Michael O'Brien (1939–2016)

Poet Michael O'Brien passed away last week, on Thursday, November 10, 2016, in New York. Peter O'Leary, a decade-long friend, remembers him at Flood Editions, the home for O'Brien's recent books, Avenue (2012) and Sleeping and Waking (2007). O'Leary writes:

Michael was a superb poet, a master of what Ronald Johnson called the “Madame Curie” principle of modern poetry, “compression and radiation.” One predominant model of modern poetry is that innovation yields excellence. Such poetry is valued for its inventiveness. Another, less frequently invoked model is that of caretaking, what Basil Bunting indicated as a desire as a poet “to have maintained the art.” Language is always degrading and the poet, in an expressive precision, stays for a time that erosion. It’s a seemingly more modest position for a poet to take, but no less heroic, after all. Language cunningly placed, used to observe the world minutely, magnifies that world in the imagination. O’Brien was one of our great caretakers. Here is “In the Elevator,” from Sills (2000):

creaks like a mast her leather jacket as her body stirs

In 2007, David Orr reviewed Sleeping and Waking in the the New York Times. "[O'Brien] began his career as a participant in the Eventorium, a coterie of New York artists with a surrealist bent," writes Orr. He gently reminds dutiful readers to be attentive. "O’Brien is primarily an observer rather than a debater, and the poems here are heavy on isolated images, dream logic, bits of overheard conversation (typically urban conversation) and memories, with larger themes emerging through juxtapositions and repetitions .... Reading the best work here is like watching watercolors blur across wet paper, gradually mingling to produce soft yet definite shapes." More:

As in many poems here, the idea is to capture perception just before it yields to analysis — a kind of musical rest on the page. O’Brien is strongly influenced by Asian writing (titles here include “After Lu Yu” and “After Kiyohara Motosuke”), and one of the benefits of that influence is his willingness to let small moments speak for themselves. To be sure, this can sometimes result in lines that don’t do much (“Cloud touches / mountain so lightly, / folded into the folds, / on its slow way”). But by suggesting that the poet is open to whatever perception strikes him, these slighter gestures prepare us for the surprisingly unrestrained emotion of lines like these:

At a
party my
father suddenly
appears, young,
vigorous, I’m
so glad to
see him it
wakes me up.

[...]

While O’Brien’s technical skills should be crisp enough to please the iciest avant-gardist, he has one virtue more cerebral poets often lack: he isn’t afraid to make a plain statement. In other hands, that virtue can become a self-satisfied vice, but here it lends a necessary sharpness to an otherwise fluid and dreamlike collection.

Of course, as fine as “Sleeping and Waking” is, it may still join the rest of O’Brien’s work in the peculiar limbo inhabited by the writing of so many strong but unrecognized poets. After all, as Donald Justice once said, “there may well be analyzable causes behind the oblivion some good writers suffer, but the causes, whatever they are, remain elusive.” Still, if the causes of a lack of recognition are unknowable, the causes of recognition are equally obscure — which means that luck can always turn. Or, as O’Brien himself puts it in a very different context: “Like a defective purgatory no one remembers the point of, or how to turn it off. Like being hazed by one’s needs. By human practice. Which can change.” A change in the way we’ve looked — or not looked — at this poet might do more than simply alter his position in the star system of the poetry world; it might transform the way we think about ourselves.

We'd also look to Sills (Salt Publishing, 2009), which gathers poems from O'Brien's four early books. "O’Brien started to hear a city that no one else had ever heard," wrote Eirik Steinhoff of the collection.

We were lucky enough to see O'Brien read at Poets House in 2012. Our thoughts are with his friends and family.