About Michael Gottlieb

Michael Gottlieb is a poet and the author of twenty-three books of poetry, essays and memoir. His latest book is Collected Memoirs, published by Chax Press in November, 2023. Collected Memoirs is published as the third volume in a uniform edition by Chax, joining Collected Essays (March 2023) and Selected Poems, (2021). Other recent titles include Mostly Clearing (Roof, 2019) What We Do: Essays for Poets (2016, Chax Press), I Had Every Intention (2014, Faux Editions), Dear All (2013, Roof Books), Letters to A Middle Aged Poet (2012, Otoliths), The Dust (2011, Roof Books), Memoir and Essay (2010, Faux/Other). A first-generation member of the Language Poetry school, he helped edit one of its foundational magazines, Roof and for several decades, its successor press, Roof Books. He was also the publisher of Case/Casement Books (1981-1999). He started the Last Tuesday multi-media performance series at La MaMa in NYC in the 1980s and founded and co-curates the Familiar Trees poetry reading series in Great Barrington, MA.

A number of his works have been adopted for the stage, notably at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City. In September 2011, the director Fiona Templeton staged THE DUST, her dramatization of his long 9/11 poem of the same name, at St. Mark’s to mark the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. In November 2019, coinciding with the publication of Mostly Clearing, his sixth book from Roof Books, the Poetry Project produced the play IS THIS CLEAR ENOUGH?, created and directed by Genée Coreno, based on Mostly Clearing.

In November 2023 the Poetry Project served for the third time as the producer for a dramatization of his work, presenting, in the church’s Sanctuary, I AM ANGRY AT A FORCE I CANNOT SEE: BASED ON THE POETRY OF MICHAEL GOTTLIEB, a staged adaptation of ‘The Voices’, his long poem about Covid and NYC, and ‘The Dust’. This work was directed by Chana Porter with sound and music by Rohan Chander, with the generous support of the Axe-Houghton Foundation. The performances coincided with the publication of his Collected Memoirs.

Ron Silliman called ‘The Dust,’ when it first appeared in print in 2003, “the first great poetic work to emerge from the trauma of September 11.” Eileen Myles has written that the body of Gottlieb’s work focuses "much like the narrator does in Robert Musil’s epic the 'Man Without Qualities,’ on the difficult moment in which one faces one’s culture and understands… what it is to be a man." His first-published memoir, Memoir and Essay, was described by the poet Elizabeth Fodaski as “doing for New York in the 70s what A Movable Feast did for Paris in the 20s.”

Gottlieb was born in the Bronx and grew up in Westchester County, NY. He graduated from Bennington College where he studied poetry and painting. He’s worked for a private detective agency and in business affairs for Warner Bros. Inc. He founded a start up and most recently served as Vice President, Digital Insight & Chief Research Expert for the global software company SAP. He divides his time between New York City and Connecticut.