Michael Sharkey

Michael Sharkey Poems

Michael Sharkey Biography

Michael Sharkey is an Australian poet, resident in Armidale in the New England region of NSW. He was born in August 1st, 1946 in Canterbury, New South Wales .He studied at the University of Sydney, where he was awarded a BA degree in 1972, and then at the University of Auckland where he was awarded a PhD in 1976 for his dissertation on Lord Byron's poetical dramas. Michael Sharkey is a biographer, poet and reviewer of Australian and New Zealand poetry and journalism, having published over 700 works. His poems have appeared in literary anthologies, journals and newspapers in Australia, New Zealand, India, the UK, USA, Canada, Mexico, Italy, Syria, China and France. He was poetry editor, later coordinating editor of the Australian literary journal Ulitarra from 1992-2001, and has guest-edited poetry issues of other magazines including Hobo and Famous Reporter. He has also worked as a free lance writer, editor and publisher's reader, and as a Writer in the Community for the Box Hill-Doncaster Regional Library in Victoria and the Blue Mountains City Library in New South Wales. He was a regular book reviewer for the Australian Book Review, and the Australian and Courier Mail newspapers and has contributed biographical essays to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography and other publications. He has conducted poetry seminars and read poetry at several German universities including RWTH (Aachen), Osnabrück, the Humboldt (Berlin), Trier, Munich, Kiel, and the Free University (Berlin). He has also been a guest poet and lecturer at London University and University College Dublin. In recent years, he has read poetry at Australian literary events including the Victorian Arts Festival, the Queensland Poetry Festival, the Sydney Poetry Festical and the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival. He has also served as a judge of State-sponsored literary awards for the Northern Territory and New South Wales. Academic history Sharkey was an Associate Professor of Rhetorical Analysis, Writing, and American Literature at the School of English, Communication and Theatre at the University of New England from 1992 until his resignation in 2010. His academic career included appointments as a Teaching Fellow in English literature at Sydney University(1972-3) and in New Zealand literature at Auckland University (1974), and as a Tutor in English at the University of New England (1977-81). He lectured in Australian and American literature, and in critical theory at the University of Southern Queensland (1983-4) and as a part-time lecturer in Australian cultural studies and Renaissance literature at Melbourne University of Technology (1985-7). He was an Assistant Professor of American and English literature at Bond University, Queensland from 1989-90. Sharkey has conducted seminars on diverse topics at Beijing Foreign Languages University, Luo Yang Foreign Languages University, and City University (Hong Kong).)

The Best Poem Of Michael Sharkey

The Paradise Flick

How do we know Eve and Adam were happy,
deprived, as they were, of a childhood?

Eve never knew, unlike Adam, a world
that was free of the chatter of others.'

How did she cope? And how could she choose,
if she'd wanted, to live by herself?

What did the man eat that made him hear voices,
while Eve was inventing frustration?

Where could she go for a break from the sound
of Himself, in his skin suit, like Tarzan,

assuring the bush that he'd just given birth to a woman?
Did she smile at the fool, or remind him that he was

asleep when she turned up and found him?
Where could she go to be shot of his need for a mother?

(A pity she woke him.)
Life for them both was a training film shown in real time,

on the zen of zoo-keeping.
When the encyclopedia seller arrived, who could blame her for buying?

No exit pollster asked how she felt
when she left at the end of the movie.

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