Michael Casey's New & Selected Poems

In September 2017 Loom Press published Michael Casey's New & Selected Poems. Congratulations to Michael, an award winning Armenian-American poet.

“In 1972, Michael Casey won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Obscenities, a collection of poems drawn from his military experience during the Vietnam War. In his foreword to the book, judge Stanley Kunitz called the work “a kind of anti-poetry that befits a kind of war empty of any kind of glory” and “the first significant book of poems written by an American to spring from the war in Vietnam.” Its raw depictions of war’s mundanity and obscenity resonated with a broad audience, and Obscenities went into a mass market paperback edition, and was stocked in drugstores as well as bookstores. In the decades since, Casey’s poetry has continued to document the places of his work and life. Then and now, his poems foreground the voices around him over that of a single author; they are the words of young American conscripts and their Vietnamese counterparts, coworkers and bosses, neighbors and strangers. His compressed sketches and unadorned monologues have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. There It Is: New and Selected Poems presents, for the first time, a full tour through Casey’s work, from his 1972 debut to 2011’s Check Points, together with new and uncollected work from the late 60s on. Here are all the locations of Casey’s life and work—Lowell to Landing Zone, dye house to desk—and an ensemble cast with a lot to say.

The publication of Michael Casey's New and Selected Poems, with his quirky portraits of ordinary Americans, is an event to celebrate. Like a photographer snapping pictures relentlessly, he must have written a poem about everyone he ever met with dead-on realism. Compared to him, the Spoon River Anthology is a work for kiddies. If Robert Frost was a poet of the rural New Englander, Michael Casey, also a New Englander, brings to life his mill town background, the guys who didn't go on to college and the larger world, but married the girls they dated in high school and got jobs in the mill. When he's sent to Vietnam he captures his fellow soldiers in their own military jargon. A master of the vernacular, he forces one to question writing in the 'correct' language when so many of us speak it quite differently, the language we think and feel in. Rare among poets, he's willing to explore colloquial speech in all its messiness, and gets it down perfectly – in fact, he's got us all down spot on. This collection, with its wide range of voices, is a unique achievement.”

— Edward Field, author of The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and After the Fall: Poems Old and New

Michael Casey: Hoa Binh

August thirty-first

Stanley was all excited 

She just made eighteen

And got to vote 

For the first time 

There were sixteen slates 

To vote for 

In Vietnam that year 

And every slate's poster 

Said that 

That slate 

Wanted Hoa Binh

From voting 

She came back to me 

All excited 

Casee 

I vote for Hoa Binh 

That's nice, Stanley 

I did too 

Back in Hoa Ky 

I hope your vote counts

Michael Casey: BLUE DOT SIGN

she was walking down Bridge Street

to the Blue Dot

buy a half pound

for Sister Vincent Ferrer’s

Saint Patrick’s Day gift

box of candy

she was already in the car

when she told me that

or I wouldn’t have offered her

a ride in my pink cadillac

for Sister Vincent Ferrer?

Sister Vincent not my favorite person

Sister Vincent an Irishman?

you must have to be kidding me

but my passenger, Sister James, asks me

 Albert, how’d you get

 the money for such a nice car

like I stole it

  well I stall

  it is something like a secret, Sister

  you have to be discreet

  wouldn’t spread this around

  promise you won’t tell anyone, Sister?

  y’af to keep this quiet

  I mean this is like confessional, you know

  you won’t tell anybody? promise, right?

so she promises silence

as she gets out of the car

and I says

  Sister

  I rob banks

and she starts crossing herself

really really fast

looking up to heaven

after every sign

.

—Michael Casey (c) 2011

Michael Casey is the author of several books of poetry, including “Obscenities,” “Millrat,” and “Million Dollar Hole.” In 1972, he won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award for his book “Obscenities,” now considered a classic volume of both Vietnam War literature and war poetry of all time. His poems have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and many literary journals. A Lowell native, he graduated from Lowell High School and UMass Lowell (then-Lowell Technological Institute), and SUNY Buffalo (MFA in Creative Writing). He lives in the Merrimack Valley.

Michael Casey: Emily Donut Dolly

When someone asks me what I did in Nam, my usual response is: "I flew around in helicopters and played games with the guys." That usually stops the conversation. Occasionally, when I feel like someone really wants to know, I will give them a copy of this poem I wrote

i flew to desolate fire bases
filled with the tools of war
and the men who used them
it was my job to perform the miracle
of making the war disappear (however briefly)
for boys who had been trained to kill

it was my mission to raise the morale
of children who had grown old too soon
watching friends die

it was my calling to take away fear
and replace it with hope
to return sanity to a world gone insane

i was the mistress of illusion
as i pulled smiles from the dust and heat
the magical genie of "back-in-the-world"
as i created laughter in the mud

but when the show was over
i crawled back into my bottle
and pulled the cork in tightly behind me

© 1992 Michael Casey

Michael Casey: A Bummer

We were going single file
Through his rice paddies
And the farmer
Started hitting the lead track
With a rake
He wouldn't stop
The TC went to talk to him
And the farmer
Tried to hit him too
So the tracks went sideways
Side by side
Through the guy's fields
Instead of single file
Hard On, Proud Mary
Bummer, Wallace, Rosemary's Baby
The Rutgers Road Runner
And
Go Get Em - Done Got Em
Went side by side
Through the fields
If you have a farm in Vietnam
And a house in hell
Sell the farm
And go home


Michael Casey (born 1947 in Lowell, Massachusetts) is an Armenian-American poet.
His first collection, Obscenities, was chosen by Stanley Kunitz (former Poet Laureate of the U.S.) for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Other collections include Millrat (Adastra Press), The Million Dollar Hole (Orchises Press), Raiding a Whorehouse (Adastra), Permanent Party (March Street Press), Cindi's Fur Coat (The Chuckwagon), and The Bopper (Kendra Steiner Editions).
After working as a kettleman in a textile mill dye house in nearby Lawrence, we went to war in Vietnam.

Obscenities is often considered the first significant book of American poetry to come out of the Vietnam War. It has sold over 100,000 copies. One of the more memorable stanzas from Obscenities is from the poem A Bummer
His writing has appeared in America, Ararat, College English, The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Rolling Stone and Student Lawyer. He is the author of Obscenities, Yale University press, 1972.