Anne Michaels
Anne Michaels
Anne Michaelsis a Canadian poet and novelist. Michaels is the current poet laureate of Toronto, Canada. She is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces which was adapted for film in 2007...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth15 April 1958
CountryCanada
rain past names
The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.
love-is thinking long-ago
I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
philosophy moving sacrifice
Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.
offering giving demand
When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know - you can only hope - that what you're offering will in some way be received. You shape your love to artistic demands, to the rigors of your genre. But still, it's a labor of love, and it's the nature of love that you must give it freely.
mouths starving
The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” from “Memoriam
darkness grace dresses
But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it's not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it's the world's brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.
gratitude sweet book
When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice.
spiritual pain decision
...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.
rain poetry awkward
I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.
lonely distance bird
Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.
psychological hiding share
To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.
path depth ascent
It is not a person’s depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
instant
History is the gradual instant
teacher retirement heart
The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.