The final book of poems from a Beat Generation legend, Mule Kick Blues finds McClure restlessly innovating until the end. Completed over the last years of his life, Mule Kick Blues is the final book of poems by Beat Generation legend Michael McClure. Taking its title from an innovative sequence of homages to blues musicians like Leadbelly, Willie Dixon, and Howlin' Wolf, and evoking Kerouac's concept of "blues" poems, Mule Kick Blues contains stark meditations on the poet's mortality as well as the nature and zen poems for which McClure is known. With shout-outs to lifelong friends like Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, and Gary Snyder, the long poem"Fragments of Narcissus," and the profound and moving sequence "Death Poems," Mule Kick Blues is a definitive statement by one of the most significant American poets of the last 60 years. "His validity and his intelligence and his intensity and his curiosity about the complexly diverse world in which we live is to me extraordinarily interesting."--Robert Creeley
