Michael Blumenthal

Michael Blumenthal Poems

Michael Blumenthal Biography

Michael C. Blumenthal was born in 1949 in Vineland, New Jersey. A poet, essayist, novelist, and translator, Blumenthal began his career as a lawyer. He earned his JD from Cornell Law School, and later went on to study clinical psychology at Antioch. Blumenthal once commented: “Like many poets, I came to my vocation, one might say, ‘through the back door,’ having struggled through years of seemingly desirable yet (to me) unsatisfying jobs, while ‘stealing’ the time for my true work. The original impetus for my writing, perhaps, was best reflected in a statement made by Robert Mezey—‘I am a man, a Piscean, and unhappy, and therefore I make up poems’—but I feel, now, that my work derives from the healthier (and happier) desire to tap the sources of my own inner wisdom, and to make music of it.”)

The Best Poem Of Michael Blumenthal

Suburban

Conformity caught here, nobody catches it,
Lawns groomed in prose, with hardly a stutter.
Lloyd hits the ball, and Lorraine fetches it.

Mom hangs the laundry, Fred, Jr., watches it,
Shirts in the clichéd air, all aflutter.
Conformity caught here, nobody catches it.

A dog drops a bone, another dog snatches it.
I dreamed of this life once, Now I shudder
As Lloyd hits the ball and Lorraine fetches it.

A doldrum of leaky roofs, a roofer who patches it,
Lloyd prowls the streets, still clutching his putter.
Conformity caught here, nobody catches it.

The tediumed rake, the retiree who matches it,
The fall air gone dead with the pure drone of motors
While Lloyd hits the ball, and Lorraine just fetches it.

The door is ajar, then somebody latches it.
Through the hissing of barbecues poets mutter
Of conformity caught here, where nobody catches it.
Lloyd hits the ball. And damned Lorraine fetches it.

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