Poetry, Michael McClure has said, is not a system but is real events spoken of, or happening, in sounds. And for thirty years, whether in his early Dionysian lyrics or his evolving bio-alchemical wisdom, his work has shown a ferocious energy and driving physicality. A poet of and for our time, his own formal structuresthe shape of his poems and his highly charged breath-linenevertheless look back to the classics, to the Provencal troubadours, and to the Romantic verse of Blake, Keats, and Shelley. McClures Selected Poems is the first major retrospective collection of a poet and Obie-winning playwright associated with the San Francisco Renaissance from its start as well as the early Beat movement. The poems in the book, chosen by McClure himself, hold the undiminished force of three decades work distilled. Included in Selected Poems are poems and long passages from nine of the authors earlier collections.