“Michael McClure, one of the famed Beat poets of  San Francisco  whose career as a poet eclipsed many others in popular culture, has died. He was 87. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that McClure died Tuesday in Oakland,  California , after suffering a stroke last year. On 7 October 1955, a then 22-year-old McClure helped organize the famous Six Gallery beat poetry reading and later read at the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park that launched the Summer of Love in 1967 and at The Band’s “Last Waltz” concert at Winterland in 1976. “Without the roar of McClure, there would have been no 60s,” actor Dennis Hopper once said. In McClure’s 1982 nonfiction account of the Six Gallery reading, Scratching the Beat Surface, he set the stage for the revolution that was to follow in the mid-1950s: “The world that we tremblingly stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one,” he wrote. “We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead – killed by war, by academies, ...