GOOOOOOR! GOOOOOOOOOO!
GOOOOOOOOOR!
GRAHHH! GRAHH! GRAHH!
Grah gooooor! Ghahh! Graaarr! Greeeeer! Grayowhr!
Greeeeee
GRAHHRR! RAHHR! GRAGHHRR! RAHR!
RAHRIRAHHR! GRAHHHR! GAHHR! HRAHR!
BE NOT SUGAR BUT BE LOVE
looking for sugar!
GRAHHH! GRAHH! GRAHH!
Grah gooooor! Ghahh! Graaarr! Greeeeer! Grayowhr!
Greeeeee
GRAHHRR! RAHHR! GRAGHHRR! RAHR!
RAHRIRAHHR! GRAHHHR! GAHHR! HRAHR!
BE NOT SUGAR BUT BE LOVE
looking for sugar!
GAHHHHHHHH!
ROWRR!
GROOOOOOOOOOH!
ROWRR!
GROOOOOOOOOOH!
Student: I want to mention that Michael McClure has created something called aGrahh language..
AG: Yeah, beast language.
Student: (It's in) Ghost Tantras.
AG: Ghost Tantras, yeah.
Student: ..which is, all the way, what is it, ninety-nine?
AG: Ninety-nine poems, or so [ninety-nine]. He was inspired by listening to the lions in the San Francisco Zoo, and listening to whale sounds and coyote sounds and wolf records. And so he (wrote) poems in what I think he called "Beast Language", and the book is GhostTantras, and we probably do have it in the library. And he pronounces them really interestingly. And what they are (are)..little fragments.. you've heard them?
Student: Ah..
AG: Some of them?
Student: On and off
AG: Yeah. He read them here at Naropa, some. Little fragments of his favorite associated words, like "air","tip", "wing", "gold", "velvet""delicate", and then, mixed up with "graar, graour, greyour, graar, greeear, grouer" - all different sounds. And then he read some of them..there's a recording of him reading some of them in the lion house in San Francisco Zoo, beginning to read, and, after a while,rousing the lions so that the lions are roaring back at him and he's roaring back at the lions. And it goes up like a great fugue, or builds up until the lions build up to a height and slowly descend and calm and he descends and calms also. So it ends in the quiet.
There are a lot of poets that have done sound poetry and there's a vast field which we're hardly covering (except for a few poems by Kurt Schwitters, which are in our anthology here - particularly the poem "primititti", which we actually might get to right now, just as a comparison
to be continued…
[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at approximately nineteen-and-a-quarter minutes in and concluding approximately twenty-one-and-a-quarter minutes in]
On Ghost Tantras (addenda) - Ghost Tantras was recently re-released by City Lights. Here's McClure's introduction to the 2013 edition
Many decades ago in San Francisco, lying on the couch, reading the newly written first Ghost Tantra [above] as it unveiled to my eyes and ears, I feel a ripple, maybe a shudder, of embarrassment and laugh at myself. Where is the beauty that I expect after my experience of that ball of silence promising me ninety-nine tantras to the goddess? I remember Robert Creeley’s admonition to believe in the experience of writing the poem. I look at the page again — it brings love looking for sugar! I know that there are to be ninety-eight more of these. I’m sure of it.
The next day Ghost Tantra 2 appears and speaks in“beast language” . . . the Tantra waves baby arms at me and gives me news of the great Tibetan poet Milarepa who is imprinting himself on the poem, becoming a“mystic experience” — and tells me that everything lies in front of me not in the past. Yes, it is a mystic experience and is my self-experience which can be laughable as easily as loaded with torment. Maybe some beauty that I do not expect will occur in a different guise or body or body of words. Next, Ghost Tantra 3 brings its own announcement with a cigar and cherries, and the sounds that begin to feel familiar —“grooooooooor yahh-yort gahhr.”
Immediately afterward, Tantra 4 carries long howls, brings gardens with cool shadows, and sings of youth and liberation. Sounds of the molecular body account for the fifth Tantra. Tantra 8 has the rose and lily-lovely cheek of the goddess appearing. Belief is beginning to push the edge of dubiety back.
Tantra 13 begins, “OH LOVELY LINE BETWEEN DAY AND DREAM.” I am “pleased and richly placid,” I am sentient and this flow of language seems to be conscious, and is its own being. Can these, in fact, bring changes to the universe, as tantras should do? I’m changing.
Once comic books had words like “CLANG” and the ancient Greek poem says “KLANG.” Did Goethe write Faust or did Faust create Goethe?
I am excited with the existence coming into being— I have brought it about.
*
Now it is time to pack my bag for the air flight to Mexico City and the long drive to Huautla de Jiménez— and the journey into the mountains of Oaxaca
I write Tantra 15b in my notebook as the plane departs San Francisco for Mexico City California Mexico City
We drive across the desert stopping sometimes to look at roadside botany. Hours later, we turn off the worn asphalt and enter the mountains into an adventure of thunder and lightning storms and deserted, roadside, cliff edges and narrower “trails”with pounding torrents crushing them — no campesino or burro to be seen in the steep craggy latenight flashes of a landslide drive. Waking in the morning in the small pueblo of Huautla de Jiménez, in a quiet terrain, we drive from the country town to empty cow pastures and carefully make cultures of psilocybes, sterilizing the instruments with a portable burner, propping a tarp of waterproof canvas over our heads, and our sterilized instruments make clean cuts in the small mushrooms. In the early afternoon the curandera María Sabina allows us into her chanting ceremony. Lightning is flashing and thunder booming through the uncovered windows of her home on a high road. Later that day carrying our broken movie camera, we listen to the stories of Isauro Nave, a curandero of the Leaves of the Good Shepherdess, in his hacienda. A few days later, we are in a rural Mexican airport and begin flying to San Francisco Golden Gate and waves crashing on Point Bonita, I resume writing the Tantras. About this time I struggle in my writing with my shyness and an urge to explore self-dramatization — to attempt a non-mimetic poetry which would not be descriptive of the ordinary world but would be at one with creation of muscular music coming from the body and organs and inspiring sounds and “pictures” from that source.
I believe that a poem I make is part of myself like an organ or spirit-body, and these poem-tantras are becoming a body and growing up — having a life of their own. This is not hard to imagine for a young poet who believes in the divinity of (William) Blake and(Percy Bysshe) Shelley, and in the paintings of Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock as a part of those artists’ being.
It was, and is, part of my art to believe that all conceptions of boundaries are lies . . .
As the Tantras move forward and as the ball of silence from which they sound-out is both more clear and more elusive, I consider them carefully. I can feel the spirit of Marilyn Monroe (Tantra 39) entering them the day after her death in 1962. It is only right; it is a business of the goddess. I like the mammalian music when I declaim the poem. Now the title occurs to me “Ghost” from the German “Geist” or soul — Spirit Tantras — Ghost Tantras. I am moved by Brahms’ Four Serious Songs as they sing, in German, the Preacher of the Old Testament’s concern with the spirit of men and the spirit of the beasts and how one goes down underthe earth and the other goes out, out, out. Huge low silences and huge high silences are occurring. Tantra 49, “SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE SENSES!” has an extending and extended life.
A year or two later, Bruce Conner and I go to the San Francisco Zoo to record lion roars and snow leopard growls for a sound-play I have written. The newly published first edition of this book is in my back pocket and through a lucky event we end up in the lion house, and I yell this Tantra to the four maned males of the building. They roar back with me and we sing it together. The five of us are deeply pleased; also I am profoundly shaken and then shaken again when Bruce plays back the tape he made with his high fidelity machine. A few years later a public television group is making documentary films of the new generation of poets and asks me to read again to the lions and again they roar with me. The film was shown on TV and now it can be found on the internet.
From Ghost Tantra 90 on, the stanzas build to power and the final ones close by hugely shouting into the dense mattress-like curtain of material reality, until it begins to lift in tranquility.
Michael McClure, Oakland