Life

The Pasadena

Pasadena, California

Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although famous for hosting the annual Rose Bowl football game and Tournament of Roses Parade, Pasadena is the home to many scientific and cultural institutions, including the California Institute of Technology , the Jet...

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

 native received his Ph.D. from Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

. In 1970 he married his second wife, Phylinda Wallace, a translator, and has three children, Robert, Geoffrey and Owen.

McMichael is a professor of English and director of the Master of Fine Arts Poetry Writing Program at the University of California, Irvine

University of California, Irvine

The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...

.

"McMichael writes densely; his language is compacted, coiled, sprung (in Hopkins's sense) and highly allusive. It is never simple or straightforward," writes Liz Rozenberg in a Boston Globe review.

Eric McHenry, in a brief review of Capacity in The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, wrote: "Since 1980, his [McMichael's] sole contributions to the genre (excluding a "new and selected") have been three book-length poems, each strikingly different from the others and from anything else on the market. In Capacity, he has exchanged the long lines and explicit autobiography of the previous two for dispassion, elision and lines as short as a syllable."

Awards

His first new poetry collection in a decade, Capacity, was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for Poetry

National Book Award for Poetry

The National Book Award for Poetry has been given since 1950 and is part of the National Book Awards, which are given annually for outstanding literary works by American citizens...

.

He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

, a Whiting Writers' Award

Whiting Writers' Award

The Whiting Writers' Award is an American award presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays. The award is sponsored by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and has been presented since 1985. As of 2007, winners receive US $50,000.-External links:**...

, the 1999 Arthur Rense Prize

Arthur Rense Prize

The Arthur Rense Prize was established in 1998 when Paige Rense started the award of $20,000 in memory of her husband, the sportswriter and poet Arthur Rense. The prize is given triennially to an exceptional poet by the American Academy of Arts and Letters....

, the Shelley Memorial Award

Shelley Memorial Award

The Shelley Memorial Award of more than $3,500, given out by the Poetry Society of America, was established by the will of the late Mary P. Sears, and named after the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The prize is given to a living American poet selected with reference to genius and need. The selection is...

, and the Academy of American Poets' Fellowship.

Poetry

• Against the Falling Evil (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971), ISBN 0-8040-0552-4
• The Lovers Familiar (Boston: David R. Godine, 1978), ISBN 0-87923-175-0
• Four Good Things (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), ISBN 0-395-29913-6, "a sprawling autobiographical meditation on life, death, and real-estate, set in [...] Southern California"
• Each in a Place Apart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ISBN 0-226-56106-2
• The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ISBN 0-226-56104-6
• Capacity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), ISBN 0-374-11890-6

Other

• The Style of the Short Poem (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1967)
• Just What the Country Needs, Another Poetry Anthology (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1971), ISBN 0-534-00137-8, ed. with Dennis Saleh
• Ulysses and Justice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), ISBN 0-691-06547-0, a study of James Joyce

External links

• http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=4602 brief biographical sketch at The Poetry Foundation Web site, including an excerpt from The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English
• http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2793 His web page as a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine

Poems online

(in alphabetical order)

• http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/opinion/24mcmichael.html?ei=5090&en=3a2d54589889de91&ex=1322024400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print "The Believed-In"
• http://www.poems.com/britimcm.htm "The British Countryside in Pictures" from Capacity
• http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=175889 from "Each in a Place Apart"
• http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=175890 from Four Good Things
• http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=175892 "Itinerary"
• http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2006_p_mcmichael.html# "Posited" from Capacity
• http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/2002/56-mcmichael.html untitled
• http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=20941 "The Vegetables"
• http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=21843 "The Very Rich Hours"

Book reviews

Capacity:

• http://www.poems.com/essaclar.htm Jennifer Clarvoe in The Cincinnati Review, republished at the Poetry Daily Web site
• http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hbr/issues/summer06/articles/capacity.shtml Marta Figlerowicz in The Harvard Book Review
• http://reviews.coldfrontmag.com/2006/06/capacity_by_jam.html John Demming in Coldfront
• http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/books/review/23mchen.html?ei=5070&en=60b5b9562b2815b5&ex=1166418000&pagewanted=print Eric McHenry in The New York Times
  The New York Times
  The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...