Michael Ryan is the director of the MFA Program in Poetry at UC Irvine. He has been teaching creative writing and literature at UCI since 1990. He taught previously at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He has written five books of poems, a novel, an autobiography, a memoir, and a collection of essays about poetry and writing for which he has won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, among many other distinctions. His most recent book of poems, This Morning, was published in 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and his first novel, Guy Novel, in 2016 by The Permanent Press.
-
New and Selected PoemsFrom"Letters From An Institution"
I have a garden in my brain
shaped like a maze
I lose myself
in, it seems. They only look for me
sometimes. I don’t like my dreams.
The nurses quarrel over where I am
hiding. I hear from inside
a bush. One is crisp
and cuts; one pinches. I’d like to push
them each somewhere.
They both think it’s funny
here. The laughter sounds like diesels.
I won’t come out because I’m lazy.
You start to like the needles.
You start to want to crazy.
New and Selected Poems: -
New and Selected PoemsFrom"When I Was Conceived"
It was 1945, and it was May.
White crocus bloomed in St. Louis.
The Germans gave in but the war shoved on,
and my father came home from work that evening
tired and washed his hands
not picturing the black-goggled men
with code names fashioning an atomic bomb.
Maybe he loved his wife that evening.
Maybe after eating she smoothed his jawline
in her palm as he stretched out
on the couch with his head in her lap
while Bob Hope spoofed Hirohito on the radio
and they both laughed. My father sold used cars
at the time, and didn’t like it,
so if he complained maybe she held him
an extra moment in her arms,
the heat in the air pressing between them,
so they turned upstairs early that evening,
arm in arm, without saying anything.
New and Selected Poems: -
New and Selected PoemsFrom"The Past"
It shows up one summer in a greatcoat,
storms through the house confiscating,
says it must be paid and quickly,
says it must take everything.
Your children stare into their cornflakes,
your wife whispers only once to stop it,
because she loves you and she sees it
darken the room suddenly like a stain.
What did you do to deserve it,
ruining breakfast on a balmy day?
Kiss your loved ones. Night is coming.
There was no life without it anyway.
New and Selected Poems:
“Ryan is a scrupulously observant poet with a gift for going for the jugular . . . His work is finely honed, provocative, questing, and humane.” —Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post Book World [on New and Selected Poems]
"Ryan's poems have always felt as if they needed to be written. They seem to exist because of some pressure to respond, not because of a facility for language alone. This is a rare quality among poets. The commitment to it is as hard-won, and real, as any you are likely to find in poetry." —David Rivard, American Poetry Review [on New and Selected Poems]
“Unlike too many poets who tumble into print at the first twitch of feeling, Michael Ryan takes time to listen to himself, and such listening contributes immeasurably to the subtlety of his address to the reader . . . [He] reminds us on every page that poems can be about lives, and about them in ways most urgent and delicate.” —William H. Pritchard, The Nation [on This Morning]
Selected Works
