The middle years of the 1960's marked a period of McClure's career in which he placed more emphasis on drama than poetry. His most famous and most controversial play, The Beard, was penned and first performed in 1965. The obscenity trials which resulted from the production would occupy much of the writer's time and energy for the next three years.

During this same period, McClure released a small but fascinating poetry chapbook entitled Poisoned Wheat. Written as a protest against American involvement in the war in Vietnam, the book's title refers to the wartime practice of poisoning grain fields in Cambodia. The poet mailed over 500 of the pamphlets to journalists and politicians whom he felt might have some influence on American policy in Southeast Asia (King 394). While in retrospect this seems a relatively futile act, McClure's small book was not without its impact; the real importance, however, of Poisoned Wheat was not its small stab at the American war machine, but in its radical merging of biology and politics.

In a poetic manifesto which would foreshadow much of the poet's writing for the next three decades, McClure's Poisoned Wheat attempts to look for solutions to the world's catastrophic problems outside the normal channels of politics and ideology. Although the long poem deals ostensibly with the war in Southeast Asia, the war quickly becomes just one symbolic symptom of a much larger malaise resulting from a corrupt society which clings to political dogma rather than biological realities. McClure's response is to divorce himself from the war and the misguided and cruel society which wages it:

McClure's staunch anti-war stance was a radical one in 1965, a time when opposition to the Vietnam War was still largely smothered beneath Cold War rhetoric of the Iron Curtain, the Domino Theory, and the rapidly accelerating arms race. But far more radical is his insistence that we look beyond political rhetoric to the realization that the Vietnam War was not about a political struggle between Communism and Democracy, but was instead symptomatic of a much larger problem to which neither side possesses a solution. McClure's poem attacks each of the world's prevailing political systems -- capitalism, communism and fascism -- for their failure to effectively address the problems of life on the planet.

Stating that "I have escaped politics," and that the "meanings of Marxism and Laissez faire are extinct" (6), the poet rejects the political and social systems which have been artificially imposed upon the biological realities of life. Just as he suggested in his earlier essay "Revolt," as well as in the St. Geryon poems, the social and intellectual forces of the mind (in this case, the abstract notions of "politics" and" government") have repressed the biological aspects of human life, often resulting in disastrous consequences.

In place of political issues, McClure points to the stark biological realities facing the Earth -- realities which have gone unaddressed by both Capitalism and Communism:

The results of the"biological sink" which McClure describes are starvation, exploitation of world resources, and an increasingly repressive and war-like society which has already fallen victim to its own suicide. The poem continues:

In place of a culture governed by political theory, McClure offers what Allen Van Newkirk has called a"bioculture" (22). In his brief 1975 analysis of McClure's work as it relates to new frontiers of ecological thought,"The Protein Grail," Newkirk describes the tenets of the bioculturist worldview:

. . . [B]iocultural thought . . . is distinguished by its emphasis on the wild realities of the landscape as a field for discourse and action. Bioculturists assert a biological interpretation of history; that the human situation is mammalian, that the human mammal has over-domesticated itself and the landscape it utilizes, and that wild nature contains economic and sensate possibilities overlooked by the inherited civilization construct. (22)

With the poet's emphatic line, near the end of Poison Wheat, declaring that "NEW SOCIETY WILL BE BIOLOGICAL!" (9), and further, that "POLITICS IS DEAD AND BIOLOGY IS HERE!," McClure demands nothing short of a total reorganization of society along these biocultural lines. Tellingly, the long poem ends, as it began, with an utterance of McClure's trademark beast language, a "Grahhr" symbolizing humanity's mammalian past -- and its mammalian future.