Word: mcmichael
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...remember the '64 convention," said Frances Humphrey Howard, who worked with Eleanor Roosevelt during the war. "Women were told to scamper. My own brother Hubert was the nominee, and I was told to get lost. Today a great partnership is occurring." Jane McMichael, legislative director for the American Federation of Government Employees, was the staff director of the National Women's Political Caucus during the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami. "Remember our so-called headquarters hotel? The cockroaches were big enough to steal the typewriters. I remember crying when Shirley Chisholm was nominated for President...
Williamson is freshest when he writes about his contemporaries-- Louise Gluck, Richard Tillinghast, Diane Wakoski, Frank Bidart, James McMichael, Robert Pinsky, and Allen Grossman. Each of these poets has confronted the same problems that Williamson's book addresses, and Williamson's refusal to apply premature classifications is the beginning of a fair critical treatment of these poets. It is here that he addresses the complexity of each post's private images and the value of irony...
Knowledge of our displacement, knowledge of death--these are consciousness for McMichael, and what consciousness does is worry and plan, though it hungers like the wren to say "Here I am," to make a place out of sleep or to make "Pasadena" or a house like a nest, to make love. This is a long American poem remarkable in that it stays completely in the world of ordinary consciousness, of history and fact and daily life. It does not wander into myth, the dark of nature, or sexuality, fun as that might be to read. The passage about lovemaking...
...first book-length American poem, Walt Whiman, with a great sense of how comic the idea was, made love to all of us, to the whole future. We could, he said, make the future now with our imaginations--like the man in the TV ad says today. McMichael does the opposite. To him, the present is always future. Partly he sees this as the human condition (we are displaced; we do have to plan) and partly as an economic one, with capitalism as the engine which continually displaces the present. It exists in terms of consumption only, what is being...
There may be another source for this vision. McMichael belongs to the generation of writers, now about 40, who grew up in the social and economic expansion of the postwar years. It was probably most intense in California. There, the young watched the planning and the confidence and the technical inventiveness turn, with callousness and efficiency and fury, on Vietnam. That war had no people in the plan, and as one Administration with a plan to win the war was replaced by an Administration with a plan to end the war, the suffering seemed to go on forever...