Now that he's retired, you'll most often find Michael Delp at his cabin on the Boardman River, near Traverse City, where he lives. Chances are he's chomping on a cheap cigar, a dog at his side, contemplating fish. Or poetry.
Delp was the long-time director of creative writing at the Interlochen Academy, a mentor and advisor with the Front Street Writers Program, and he's still on the editorial board for the Michigan Writers Series at Wayne State University Press. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose. But when two personas took him over, he channeled them into a poetry collection called, Lying in the River's Dark Bed: The Confluence of the Deadman and the Mad Angler (Wayne State University Press, April 2016).
“The Deadman is old, very old in terms of my chronology,” says Delp. “I probably ran into him about 30 years ago. I was teaching somewhere, and a friend of mine came up to see me. We were talking poems one night. He handed me a poem and there was mention of Deadman in it. Just that word, nothing more. It struck me somehow. I went back to my room and was writing some notes, and I had this really odd feeling, something I’ve never felt before—I wasn’t in charge anymore.”
Delp wrote a stream of poems about Deadman that night, and he kept writing more over the years. He says Deadman is the perfect paradox, the perfect contradiction, a kind of trickster.
“He can be killed, but he can’t die. He’s very bright; he’s not bright at all. You should trust him implicitly; you shouldn’t trust him at all. He can be anything he wants. It’s just fun to let him talk.”
The Mad Angler, the second persona that appears in Delp’s poems, was born from Wendell Barry poems about the Mad Farmer.
“I love those poems so much, those Wendell Barry poems about rebellion and revolution,” Delp says. “The Mad Angler poems manifest themselves more as river poems, because I’m on the river all the time and I love the river and do what I can to preserve it. Those are probably more political than the Deadman poems.”
The Confluence poems at the center of the book are the link between Deadman and Mad Angler, and the link is made not just in poetry but in the book's format. The Deadman and Mad Angler sets take up each end of the book, so that the reader must turn the book around to read them. The Confluence verses at its center are printed sideways.
While Delp has said in the past that he preferred fishing to writing, he laughs at that now. He admits that writing has become more important to him over time, although he writes slowly and in “binges,” after allowing an idea to grow within him. When he's on the river, however, Delp says he won’t write.
“On the river, I vanish. On the river, it’s a place to just be.”
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