Here are three favorites from my fabled pencil-and-index-card period, in which, like a demented phrenologist, I traced and embraced the divots, pits, and grain, to reveal — what, exactly, is for you to decide. A starry night? An ocean of crows? A rider that makes his own road? Look again. Take your time. Each is revealing. Each is disturbed. Each contains great hypnotic power. Are you awake? Asleep? Here? There? […]
At this late date, Verses strikes me as a kind of modern-day Genesis. Of course it’s a work of memory, and is therefore autobiographical. In its making, the images arose in abundance, each seemingly rife with its own hints and suggestions, until all I could do was hang on for the ride, thinking, If this is Genesis, then I want to read the whole Bible. But for that to happen […]
The dictionary in question is Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, published by G. & C. Merriam Company in 1924. It weighs just under fifteen pounds; the front cover is frayed and attached by only a few threads. I’ve since acquired older dictionaries, published early in the nineteenth century, in English and Spanish, and others of a more recent date, in French and German. Armenian, Japanese, and Russian […]
Believe it or not, upon its first publication, An Absurdist Play was liked well enough by a high school teacher that he used it in a poetry segment of his English class. The experiment failed, as I thought it might, and for his valiant effort, the teacher was met with puzzled expressions perhaps not unlike those suggested in the stage directions of the poem itself. I doubt the teacher really […]
In terms of poetry, I find the seventeen-syllable habit a good one, and I’ve written many in this mode and haven’t found it limiting. I call them haiku, and several have been published here and elsewhere as such within that very fluid definition. Splitting hairs over form is something in which I don’t engage. Times change; language changes; people change; stones, ponds, stars, cherry blossoms, remain the same. Haiku or […]
I’ve corrected the penultimate line. Instead of forgetting the earth is a ripe plum in a boy’s bleeding shirt pocket it’s now forgetting the earth is a ripe plum bleeding in a boy’s shirt pocket This might not seem a big thing, but I’m surprised, and a little disappointed, I didn’t notice it before. When our children were growing up, I told them often, Say what you mean, and mean […]
After ten years, I’m pleased, and almost surprised, As Is still makes sense — though perhaps I mistake its joyful wordplay for sense where there really is little or none. Of course, I say that only to let you off the hook; I think it’s brilliant — which is another way of saying, I might or might not be a step ahead of Artificial Intelligence. ~ [ 1996 ]
Do not listen to the ministers of failure, who promise redemption for their imagined sins. Did Walt Whitman really write these words? In a sense, yes, because, whether those of us engaged in literary pursuits are aware of it or not, his influence is so great and so profound that it’s inevitable, at one time or another, we take up the pen in his name. Not only Whitman, of course; […]
Another small collection of very short, related poems, The Poem I Wrote Is Glad It Missed the Train is a quiet mix of autobiography and family history. In the introduction, I say that each word is a kind of love letter, and I hold by that description. Certainly, each poem is. As brief as the they are, each contains much more than meets the eye, incorporating personal philosophy and nature […]
They’re called The Asylum Poems for good reason. And as you read through them — each is but a few lines in length — you might see what I see now, almost twenty years since: a familiar stranger pacing a small room, each step a door, closed behind his back. You might see it even if you don’t read them. You might see yourself, too, because, if you look long […]
William Michaelian 
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