Michael McClure (born the October 20th 1932) is a poet, an essay writer and an American playwright.

Of its childhood passed in Kansas it will retain a strong attraction for the topics of nature, the animality, the concept of living organism (it was intended initially for the trade of naturalist). He notices in Scratch The Beat Surfaces : “The human one which refuses to admit that it is initially an animal is less than one animal. ”

Reader of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and initially attracted by traditional versification, Michael Mc Clure meets Allen Ginsberg, during his years of university with San Francisco. Their friendship, initially founded on their differences in sights in connection with William Blake, will be reinforced after a reading common of poems held in 1955 to the Six Gallery, in which took part, in addition to Ginsberg and McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This public reading is often regarded as the beginning of a type of literature known as " happy " , where dominate the feeling of a destroying humanity of its own environment, the anguish of the loss of the direction in the companies technicists, the choice of a wandering life and the destructuration of the language " normal" with the profit of musical and rhythmic qualities (in English, " happy ") language.

In May 1968, McClure agrees to meet, via a common friend, the frontman of The Doors, Jim Morrison. The singer admires the " happy poet" for its years of college but, between the two men, the power has been on with difficulty. Nevertheless, their common passion of poetry brings them closer and McClure will encourage Morrison to publish its poems.

This meeting also constitutes the occasion for McClure to meet the other members of the group The Doors, in particular the organist Ray Manzarek with whom it binds friendship. Since 1988, McClure and Manzarek present spectacles where the virtuosity of improvisation of the organist serves the reading of his works by the poet.