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+# Out of the Cage: Michael McClure and the Digital Lyric Archive 
+
+In the annotated recording below, listeners will hear the American poet Michael McClure (1932-2020) read from his book *Ghost Tantras* (1964) at the Naropa Institute on June 16, 1976. This recording is held in both the Naropa Archives and the Michael McClure fonds at Simon Frasier University, a SpokenWeb partner. The poems in *Ghost Tantras* dip in and out of what McClure calls “beast language,” an ecstatic register of leonine nonsense that mimics the guttural growls and roars of large mammals. Beast Language was McClure's attempt to activate “the biological bases of poetry” (Scratching 43), a practical application of what he dubbed “Meat Science.” “For McClure, humans are meat," writes Michael Davidson, "and one’s expression—in its ideal state—is an incarnation of one’s mammal nature” (Davidson 87). Rather infamously, McClure read a selection of these poems to the lions at the San Francisco Zoo, an escapade captured in a 1966 episode of the documentary series USA Poetry, developed by poet and Beat associate Richard O. Moore:
+
+[<img src= "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/djtmpdlXKEA/hqdefault.jpg" max-width="600" height="440" align="center">](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djtmpdlXKEA)
+
+*Michael McClure on Poetry USA (1966)*
+
+Ten years later, during a whistle-stop retrospective of Beat history with Ginsberg at Naropa, McClure makes a show of his hesitance to read “Ghost Tantra 49,” one of the very same poems he had triumphantly declaimed to a cage of lions the decade prior.
+
+>I was always afraid to recite this other one. Although I knew it by heart, I was afraid to recite it because I thought I might not be able to stop. It’s very mantric. And I thought I’d be giving a reading and they’ll carry me away at the end. I’ll still be going Grahhr! Grahhr! (1:00:30-1:00:47)
+
+As you'll hear in the recording, McClure explains his newfound resolution to read the poem by pointing to a recent experience in an isolation tank. In the *Ghost Tantras*, the unprepared passage from English to beastly nonsense and back performs the extreme dissolution of the Cartesian split. And given that beast language so exuberantly infuses body, meat, and muscle with capacities for expression, we have to ask: why should the experience of floating in an isolation tank, which allows one to become free within a few minutes” (Lilly 22), license McClure’s reading in beast language before the Naropa audience in 1976?
+
+<img src= "https://allenginsberg.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/allenannemcclure.jpg" max-width="600" height="440" align="center">
+
+*Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Dick Gallup, Anne Waldman and Michael McClure at Naropa Institute, 1976*
+
+I have never recited a poem in an isolation tank, but I suspect that one hears one’s voice as if from the inside, by means of what the poet calls “the inner organs of perception” (Scratching 156). So interiorized is this mode of listening that McClure demurs at any suggestion of materialization. In his essay “A Mammal Gallery,” he describes listening to a tape recording of a snow leopard’s performance—“more beautiful than any composition of Mozart”—and studiously declining to privilege its preservation (156). “The tape is a work of art as we listen. But we have no desire to add it to the universe of media and plastic artifacts. We see, hear, feel through the veil. WE are translated.”
+
+The digitized recording annotated here surely belongs to that “universe of media and plastic artifacts." I’ve seized on this bit of paratextual patter from McClure’s reading because the idea of reciting beast language in an isolation tank, the supposed spur to McClure’s performance of “Ghost Tantra 49,” offers an arresting counter-image of what is interpretatively salient in what actually happened at Naropa on June 6, 1976. The isolation tank, in other words, is a foil for that set of difference-making material contexts to which critical readings of the audio archive might attend—and all the more successfully so when equipped with platforms like AudiAnnotate. Because it allows one to layer observations and interpretations across a single time axis, this flexible annotation tool enables close listening to the multiple voices one hears in the audio record.
+
+The keyed annotations on the next page pursue this possibility by mapping McClure's performance in three dimensions: that of the reading voice, the situated voice, and the social voice. Attention to the reading voice strives to restore the difference made by the dynamic relationship between the performative voice and the printed page. The situated voice, meanwhile, attunes us to the institutionally mediated relation between the performer and the audience. Finally, listening for the social voice requires tarrying with the grain of address and its expressive physiological textures–the “unique voice that signifies nothing but itself,” in Adriana Cavarero’s phrase–as much as the compacted social histories those textures index (7).
+
+Just as he feared, online collections like [SpokenWeb](https://spokenweb.ca/) (2010), [PennSound](https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/) (2005), and [UbuWeb](https://www.ubu.com/) (1996) entail the permanent possibility that McClure will be “carr[ied] away” from the irenic plentitude of a lost moment in time—on digitized tape, he’ll “still be going Grahhr! Grahhr!” as long as we care to listen. At the same time, by bursting the isolation tank of the poetry reading, we can give speech a measure of its body back, the gurglings, drips, rumblings, heart, and pulsebeats. In the process, as listeners at the remove of the present “WE are translated” indeed--into the sonorous language of differences that history makes.
+
+# Acknowledgments
+
+*Thank you to Tony Power at Simon Frasier University’s Bennett Library for his help navigating McClure’s audio record.*
+
+<hr>
+
+# Works Cited
+
+Belgrad, Daniel. *The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in Seventies America.* University of Chicago Press, 2019.
+
+Bernstein, Charles. “Introduction.” In *Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word,* edited by Charles Bernstein, 3-26. Oxford University Press, 1998.
+
+Burnett, D. Graham. “Adult Swim: How John C. Lilly Got Groovy (and Took the Dolphin with Him), 1958-1968.” In *Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation & American Counterculture,* edited by David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, 13-50. University of Chicago Press, 2016.
+
+Cavarero, Adriana. *For More Than One Voice: Toward a Phenomenology of Vocal Expression.* Translated by Paul Kottman. Stanford University Press, 2005.
+
+Davidson, Michael. *The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century.* Cambridge University Press, 1989.
+
+Kahn, Douglas. *Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts.* MIT Press, 2001.
+
+Lilly, John C. *The Deep Self: Consciousness Exploration in the Isolation Tank.* Gateway Books and Tapes, 2007.
+
+McClure, Michael. *Ghost Tantras.* City Lights Publishers, 2013.
+
+---. *Scratching the Beat Surface.* North Point Press, 1982.
+
+<hr>