Michael Burkard
Michael Burkard's books of poetry include My Secret Boat (1990), Entire Dilemma (1998), Unsleeping (2001), and, most recently, Some Time in the Winter (2014). His poems appear in many journals and magazines, including The American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Verse, Fence, and Black Clock. Twice he has received fellowships from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. He received the Alice diFay di Castagmola Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2008, Michael Burkard was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in four separate Best American Poetry anthologies. Nightboat Books published a selected and uncollected volume of poetry in 2008, Envelope of Night. He is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing. He also teaches creative writing in Syracuse public schools and frequently collaborates with artists and photographers. He was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In past decades he has taught at New York University, Sarah Lawrence, and the University of Louisville.
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Fictions from the SelfPoemsFrom"When the Sun Rises"
I do not know how I need the air,
or if it needs me. The lost air,
the air which is smashed, like a red hat.
When the sun rises the amnesty
of the unused animals – the goat, the burrow,
the maroon horses - when the sun rises
the amnesty of these flies its flag: an orchard
with a thumb on top.
Fictions from the Self:Poems -
Fictions from the SelfPoemsFrom"Like a Receipt"
Went walking with a few others
in the guarded sunlight of hilly
streets, saw a man through the door,
beyond another man, assumed owned,
bequeathed to the street for only
a moment: saw the fat man sitting
there in black, like a receipt,
a fat black receipt waiting and waiting:
o deliver love and no other word,
deliver flawless feeling to the house,
the feeling that comes once in a lifetime,
then, when least looking, once again.
Fictions from the Self:Poems -
Fictions from the SelfPoemsFrom"My Cobbler"
It was told I could pull
the wagon of death
as long as I chose to pull.
My shoes didn’t tell me,
my cobbler told me.
My cobbler tells me a lot of things.
I turned you into a widow,
I was that tough on myself,
the two of us effaced
like stones you might erase
the miles from, the journeys
of the names and other stars
and evenings.
Fictions from the Self:Poems
"Only a handful of poets live on the earth at any given time, and I believe Michael Burkard to be one of them. What a joy—and how humbling—to be confronted by an artist who has utterly abandoned himself to beauty and truth." —Denis Johnson
"Michael Burkard has over the years attracted a small but fanatical set of readers. I’m tempted to call him a cult figure, or a poet’s poet . . . he is a school of one . . . a poet whose forte is his hauntedness and his sorrowful expressive mystery. Burkard is a poet who should be read rather than explained, and in an era which our poets’ voices have grown benumbingly interchangeable and predictable, this quality makes Burkard all the more distinct." —David Wojahn, Poetry
"Burkard's new book stands as an antidote to the fashionable but spiritually unambitious work that passes for publishable poetry now flooding the literary marketplace. Burkard returns us to a primary strangeness . . . [He] is invested in a metaphysics of relationship, probing into how we treat each other (and hence ourselves) . . . His is an honest introspection mapping out hearts that ever slide." —Harvard Review [on Entire Dilemma]
Selected Works
