DOGPOET:AUTOBIO

Welcome to my little Internet outpost. My name is Michael and I was born on April 5th, 1971 in Stillwater, Oklahoma at a hospital that no longer exists. But I exist and have been trying to prove this here since December of 2001.

Why "Dogpoet"? The fascinating answer is that I dig words that have "dog" paired up with another word: "dogwood," "dogstar," "dogtown". I also once wrote a poem about my dog Louie, based on Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Louie prefers bacon to poetry.

Somehow I've stuck it out a few years. Dogpoet is my rough draft, where I mess around with stories, memories, and characters. Everything's true, though sometimes I change the names so that people will still talk to me the next day. This is also why my weblog is rather annoyingly all about me; I'm as desperate for love as the next guy, and I like having friends who will take my calls, and family who will give me money.

I've been writing since the fourth grade, when the school newsletter published my first poem, which was full of big words that didn't make any sense when strung together. I was a skinny kid who read Agatha Christie and preferred Tarzan over Jane. Apparently this ran in my family, as both my parents eventually came out of the closet. We call my straight brother the black sheep of the family. Ha ha ha.

I grew up in Minneapolis, went to school in Florida, and settled for a bit in San Francisco.

In August of 2004 I moved to New York City for the graduate writing program at Columbia University. I will be moving back to SF at the end of May, 2006 to finish my thesis/book. You can check out an excerpt from the unfinished book in this great anthology.