Michael Charles Blumenthal
Poet, Fiction Writer, Essayist & Translator
Welcome to the my website. As a writer of poetry, novels, short stories, essays and translations over the past 40 years, my mission has been to attempt to depict life in all its beauty, tragedy, complexity and sacredness. I hope you will find someting in my work that moves you and brings you joy in being alive in this world, with all its intensities of beauty and pain.
About
A Life in Words
Born in Vineland, New Jersey, on March 8, 1949, Michael Blumenthal grew up in a German-speaking home in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. He received his BA in philosophy from the State University of New York in Binghamton in 1969, and his JD from Cornell Law School in 1974. From 1985 to 1986, he studied clinical psychology at Antioch University and worked in private practice as a psychotherapist with Anglophone expatriates in Budapest.
Blumenthal's debut collection, Sympathetic Magic (Water Mark Press, 1980), received the Water Mark Poets of North America First Book Prize. His other collections include, most recently, No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012 (Etruscan Press, 2012), And (BOA Editions, 2009), and Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999), winner of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Prize.
In his foreword to Blumenthal's first book, Charles Fishman wrote: "Like Gerald Stern or David Ignatow, Blumenthal has a genuine comic gift as well as a broad, deep sensibility that encompasses and transforms nearly everything he touches—nearly everything that touches him." About his work, Grace Schulman has said, "Michael Blumenthal has the intelligence to sort out complexities, the innocence to see the world new, and the craft to combine those often incompatible qualities."
BREAKING NEWS: POEMS SELECTED & NEW, 1980-2020
June 15, 2020
“I roll from the bed mornings,” Michael Blumenthal wrote in his poem “Praise” almost forty years ago, “knowing things fade/and renew as they will.” This praise and regret at the fading and renewing of life—and poetry’s attempt to “correct the world” in light of it—have been, directly or indirectly, the subjects of Blumenthal’s poetry since his first book, Sympathetic Magic (described by U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov as “the last first book I remember as having this strangeness and distinction was called Harmonium" and by Poet Laureate Anthony Hecht as exhibiting “all the wonder and astonishment and delight of a new planet of major magnitude”) was awarded the Watermark Poets of North America First Book Prize in 1980. In poems taken from more than 40 years’ work whose subjects range from the destruction of the planet (“In a Helicopter Over Parachute, Colorado”) to the difficulties of expressing genuine love (“The Bitter Truth”) to praise for life itself (“And the World, After All, Is a Good and Gentle Place”), this book testifies to poetry’s consoling and corrective power over our lives—both “to what it disturbs” and to “what it rectifies.”
"A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul."
Franz Kafka
Contact
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