The Beat Century — post 26 of 100. Michael McClure, Ghost Tantras (1964).
Ninety-nine poems written largely in an invented mammalian language of roars and growls, self-published in 1964 and validated when McClure read one to four lions at the San Francisco Zoo and they answered.
Most experimental poetry cannot be tested. Ghost Tantras can, and was. In 1964 Michael McClure walked into the lion house at the San Francisco Zoo with a freshly printed copy of his own book in his pocket, stood in front of four maned males, and read them Tantra 49. The lions roared back and kept roaring with him. Bruce Conner recorded it; the tape runs a little over four minutes.
That episode is usually filed as an anecdote about Beat eccentricity, alongside the drugs and the bongos. It is better understood as the only empirical result the book was after. McClure had written ninety-nine poems in a language he claimed was not so much invented as recovered — a mammalian speech underneath English — and a claim of that kind can only be tested on an audience that has no English. The lions were the peer review, and they returned a favourable report.
What Beast Language Is
The vocabulary is partially invented and consistently guttural: GOOOOOOR, GRAHHR, gahr, strings of roars and vhooshes set in capitals across the page. It is not nonsense in the Carrollian sense, where invented words carry a wink and a hidden meaning. McClure was after sound that arrives from the body rather than from the dictionary — noise a mammal makes before it has any use for grammar.
The tantras alternate. Passages of conventional English sit alongside the roaring, and the poems generally begin in speech before descending into it. Tantra 49 opens with a pair of commands — silence the eyes, becalm the senses — and then falls away into a trillionic multitude of grahh, vhooshes and silences. The English is the ramp. The beast language is where the poem was going.
Written Down a Ladder of Consciousness
The composition matches the method. McClure wrote the ninety-nine tantras spontaneously, in the order they arrived, and made no attempt to reorder them afterwards. He began the sequence in San Francisco, continued it while travelling in Mexico to work with María Sabina and psilocybin mushrooms, and finished it at home above the Golden Gate.
He was explicit about the lineage he thought he was working in. He named Blake and Shelley as spiritual antecedents and the painters Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock as formal ones — action painting being the obvious analogue for a poem that records the gesture rather than the intention. The tantric framing came via Milarepa, the Tibetan poet, and it is not decorative: a tantra is a text meant to be sounded, not studied.
The ninety-nine also carries weight. It is a number that signals a devotional sequence rather than a gathering of separate poems, and it commits McClure to continuing past the point where the device stops being novel. That is the hardest part of the book and the most serious thing about it. A handful of roaring poems would have been a gesture; a hundred of them is a practice, and the later tantras are audibly the work of someone who has stopped performing the language and started living inside it.
A Book That Fails on the Page
Read silently, Ghost Tantras is close to unreadable, and McClure never pretended otherwise. He insisted the tantras be read aloud, sung, vocalised — and he was describing a requirement rather than making a suggestion. A reader who scans GRAHHR with their eyes has performed no part of the poem. The words are notation for a physical event, and the event has to happen in a throat.
This makes the book a hard object for criticism, which is equipped to discuss what a text means and poorly equipped to discuss what a text does to the diaphragm. Ghost Tantras is arguably the purest sound-poetry produced by anyone in the Beat orbit, and its purity is exactly why it sits awkwardly in the anthologies that have to print it flat and silent.
The Lions as Argument
The zoo readings — McClure returned to record with lions again in 1966, and a version reached television through Richard O. Moore’s series U.S.A. Poetry — function as the book’s proof of concept. If beast language were merely a stylistic conceit, the lions would have been indifferent to it. They were not indifferent. Something in the frequency and the intent registered as communication by an animal with no access to English whatsoever.
McClure’s claim was that poetry could reach beneath the layer of human culture to the mammal underneath, and that the mammal was still in there and still listening. A sceptic can reasonably answer that lions roar at loud noises and that no meaning passed in either direction. The tape is not conclusive evidence for a theory of consciousness, and it was never going to be. It is remarkable evidence that the theory was not merely literary — that McClure had proposed something about bodies which could be taken outdoors and tried.
Where It Sits Now
The book was self-published in 1964 and has never been central to McClure’s reputation, which rests more comfortably on the plays and the later collections. He remained a working poet until his death in 2020 at eighty-seven, one of the five poets who read at the Six Gallery in 1955 and among the last of them still working. A 2013 reissue with a new introduction by the author brought the tantras back into print for a readership several generations removed from the zoo.
There is a straightforward objection to all of this, and it deserves stating. Beast language is unfalsifiable as a theory and unteachable as a technique: nobody else could write a ghost tantra, because there is no way to be wrong in it, and a poetics with no possibility of error has given up one of the conditions that makes poetry an art rather than an emission. McClure would likely have accepted the charge and denied it was a cost. The book was never trying to be a model for other poets.
Ghost Tantras endures as the moment the Beat interest in the body stopped being a subject and became a method. Ginsberg wrote about the body at length in perfectly grammatical English. McClure tried to get the body to write, and produced ninety-nine poems that a lion could follow better than a critic.
SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE SENSES!
Michael McClure, Ghost Tantras, Tantra 49 — the poem he read to the lions
Where to go next
Find the Bruce Conner recording of Tantra 49 before reading a page of it, then move to McClure’s Meat Science Essays for the biology behind the beast language.
Previous: Lenore Kandel, The Love Book. Next: Helen Adam, A Helen Adam Reader. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.
Sources
- Michael McClure: Introduction to ‘Ghost Tantras,’ the 2013 edition — Jacket2
- Michael McClure reads to lions — Jacket2
- from ‘Ghost Tantras’ by Michael McClure — Light and Dust
- Michael McClure, poet who helped define Beat generation, dies at 87 — The Washington Post
- Michael McClure — Wikipedia
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
