Simplicity, Sincerity, Sonority: A New Voice in American Poetry

The following excerpt is from an excellent review of William Michaelian's two books of poetry, Winter Poems and Another Song I Know, posted recently online. The review is by Russ Allison Loar, a journalist, writer, and poet who lives in Claremont, California. The complete review is available at Amazon.com and on the Powell's Books website.

We are not living in an age of poetry, sad but true. The greatest lines of our most famous poets no longer enter our everyday vernacular. Shakespeare and Robert Frost, among others, still remain in our vocabulary, but the age of technology and the omnipresence of mass corporate culture has replaced the role of the poet in our society.

When one discovers an original poetic voice, a voice that actually matters, it is reason to take notice, to take out the iPod earbuds and try once again to read a book of poetry and enjoy it. This time, you will not be overwhelmed by obscurity, nauseated by pretentiousness and bored by irrelevance.

William Michaelian is a poet that matters, and most of all, he is a poet who communicates what matters, those small parts of everyday life that are the finest moments of our lives — moments of observation, insight and awakening.

William Michaelian: The Wall Poems of Leiden

If I remember correctly, I posted the following entry in the Highly Recommended section of my website about two years ago. The Wall Poems of Leiden site is definitely worth visiting. I see the Project is now complete, and that it contains 101 poems in all.

Recently in my literary Web wanderings, I stumbled onto a link to a wonderful outdoor poetry project in the Netherlands city of Leiden. The Wall Poems of Leiden gives the background of the project, which was begun in 1992, and which, when completed, will encompass 101 poems painted on walls throughout the city. The poets represented hail from all corners of the world and include such luminaries as Marina Tsevetayeva, William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, Anna Akhmatova, Keats, Yeats, and Rimbaud, as well as many others I’ve never heard of and don’t know how to pronounce. What a truly great and civilized idea! Links are provided to photographs of each wall poem printed in its original language. Below the pictures are English and Dutch translations. Visitors can follow the links from one page to the next in a sort of “walking tour,” or choose links from the complete list on a separate page.

I would love to see something like that here. Maybe there are similar projects scattered around the U.S. If there are, I'd love to know where, and to find out more about them.

William Michaelian: In Passing

Michael Lee Johnson could have been thinking any number of things when he wrote this little poem back in 1969:

She

Somewhere

she has lost
her shadow.

and now

she stands
still

with nowhere
to go.

And really, in a way, it almost doesn't matter what he was thinking. What matters most, at least to me, is that it's a good poem, and that it popped into my life on a rather strange, quiet day I had recently, after hearing that one of my dear Armenian aunties had passed on at the ripe old age of ninety-five. My blood, Johnson's poem . . . two strangers who met in passing.

William Michaelian has a huge web site. Check it out.

William Michaelian: I Hear America Singing

I still remember what I said when my friend and literary co-conspirator, John Berbrich, told me several years ago that there's a shopping mall on Long Island named after Walt Whitman: "There should have been a huge public outcry over that. What kind of people are we, that we would name a place of generic commercialism after a national treasure?"

We'd been talking about Whitman's colossal stature and my idea of declaring a national Whitman holiday. John, the Long Island-born publisher of the small press quarterly Barbaric Yawp, said — and I'm quoting directly from our conversation as it appears on my website — "Whitman is the monstrous whispering ocean moving eternally beneath the full moon, waves lapping the sand."

"Beautiful," I replied. "And so true. For me, Whitman’s confidence is like Beethoven’s. They were geniuses, creatively bursting at the seams. Their defiant laughter shakes the universe. These days especially, with the news dominated by petty minds cultivating lies, I think we should declare an international Whitman holiday and observe it for at least a year. During that time, we can take stock of ourselves, and perhaps emerge with a higher aim and purpose."

Of course, we go on like this all the time. But I still think about that holiday idea, as well as another John came up with: "I propose that all technological inventions be declared illegal for at least ten years, thereby giving us perhaps a chance to catch up a little bit. This time period may be extended if necessary."

William Michaelian has already prepared for the long nights, the rain and the snow: buy his book Winter Poems here.

William Michaelian: Thoreau's "Sounds"

It has long been my feeling that the universe operates on a musical principle — that it is, in fact, a song. Consider the following excerpt from the fourth chapter of Walden:

Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood — the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.

You can find William Michaelian's two books of poetry at cosmopsis.com/michaelian.