Michelle Wing’s captivating book of poetry, Body On The Wall — is divided into four elements: Wind, Fire, Earth and Water. Michelle delves into the complex array of emotions with an artist’s eye and sure hand, transporting the reader from piece to piece with honesty and intensity. In Wind, readers feel the breeze, the cleansing air, the playfulness, despair and hope. In Fire, the rich texture and complex layers travel a labyrinth of emotional experiences. In Earth, more ups and downs on the emotional ladder of pain, humiliation, awareness, hope, reality. In Water, new life, satisfaction, rejection, sharp pain, settling, calming and humor. Joanna McClure, an original San Francisco Beat Poet: I enjoyed reading Michelle Wing’s poetry — full of her rich and varied multi-cultural life — its sensual pleasures as well as its dark depths. Kathy Myers reviews Body On The Wall: I wish I could reach through the cover…
Tag: Joanna McClure
Catching Light: Collected Poems of Joanna McClure
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…