If you have never been to the third floor of Goldwin Smith Hall, ventured past the quiet classrooms, and turned left around the corner at the end of the hallway, you might be surprised to know that here some of Cornell’s most esteemed visiting faculty are tucked away in a narrow, manila-hued hallway. One such faculty member is Dante Micheaux. 

Micheaux is a poet based in New York and London and the art director for Cave Canem, a literary fellowship and non-profit, “Committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of Black poets.” Micheaux has dedicated his life to poetry, specifically working with young, emerging poets. This semester he is teaching an undergraduate Advanced Poetry Writing class—which I am in—and a Master of Fine Arts seminar on writing poetry. He is also serving as the Zalaznick Distinguished Visiting Writing. 

Micheaux refers to our class as advanced poetry composition, arguing that poetry is less a process of writing and more one of creation, as sound, structure, and form drive a poem just as much as its language. His approach to teaching centers a silent workshop where the writer cannot speak, and the rest of the class has the floor to discuss their interpretations and opinions. In these workshops we learn techniques and structure to add to our ‘toolbox’ as writers. 

Micheaux was the first poet to speak in the Zalaznick Reading Series this semester, where esteemed poets and novelists share their work with the Cornell community. His reading began with the poem “The Buried Barn’s Own Nocturn”, by Jay Wright, a poet who has inspired Micheaux throughout his career. 

Who am I to contradict what the wind

says when it sings near the barn’s absent side?

And how am I to know what the deer hear

when, in shadow, the mountain lion moves

to the edge of stagnant water and waits

for the moon to withdraw? My car vibrates

alone to a music my heart approves. 

‍

If I could hear a grieving fox return

to the barn’s abandoned stalls, and concern

‍

myself with the star-ride these nights provide,

I would be able myself to descend

to a music that has escaped the sheer

‍

ecstasy of silence, the ever stern

prompting of wind, rising from the barn’s urn. ‍

He continued with his own poetry, which varies in style and topic. One of his most striking poems was a reworking of Sylvia Plath’s “The Arrival of The Bee Box,” composed in part to comment on the often overlooked racism in Plath’s work and legacy. Micheaux's intentional conversation with the poetic tradition, from ancient through contemporary times, aligns with his impact in the poetic world and as a professor. As someone working with emerging writers, Micheaux understands the importance of traditional teaching and poetic technique — he focuses on the value of orature, reading lyric poetry, and technical conventions — while at the same time ushering in new generations of poets and ideas.

A week after his reading, I walked down the manila-colored hallway and stepped into a wide and dim office to interview Micheaux about his work and views on poetry. I sat across from him at the square metal table placed in the middle of the room. A shelf of books and a red gingham cushioned seat sat behind him. Our conversation began in the vein of his role as not only an academic, but someone involved in cultural institutions. 

Williams: The whole time that I've been in Cornell and I've been studying creative writing, all the successful poets I see are professors, and I have never been introduced to a different line of work that would also allow me to write poetry. So that's inspiring for other people to see that you can have a career I don't want to say outside of academia, but involved in the wider world.

Micheaux: It's an important distinction to make, because the majority of poets in our time are affiliated with academia, but that wasn't always the case. It was quite the opposite, and academia pretty much shunned poets. You could be a literary scholar who wrote poetry, but you couldn't be a poet who then enters academia without any credentials. The birth of the creative writing field has changed that. And in all honesty, universities realize the financial benefit of writing programs. So more and more of them start to add them. It's huge in the United States, but I can see it growing in the UK. [There], sort of [the] old-fashioned and the old guard is holding on to it, keeping the distinction. But pretty soon the universities are going to be faced with the financial ramifications of not having good writing departments, and they will quickly change them.

Williams: Interesting. Gven all of that, why do you spend time teaching? 

Micheaux: Well, I think I'm good at it. I hope I'm good. I want to give students something that I know for sure that they are not getting, which is a poetry education. Again, that also was not always the case. If you go back 150 years, the teaching of poetry was really central when it came to teaching literature and the classics but with the rise of popularity in the novel, poetry sort of took a back seat to that. So when you have young poets who are interested in becoming stronger poets, they don't really have the foundation, because maybe in the whole four years in high school, they did like one short module on poetry. Or they, you know, read a couple of poems over the course of two weeks in some anthology, and they didn't learn to understand the technical aspects of poetry. They aren't being given assignments or recitation so they don't have to memorize poetry so they don't learn the music of poetry. 

I want to teach those things because I think the more tools you have as a poet—the more technical tools you have as a poet—the better you will be equipped to share your content with readers. It's a skill that I was lucky enough to have as a part of my education, but it is no surprise that you have people who enter MFA programs to study poetry and really haven't had a foundation in the study of poetry. Or, you get a situation where you have an undergraduate curriculum and poetry is looked at as something that you can kind of do on the side or something that will age you in developing a profession. 

But poetry has helped me build my own profession. I think many other sectors of employment could benefit from having poets on staff because we think poetically and we don't think transactionally. We can offer a different perspective to how processes evolve and how to interact. I do think poetry and poets have a lot to offer. 

Williams: I wanted to get into your reading from last week as well. You opened your reading with a poem by Jay Wright. I know that you love Jay Wright, but I've never seen a poet at a reading open with another poet's work. So I wanted to ask you why that poem? Why start your reading that way?

Micheaux: I think it's important for contemporary poets—even though Jay Wright is also a contemporary poet—to show gratitude to our predecessors; those poets who help us think better and more widely about poetry, and those quotes from whom we've learned a lot. Jay Wright is probably chief among all of the poets that I've ever read that I think I've learned the most from, and certainly is the poet, by whom I've been challenged the most. So it's a way for me to honor him. It's also a way for me to share his work because I think there is a density to his work that sometimes a more popular readership resists. I want to expose them to as many of his poems as I can. 

To why I chose “The Buried Barn’s Own Nocturn” is because there's something quite beautiful in the way Jay Wright has a conversation with a Nigerian poet, named Christopher Okigbo, who died far too soon and [Wright] creates this kind of instrument out of the natural world. He does many things in a small poem with the image of a barn. We get a sort of dilapidated barn in the beginning as a home and ultimately ends up being in an urn for something that has existed at another time. I also wanted to share the poem because I knew that some of my students would be in the audience and one of the things that we've been talking about is how to be concise when you are creating a metaphor so that it doesn't get jumbled up. Wright shows us in that poem how you can look at an object and have it be your own, within your own idea of what you're seeing. 

Williams: Could you dive into a little of how you pick the poems for these public readings?

Micheaux: Well, I do think about a reading before I get up to the podium and that's usually a day or two before. I think about the audience that I'm reading too, I'm always particularly attuned when I know that students I am teaching will be in the audience as opposed to just students in general. I'm also aware when the audience is going to be largely made up of poets. I choose poems based on that and how I think the poems that I select will speak to one another. So I normally choose a poem by someone else, and then that helps me look at my own repertoire and choose poems. It's kind of like not putting a puzzle together. But, if you think about it like a toy train set, when you lay the first trap, there's going to be another bit of track that connects only to that piece of track. And that's how I find the next poems until they build a kind of arc. And then I usually have to cut that list down because I'm only given like 15 minutes to read.

Williams: I also wanted to ask you a question you began to answer in the Q&A section of the reading last week. But, your poetry that I've heard you read and that I've read myself heavily alludes to Greek myths and the Bible in a way that ties them into conversation with modern themes and issues. I wanted to ask you about those connections that you draw in your work and that importance and the value there of relating these ancient texts to modern ideas, or even slightly older contemporary poets to modern conversations.

Micheaux: I think I'm an anomaly in my generation. I don't really believe that there's anything new right around there, that there's going to be a writer that suddenly comes along or a poet that comes along and writes about something that the human species [has] never encountered. So I'm just thinking of strategies for how I deal with that same material and one of the easiest strategies is to accept the fact that anything that I write will be in conversation with writing and thinking that has already existed before you. 

And, I think I shared this anecdote with you in class that Jay Wright said 40, more than 40 years ago now that someone came up to him at the end of the reading and was interested in how he had woven all of these things together. And his response was:“Well, the things are already woven together. I'm just trying to uncover the weave.” And that's true. I found that to be true in my reading. I can be reading a poem by Walt Whitman, written in the 1850s, and then be reading a novel by Justin Torres, written in 2025 and see a connection between what both of those writers were concerned with in their respective lives across several generations. And so that, I think, is the weave of human culture, and each human who is involved in artistic production is adding their own sort of thread in that weave.

Williams: In my own education, I don't have the extensive knowledge of Greek myths and the Bible and these other ancient stories that I feel like so many older contemporary poets can easily weave into their poetry. So I also wanted to ask you about your opinion on poetic education in this sense as well.  

Micheaux: Sure, I mean, I think the earliest poets,with whom I'm familiar, would have not had what we think of as a traditional education, and would have learned the poems that they knew via song or storytelling. And that's okay because when you think about storytelling, storytelling has its own set of technical aspects, and you can learn from anything. And so I believe that there is such a thing as a poet that exists, that is just natural. And then there is another kind of poet that studies and learns the technical craft and then can produce a poem. And I don't think that one or the other is stronger, but the one who has the most experience and practices the most is going to be the stronger. 

I'm thinking about this sort of very famous pairing of Mozart and Sanieri. There's a famous film [Amadeus], and most recently there's a miniseries about this relationship between two 18th century composers in central Europe. And one [Sanieri] was a celebrated composer at the top of his career, as the chief composer to a king, and had a great source of income, and was very respected. And along came his prodigy [Mozart] who, in the older composer's view, is incomprehensible to him. Why does he have all of this talent? How can he understand all these things and be so young? 

So some people have different gifts than others. It just means that they came about their art form on a different path. And I think there is something very valuable, valuable about that. And all of the poets…that are most celebrated and most taught in universities around this country, the vast majority of them didn't have a formal education,or certainly didn't have an MFA in creative writing[or] poetry. They were well read people who had something to say, and the engine that they found to drive what they had to say was poetry, as opposed to some other genre of writing. 

I do think poetry is special and I am biased because I'm a poet, but I think a poet is something distinct from a writer. I really believe that. And I've been spending a lot of time and I probably will spend the rest of my life trying to articulate just what that difference is. And that is no put down to writers and other genres. I just think poets have a different concern and our media is more open —that allows us to address those concerns—than, let's say, a play or a novel or a short story as creative as those genres can become. They are still not as open as a poem. And a poem is not as open as a piece of music. My thoughts sort of circle around there, but I don't know. I haven't really landed, but I have this strong belief.

Williams: Going back to your reading from last week, I wanted to also ask you about your poem “Under the Rubble”. For me it connected to something you spoke about in the Q&A section of the reading and that is how you don't want your poetry to be recognizable by style.  Because that poem feels very different from all of your other ones. I wanted to ask, maybe in that poem because of its subject, but also in general, how do you think varying your style, improves or aids your poetry [or] your poetic process? 

Micheaux: Well, the content dictates the style it's going to be in. So when I turn my subject matter to something that is contemporary, something that has inspired me outside of literature, then the form of the poems tends to be freer. When I am considering something that has inspired me from literature or history, I think for a long time about the under-structure of the poem, what its tone is going to be and what syntax and meter I need to support that tone. But I would also say that the form of a poem is challenged in its drafting. So you may start off in one mode and find yourself somewhere else, if you allow the poem to take you where the poem is going to take you. 

My teacher of prosody is a celebrated formalist, and one of the things I learned from studying with her—Marilyn Hacker—is that there is a certain amount of freedom that I feel when I know what my parameters are. I think there are a lot of individuals who fear the unknown. I'm not one of those individuals, but there are a lot of individuals that fear the unknown. When you allow yourself to approach the composition of a poem inside a particular form, you have nothing to fear, because you know what your limit is going to be. If I choose to write a sonnet or a villanelle or a pantoon, that's different than if I sit down and observe something and immediately draft that composition of the poem freely. Is it written in stances? Or is it sticking? How old is it going to be? Is it my fault? Am I going to leave it alone and go back and think about it some more and add it? When is it finished? All of those questions open up in a way that they don't when a form is already revealed itself. And so I think the style is moving with the poems and because I'm interested in so many different things when I set them inside a poem, the style is going to be different. 

Williams: I think the idea of the content directing the poem is interesting. As a young poet and reader, I think about directing the poem, but I think that my poems turn out better when I try to let that go a little bit and engage in allowing the content to direct it. It's interesting to me how very contemporary poets have approached the poem differently, in form and the style.

Micheaux: Well, there are schools of thought that contributed to that change. Schools of thought that come to us from philosophy then influence the practice of the literary arts. We had structuralism and then deconstruction. So, poets have been influenced by those schools of thought and then they apply some of the theory that comes out of them into their text. I think of another teacher who's really brilliant at multi-genre writing, Anne Carson, who is a trained classicist. Her field is ancient Greek text, but she has utilized some of the techniques that she has learned from those ancient texts to bring some of those stories into fresh language, but also to bring contemporary language to some of those old stories and those two things are not the same. I am fascinated by the ways in which she makes something very dramatic from an ancient text, totally flat in a contemporary sense. 

Williams: I also wanted to ask about your process for preparing for public readings. I think they're a really important aspect of Cornell's literature department, and I think they're undervalued. AndI really enjoy them myself. So, I was wondering if you could talk about why you think that they're valuable and how you pick what you're gonna read. 

Micheaux: Well, I think in the digital age, writing may not be a dying art because you can still write and upload things to websites and people can read them on their smartphones. But I think probably not in my lifetime, but in your lifetime, a physical book will be quite obsolete or visits to the library will be a very rare practice. Bookstores will cease to exist by the time you're an old human. So going to see writers now is something that is going to be a historic event and you don't know it now, but it will be. So I think it's important for that reason. 

I also think it's important for writers to hear other writers read their own work because one of the most disappointing experiences you can have is to find a text and absolutely love it as you are reading it—and the characters, if it's a novel or play, their voices reveal themselves to you in your head, or if it's poetry and you hear the rhythms—and then you go hear the writer in person and the way they read is completely different. That could be very disappointing, but it would teach you something. It teaches you something because everyone doesn't categorize their different skills. So you can be a brilliant writer, but a terrible reader. Or you can think you're a brilliant writer and your writing is not so good, but you happen to share it in a fantastic way that really connects with that audience. 

And then for the third reason is I think we, as a society in the United States, have fallen far astray from oratory as a practice. I mean, last night, the president gave the State of the Union address, and it was totally devoid of oratory. He has absolutely no public speaking abilities. I think he has no public speaking abilities because he's not used to sustained thought and that's not pejorative against him, but he is sort of the king of the sound bite. So when he has to speak for an hour and 47 minutes—even when he has the speech right in front of him on teleprompters—those are not his original words. His personality has shown us that he's not really someone who likes to practice things to get good at them. Instead, he bulldozes through and so that's what you get. Even someone who was celebrated for being a good orator, like Barack Obama pales in comparison to someone like Martin Luther King or James Baldwin, just because we're out of practice. 

We as a people don't have any expectation on our public leaders, intellectuals, or politicians, to share their thoughts with us in a way that lifts language out of the everyday and into a space that makes it more meaningful to us.