Michael McClure:

MICHAEL McCLURE: Sergio, I understand the thrust of your question and it has a political aspect that is too complex and too important to answer.

My generation: Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, Robert Creeley, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, and others have with great outspokeness, in the ongoing universal biocidal war against nature, been an ongoing source of social sanity and reason. The effects of this are not measurable in a political or societal way. The willingness to out-speak with their own bodies in public places is more anti-political than political. We have spoken out endlessly for what Herbert Marcuse called the "Negative." It is an outspokeness and a living example of disdain for "one dimensionality" For Marcuse one dimensionality is -- the absorption into the inner life of the rules of social commerce, propaganda, and urban insanity, until there is only one dimension -- and there is no difference left between what was once our inner life, and commercials for tennis shoes, the obliteration of Nature, and factory farming of living animals. As a poet I make my statements against the "American Way." What we depend on are the great examples of inspiration and imagination whether it is in the late Goya-like painting agonies of artist Philip Guston (which shook me yesterday -- so much so that I had to stop and be thankful that Guston presented these horrors.) Where am I without Jack Kerouac's great poetry (Mexico City Blues), the Sung Dynasty Buddhism of Su Tung-po in his poetry, and the love sonnets of Neruda, where without the 13th century Japanese Dogen (founder of Soto Zen), Amiri Baraka's raving re-establishment of Blackness against the sea of White, Robert Creeley's tiny dynamic jewels of fresh news of our passionate condition, or Diane di Prima's epic Loba and her Revolutionary Letters ? Where without many such other brilliancies of poetry? Without them we would all have lost far too much.

I'll finish this with a poem: