On July 19, 1939, James McMichael was born in Pasadena, California. He received his PhD at Stanford University. He is the author of If You Can Tell (2016), Capacity, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry, The World at Large: New and Selected Poems (1996), Each in a Place Apart (1994), The Lover’s Familiar (1978), and Four Good Things (1980). McMichael was the 2007 recipient of the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. His other honors include a Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Arthur O. Rense Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. He is emeritus professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California at Irvine.
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Each in a Place ApartPoems
I wanted for her sake to undo it,
I asked her to forget. There wouldn’t be
time for us since I was married. I’d made her want
another time, when, whole, impossibly together,
we’d rescue my avowal, which was a curse.
Though I asked her not to, she went on
waiting for that time and, by the tree where I
couldn’t get away to meet her, waiting
undismayed, heartsick, eighteen.
Each in a Place Apart:Poems -
Each in a Place ApartPoems
To get away from the house to see her
I’d kept pleading work. The library at school was
quieter, I’d said, the kids weren’t there. It had served,
though they weren’t troublesome or loud. Now, I sit them
next to one another, tell them I’ll be moving
away for awhile, that I’m going to live
somewhere else. Nothing from Geoff, from Bobby
instantly a chuckle and smile.
“Are you happy? Why did you laugh?”
“Because now we won’t bother you when you have to write.”
Each in a Place Apart:Poems -
Each in a Place ApartPoems
As he often does when Linda holds him,
he pulls my fingers to his face. First it’s a
nostril that he covers and uncovers languidly
again and again, then it’s an eye. He keeps them moving.
If he could make my fingers fit him as her water did,
if my fingers were her water, it would always have been
his doing to have left it there, to have taken it away.
He’s invented the Baby Kitties and the Six-year-olds.
Do they do that too? The question makes him sleepier.
As silly as they come, he smiles and goes on dabbing
closed and open, closed and open.
Each in a Place Apart:Poems
"[McMichael's] strongest work . . . What makes him so unique in American poetry right now is the strength and subtlety with which he blends conceptual ambition with emotional power." —Peter Campion, The Yale Review [on Capacity]
"McMichael is the 13-year cicada of poetry. With roughly the same regularity he surfaces, sheds his old skin and delivers a song that's entirely his own . . . Everything, from immigration patterns to heartsickness, is described in the same objective, almost clinical tone—a strange and wonderful choice, lending disproportionate power to the subtlest gestures." —Eric McHenry, The New York Times Book Review [on Capacity]
“[Capacity] is McMichael's first new poetry collection in a decade and, not surprisingly, is ambitious and wide-ranging. Irish history plays a part here, the desperate years of the potato famine. McMichael writes densely; his language is compacted, coiled, sprung (in Hopkins's sense) and highly allusive. It is never simple or straightforward.” —Liz Rosenberg, The Boston Globe
Selected Works
