pages.prodigy.net/groovyskye/2.html.