McCLURE, Michael.
The New Book / A Book of Torture.
FIRST PRINTING, signed by McClure on the title page. New York and London: Grove Press, Inc. / Evergreen Books Ltd., 1961 (Evergreen Original E-306).
Slim octavo. 64 pp. Publisher's white illustrated wrappers. A near fine copy, with light tanning consistent with the inexpensive original production. Clements A7.
An early collection by one of the founding poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Michael McClure (1932–2020) was, at twenty-two, one of the five poets who read at the legendary Six Gallery reading in San Francisco in October 1955 — the evening Allen Ginsberg first delivered "Howl." This collection, published by Grove Press in 1961, gathers McClure's poems of the late 1950s: "Ode to Jackson Pollock," "Ode on the End of Jazz," "For Olson," the "Mad Sonnet," "The Flowers of Politics," and others. The poems show McClure's early experiments with capitalized typography, "body language," and the ecstatic direct address that would define his work; Ginsberg called McClure's poetry "a blob of protoplasmic energy."
A handsome Evergreen Original of the period, with cover design by Grove Press's house designer Roy Kuhlman and an author photograph by the California assemblage artist Wallace Berman on the rear wrapper.
SKU TO-2026-078
