Not often has a poet of such grace and subtlety entered the art as naturally as Joanna McClure. While the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountaineers, the West Coast anarchists, and the Beats were creating their mutation in literature, Joanna McClure, almost unknown to the others and right in their midst, was writing lyrics of intense personal emotion and spiritual confrontation. While Jack Kerouac was taking notes about Joanna and her husband, Michael McClure, for his novel Big Sur (1962). Joanna McClure was making notes for her poems about Big Sur. Joanna McClure already knew the Big Sur country from earlier trips there with her husband and with poet/publisher Jonathan Williams. Driving down from San Francisco she had seen sea otters cavorting angelically in the surf at Slates Hotsprings and the oriental beauty of Point Lobos. She had already met Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, and...