James McMichael: California Poets Part 11, Three Poems

James McMichael

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

James McMichael

Three Poems

A lakeside ranch house

too new to be unused,

and every evening, in the summer,

utter quiet,

never a vehicle or dog.

Against the enormity of the for-so-long dark,

dusk glazes the windows that display

east of them from the basin’s rim,

the slope with its sage and grasses.  Repeated at

each pane’s lower right is Conklin Lake.

The likenesses from indoors are a one-way glass.

At closer than two hundred yards out front,

their glare conceals that a downstairs

light’s been switched on, maybe by a timer.

Out front no one.  Mobile and

fixed here, inside,

operable,

the furnishings

illumined toward their being seen.

Noticeability foreruns notice.

That it may allow ahead of it into the room

a bodiless facing,

appearance lifts away from that thing’s

outermost it shows it’s of.  Of course of each

also is the understory of twilit looks

the ones here earlier confound with it in.  Spiders and

mice now in the firewood to the heatilator’s left.

On the plank of raftered ceiling

from before it went up,

the boot-tread isn’t Mitch’s.  To build

stairs, Mitch said, (building a stair),

You almost have to think.

Don Wilding plumbed it.

Over a long weekend,

Ron and Roseanne wired it at cost.

                                 *

At the end of the day,

anyone outside didn’t have to be dead

blind yet.  Still to be had an eye to only

moments ago was cow from cow.

Disappearing from its acres also

is an ashen, slanting, derelict barn.

The last that can be made out now is the horizon.

Because the world is given to go dark and be slept into,

home.  Within its numbers every night head-to-toe

lengths are gone to so the encamped might break away,

many among them every night on pallets.

Unto their beds’ arms nightly

most persons repair.

They plump themselves down.  A look of

worldlessness often follows.  Tenanted in their berths,

behind the sockets of their emptied

eyes they’ve gone.  Never mind that Death’s getting practiced.

All vaulted into it on any one night never mind.

                                *

The place thereof

shall know no more nor be known by

the one at last past dying,

dead just now,

dark night.

With the sum of its possessions

grief might name,

visibly

on it will go for sections west

again tomorrow,

from time’s blank stoplessness

day after day,

no intercessory spell,

no longing’s 

post-horn call from sylvan

bends in the road away.

Another watershed to the west therefore

again tomorrow,

harsh open plain

creeked here and there

and beavered,

aspened. 

Centennial’s

swans, coyote, marmot,

pronghorn,

moose, elk and bear.  For the naked

all of them in rut, much upland room.

Interview

October 20th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

James McMichael, Poet, Professor Emeritus

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: I’d like to start with the academic side of things because it was in Santa Barbara where you got a BA, and from Stanford University that you received your PhD, subsequently teaching at UC Irvine, where you’re now Professor Emeritus.  Is there anything you miss about being in class and how much of a challenge was it to balance university demands with your own writing?

JM: I taught workshops and courses in literature at Irvine.  What those classes were FOR was close reading.  I miss being spoiled by the hope those meetings gave me that my gifted students would become better readers still as they kept finding that they couldn’t get enough of good writing.  The position itself couldn’t have been more welcome in terms of allowing me time for my writing.  Teaching was never anything less than a joy.  They were PAYING me to do that?  It was the best job anyone’s ever had.

DG: At Santa Barbara, you studied with Edgar Bowers and Alan Stephens.  Could you talk about how these experiences influenced your poetic development?

JM:  Bowers asked us to read deRougement’s LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD as sophomores.  After that, I was in for the whole ride.  I didn’t study with Alan Stephens, though I admired his poems, as I did Bowers’.  I didn’t know how to read.  At Santa Barbara I was taught how to by Bowers, Hugh Kenner, Marvin Mudrick and Homer Swander.  Why those men came to class day after day with as much of themselves as they did to the idiots we were makes no sense, but they did it.  Thirty years after he’d brilliantly taught us Chaucer, chance sat me at a table in a small restaurant in Paris with Mudrick’s daughter, and I was able to tell her how much I was in his debt.

DG: Subsequently, at Stanford, you had the great privilege of studying with Yvor Winters.  How did working under Winters differ from studying with Bowers?

JM:  Though Winters had had more than enough of the academy and was ready to retire by the time I got to Stanford, he was very kind to me.  I knew from his essays how he read the poems and poets that were dearest to me.  It was time for me to begin learning on my own if there was anything singular enough in me that good writing might come from it.  Most of what I learned during my four years at Stanford came by way of my own study and in talks with an incomparable group of peers.  Robert Pinsky, David Thorburn, Eugene England, John Peck, Rob Dunham, Robert Hass and Ron Lee were my cohort-mentors.  We read one another’s work and stayed in one another’s faces about it.  Until my final year there, I ignored the truth that I’d be having to leave them all.  I knew I’d never again be able to avail myself of mutuality at that intense a pitch.  In 1965 I went off into the diaspora.  Which means it’s now been more than 60 years that Robert Pinsky and I have been having our long talks on the phone.    

DG: Hired to teach at UC Irvine at that point, you were now all on your own in hopes of tenure.  What was that like? 

JM: Terrifying.  I hadn’t written a good poem.  I understood that to keep my job I had six years in which to publish a book of either poems or what was then called “criticism”.  I published essays out of my dissertation on Stevens and Roethke but kept telling myself it was poems I wanted to write.  Winters and Bowers had taught (and practiced) that a musical command of METER was essential to a good line of verse—even when that line discards metrical feet and proceeds as “free”.  I could write acceptably metrical lines but wasn’t able to hear enough of “myself” in them.  In THEIR Miltonic pentameters, I could hear Keats, Hart Crane and Stevens, each one of them entirely himself.  Me I could come closer to hearing, sometimes, the more I let my ear be taught by lines of Ezra Pound—some of them iambic.  Over my first five years at Irvine I compiled a book of poems that somehow got published.  When a copy of it arrived, I sat down and read it through from first the page to last and knew there was only one good poem in it.  I was already thirty years old.  I'd kindly been given tenure, but would I ever manage to write a second poem I wouldn’t have to throw away?

DG: You refer to “a musical command” of the lines that make up a poem.  Could you elaborate on that? 

JM: Any spoken phrase or sentence has properties of sound that are more and less musical.  A command of those properties is devoutly to be wished if you think of yourself as a poet.  “Down two more turns the Mississippi pours.”  “But when did love not try to change/The world back to itself…”  Or the much quieter “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet.”  These are iambs going at it and getting it done.  That such composition has been actualized in black and white means the music of it offers a gold-standard.  It proves what’s possible.  The more equipped I am with antennae that help me be in command of how the words and syntax I’m seeking register in my ear, the abler I’ll be at keeping what belongs at its structural best.  There can be an affecting music in the movement from one line to the next.  “…their glare conceals that a downstairs/light’s been switched on, maybe by a timer.”  I’d like it to be that running over to what’s been switched on lets the word “light’s” be stressed orally.  I’d like its emphasis to underscore the strangeness that those who hear the lines (and of course can’t SEE the light) are the reported event’s only witnesses.

DG: Have composers of classical music inspired your work?

JM:  I’ve been wanting to be asked that forever.  I’m a defenseless fool for Mahler and it only gets worse.  I’m continuingly in awe that there can be such beauty.  He’s for me not only the best writer of music: he’s the best writer.  I don’t know how to account for his influence on my own work except to say that, knowing with certainty that it’s impossible, I want to make poems that are worthy company for his symphonies.  The three B’s, Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, have been important to my ears.  Again, I can’t account for their influence on me beyond saying that my poems began to be longer when, in the early 1970s, they (and Wagner, Mahler and Prokofiev) replaced the Stones in what I listened to most.  Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system has influenced my alteration of one-, two-, three-, four- and five-line stanzas (I don’t repeat any one of those forms until each one of the others has appeared in its one series) in CAPACITY, IF YOU CAN TELL, and in the book I’m working on now, LIFE SAYS.

DG: Your compositional process is unique, in the sense that you begin poems in longhand and then type them out again when all the lines are finished.  This used to occur on a typewriter; now the computer does the job.  What does this step-by-step process bring to a poem that more traditional approaches don’t and how has the computer influenced (for better or worse) what you had done prior to that?

JM: I’ve been composing on the computer now for nearly twenty years.  I’m not aware of any gain or loss from how I’d gone at it before.  Which is to say that I don’t feel the change has meant that I’ve become a better  editor of what gets itself typed.

DG: In 1991 you published a study on James Joyce called ULYSSES AND JUSTICE, which argues that the judgments people make about the characters in the book tend to resemble how they judge people in real life.  Society has perhaps never been more judgmental than it is in the present.  What inspired you to write the book and how do you see it now, thirty-five years later?

JM: Thank you—especially—for this one, David.  It took me a decade to write my book on Joyce.  I was moved to write it because Joyce has been for me the Mahler of the written word (and I’ve proved above that I don’t know how to say anything intelligent about Mahler: I trust that’s not the case with me and Joyce).  Thank you for your summary of the book’s argument.  Persons are character-makers.  Because we can’t not think and talk about ourselves and one another, the persons we refer to in our thoughts and speech don’t merely resemble characters in books but are themselves the products of that same referential activity.  Along with everything that distinguishes ULYSSES as the least conventional of narratives, it couldn’t be more everyday in its dramatizing of our inclinations and behaviors as ethical and political beings.  It charges all eight billion of us to do much better by one another than we’ve done, and it cleans our lenses.

DG: There was a ten-year gap between IF YOU CAN TELL and CAPACITY, and the same ten-year window between THE WORLD AT LARGE and the latter title.  It’s now been ten years since IF YOU CAN TELL.  How close do you feel to a new collection?

JM: As close as to death.  I’m thinking LIFE SAYS will finish me, not I it.

DG: What are you reading at the moment?

JM: I’m re-reading a translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’ADORATION.

Author Bio

Born in Pasadena, California, poet James McMichael earned a BA at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a PhD at Stanford University, where he studied with Yvor Winters.  McMichael is the author of several poetry collections, including Four Good Things (1980), The World at Large: New and Selected Poems (1996), and National Book Award finalist Capacity (2006). His prose includes The Style of the Short Poem (1967) and a volume on James Joyce, Ulysses and Justice (1991). McMichael’s honors include fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation as well as a Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, the Academy of Arts and Letters Arthur O. Rense Prize, and the Poetry Society of America Shelley Memorial Prize. McMichael is a professor emeritus at the University of California at Irvine.