Michael McClure was one of the six poets who took part in the reading on 7 October 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco that announced the arrival of the Beat generation. Performing his poem For the Death of a Hundred Whales, which commemorated an act of slaughter by bored GIs stationed at an Icelandic Nato base, McClure declared his dominant concern with the animal consciousness in man rendered dormant by industrialisation.
Describing the ethos of that night, a watershed in American culture at which Allen Ginsberg first presented Howl, McClure, who has died aged 87, wrote: “We were locked in the cold war and the Asian debacle. The country had the feeling of martial law … We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead – killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life … We wanted voice and we wanted vision.”
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