A Michelle T. Clinton Time Machine
A candid recording of an amazing poet
TLDR: Michelle T. Clinton read some poems at KCRW in 1984. Listen to this fantastic recording here.
[Also, quick note: I gained a lot of new subs in the last month. Thank you so much! Even the free subs helps my career A LOT. And it’s been word-of-mouth, so thank you for telling a friend and please, keep it up]
I only saw Michelle T. Clinton perform once, at the Pik-Me-Up Cafe in Hollywood. It would have been 1988 or 1989, when I lived in LA the first time. I was at another reading on the West Side and heard a poet say he was going there to see her. I got into the car immediately. When we arrived, she had just started, and the place was packed. I was literally half in and half out of the cafe, standing in the doorway, leaning my head to the right to hear better and see the backside of her head. The crowd was silent, an unusual occurrence denoting respect; all I heard was Michelle’s voice with espresso machine noises intermittently.
I was deep in the spoken word scene of LA, which included punk singers, street poets, activists, and mimeograph rock stars. I had come to LA for the film world but found this vibrant poetry community that was blowing my mind on a regular basis. I was 19 years old, hanging out with OLD PEOPLE (some of them were in their 30s!) and desperately trying to learn how to write such powerful pieces.
Bad poets are like herpes—easy to get and you’ll never get rid of them. There were these unbearably bad scribes who showed up at open mikes like a bad rash. Hopefully you didn’t have to sit through too many of them before you unleashed your own egocentric brilliance on the crowd like a fart in church.
But witnessing these really gifted talents like Michelle T. Clinton made up for all the bad readings I had to endure. There were plenty of others, like SA Griffin and Scott Wannberg, who were huge influences on me, but I was able to see them on a regular basis. Michelle was the one I had always just missed, or didn’t hear about her gig, and while she was an accomplished performer, she wasn’t a self-promoting glory hound like a lot of LA up-and-comers. So seeing her was a solitary treat for me.
The KCRW Session
My Substack mainly is about books or films that I like that are underappreciated. I’ve had these two books out lately, looking at them, wondering how to present them—what “angle” would I put on it. I kept looking for a way to describe her poetic impact. Definitely, her work can’t be separated from her performance of her work. She is equal parts page and stage, which is my ideal for a writer. So I went in search of a recording, and found the KCRW Session, which is a gem.
In 1984, Michelle T. Clinton went to the KCRW studio and sat with Tricia Halloran for 33 minutes to promote a reading she was going to do with Jeffrey Lee Pierce, D. Boon, and Henry Rollins at the Lhasa Club. If you ever want to make me insane, tell me about lineups and clubs like this that I missed because I was on the scene just a few years too late. Tricia knew she was in the presence of brilliance, and just made sure the audio levels were correct, leaned back, and captured a rare moment.
Michelle’s poetry illustrates rules I learned back then and still adhere to:
Write like you talk. Use your own language. If you don’t use the word in your regular life, don’t use it in your poems.
The poem is about something. Poems that look like a bunch of random-ass words with a kooky layout gotta go.
Tell the world who you are. By the end of a poem, the reader should know more about you than before they read it.
Don’t emotionally mug the audience. Write your experience as true as you can, but let the readers/listeners form their own emotional response.
Michelle also writes in poetic narrative: there is a speaker, always her, as far as I know, who “talks” to the reader, and tells us a story, or describes a scene; often, there is a beginning, middle, and an end to her poems. Back then, a lot of spoken word poets sounded like they were telling two-minute stories. It lent well to live performances, as the oral tradition in all cultures predates written language—we have a very old part of our brain that responds very well to a quick story.
On style, Michelle speaks slowly and carefully, honoring each word she has written, and giving time for the listener to absorb the scene as a whole. Many times, Michelle begins with a place or a character, and then dresses the scene in our minds by giving us one small image to place in our imagination after another. It’s common with standup comics to work on timing their jokes perfectly (Steven Wright’s extreme pauses are crucial to his humor) but this is a vestige of spoken word past.
Oh, I could write a very bitter series on HOW POETRY SLAMS RUINED EVERYTHING, but I would come off as a bitter old fuck, which is what at least part of me is. But for now, let’s focus on poetry slams instituting a time limit, which led to poets reciting their poems as quickly as possible to not go over into the “penalty.” The poems that did best were four- or five-minute poems shoved into a three-minute bag, with lots of meaningless DJ-like hand gestures, which passed as the “performance.” This aesthetic infected spoken worders, so now, even at readings without limits, you will hear them machine-gun through a poem about their grandma’s wrinkled hands for no reason at all, at a pace that precludes comprehension. Please kids, drive like your kids live here, and slow the fuck down.
The KCRW session captures Michelle candidly reading, the best representation of seeing her live that we have, in my opinion. She moves from poem to poem, ranging in topic from domestic horror and abuse to how much she likes toast. All of these subjects are holy to her, and worthy of a poem. Tricia did her part by being a listening audience, and as Michelle read to hear 40 years ago, I felt like Michelle was reading to me.
Michelle’s Legacy
I tried to keep focus on the one recording. I could write so much more about Beyond Baroque, where she was deeply involved. Or the importance of spoken word records mainly from New Alliance (she was on this label) and Giorno Poetry Systems. Or like I said, how poetry slams destroyed the scene as we knew it (BITTER).
Where is she now? Hell if I know. How someone living in this country stays quiet on the internet is beyond me. West End Press put out two great books for her, she had some recordings, and then she just dipped. Past the ‘90s, there are few mentions of her and the publications stopped.
Poetry is a thankless pain in the ass. I don’t blame anyone from walking away from it. But as someone who’s still trying to get where she was, I think, “If I was that good, I’d still be out there, blowing minds.”
Beautiful!