Michael Blumenthal graduated from the Cornell Law School with a J.D. degree in 1974, after studying philosophy and economics at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His seventh book of poems, And, will be published by BOA Editions in early 2009. A graduate of Cornell Law School and former Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, he is the author of the memoir All My Mothers and Fathers (Harper Collins, 2002), and of Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999). His novel Weinstock Among The Dying, which won Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction, has just been re-issued in paperback, and his collection of essays from Central Europe, When History Enters the House, was published in 1998. A frequent translator from the German, French, and Hungarian, he practices psychotherapy with Anglophone expatriates in Budapest and spends summers at his house in a small village near the shores of Lake Balaton in Hungary. In May of 2007, he spent a month in South Africa working with orphaned infant chacma baboons at the C.A.R.E. foundation in Phalaborwa, an experience about which he has written for Natural History and The Washington Post Magazine. He currently holds the Mina Hohenberg Darden Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. He was the featured poet at The Power of Writing Journal Conference in Denver in June of 2008 and will occupy the Copenhaver Chair at The University of West Virginia Law School for the spring semester 2009. He can be reached at mcblume@attglobal.net You can visit his Web site here.
Background Music
Hypochondria
Redundancies of Evening
In a Time of Economic Downturn, I Gaze Up at the Sky
And I Have Known the Tedium of Playgrounds
And This Unconventional Angel That is Mine. And the World For Real
And The World Is a Resilience of Hopes. And a Darkness as Well.
And Now the Weather…
And the Small, Damp Vesuvius of the Hills
For I Have Lived Like a Dusty Angel
Bleibtreustrasse
Tongues
From Laps, Section #28
Night Rocking
Waving Good-bye to My Father
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