Joanna McClure's poems reveal the story of a
central woman writer of the San Francisco Beat
generation counterculture. Married to Beat poet Michael
McClure soon after she arrived in San Francisco in 1954,
Joanna McClure became a significant figure in the Beat
poetry scene. Growing up on a ranch in the Arizona
desert, Joanna developed early on a deep sensitivity to
the beauty of nature. Her move to San Francisco as a
young woman in 1951 launched a lifelong love affair with
that city and the poetry it engendered. Thriving on the
energy of the Beat movement, the young poet found
herself inside a circle of famous poets and great
writers in American poetry and American literature,
including San Francisco Renaissance poet Robert Duncan
and his lover, artist Jess Collins, as well as the Beats
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Gary
Snyder. She heard Ginsberg's first public reading of
"Howl" at the Six Gallery in 1955, and the home she
shared with Michael became a gathering place for
beatniks. Meanwhile, Joanna was developing own body
of poetic work, allowing her clear inner voice to guide
her. Her poems ardently claim the freedoms her
generation struggled to achieve, yet they often do so in
a playful and generous voice, reveling in the beauty of
the natural world and everyday moments and elegantly
celebrating sensuality and intimate love. In the late
1950s she began publishing her work in literary journals
and chapbooks, and her first book of poems, Wolf
Eyes, was published in 1974. Like many of her
female Beat poet contemporaries, and American women
writers throughout the 20th century, Joanna McClure
wrote prolifically yet quietly year after year, even as
her life shifted focus to a career in early childhood
development and she and Michael divorced. "Poetry is
where I keep company with myself," she declares. Now for
the first time the full range of McClure's voice is
accessible in one volume, spanning the poet's entire
writing life.
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