I first met Michael Lauchlan in 2004 at Grounds Coffee Shop on University of Detroit Mercy’s campus. We were both adjuncting there at the time. I was fresh out of grad school, while Lauchlan was recalibrating after a chronic illness had derailed him from teaching and poetry for a spell. If memory serves me right, I’d brought the Ohio poet F. Daniel Rzicznek to campus for a class visit and a reading, and Lauchlan was kind enough to show up. If memory serves me right, there was cigarette smoke in the air (you were still allowed to smoke indoors in public places back then), though none of us were smokers. Sudden Parade had come out several years before with Ridgeway Press, and I told Lauchlan I wanted a copy. He gave me one the following week, and when I realized we were both living in Dearborn, I started bugging him to hang out and swap poems.
It’s now been twenty two years of that, and there’s nobody who has taught me more. Lauchlan’s poems are true to life and place. He’s an incredibly intelligent writer, but he writes with a humility that comes from the several lives he’s led. Before becoming an academic, Michael worked for a general contractor in Detroit doing about everything one can do on commercial and residential job sites—plumbing, roofing, cement work, etc. His poems reflect this both in their figurations and in the way they are drawn, the lines like plumb chalk lines, their textures carefully bevelled. He never leaves the reader behind either.
The kind, thoughtful, and generous speaker you meet in Lauchlan’s poems is the guy you meet in real life. He knows how to get stuff done and knock things down when they’re rotten, and he’s helped countless people and organizations with projects ranging from building bookshelves and fences to fixing drains and installing appliances. He brings this builder’s sensibility to the way he reads and responds to poems, too—measuring, knocking out the rotten stuff—and he’s incredibly giving of his time, serving as a mentor not only to his gifted students, but also to so many of us in the Detroit poetry community. I hope this interview allows people to get a glimpse into the generous and brilliant spirit behind the poems in Lauchlan’s stunning new collection, Running Lights.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Cal Freeman
Many of these poems, especially in the first section of the book, “Mercy,” deal with the human voice and the way it gets transmitted and preserved through technologies, including our poems. I’m thinking specifically of the poem, “Listen, for Larry Pike,” where you hauntingly pick up an analog telephone and start dialing the number of a dead friend. How do you define “voice” and how do we retrieve it when it’s become disembodied?
Michael Lauchlan
One of the miracles of the human brain is our capacity to retain a large catalogue of remembered voices. Perhaps the voices of our dead friends are not truly “disembodied” when we call them back into our consciousness, when we shiver faintly at mom’s voice still calling to us. These voices are “re-embodied” and, when we manage to capture them on a page, reenacted for (and in) our readers. Because of the passing of mutual friends, Larry has been on my mind of late, his explosive smile, his resonant greetings. He wasn’t a big man, but he was a physical, sensual presence. Many years ago, I built a back porch for him. I can still see him—utterly joyous—standing in the upper doorway, pulling on a rope, helping to lift the frame of the upper deck.
But the larger sense of “voice” is carried in our minds, as well as brains and bodies. We are hungry for the recognizable human presence borne along in cadence and syntax, image and assonance. In this moment, technology threatens that essential presence that reminds us that we’re not utterly alone. So, yes, the old phone plays a role in the poem, as does the mental slippage (recalling a friend and forgetting his death). Larry and I tore poems from typewriters and called each other. You and I do a version of the same thing and for much the same reason, making judicious use of an otherwise distracting technology. We dive into the loneliness of the poem and emerge gulping air and coughing incoherently with the few friends who also know the rivers and lakes.
Cal Freeman
Man, I love that answer. So much there that speaks for itself and I’d rather not unpack it. Of course, when you’re speaking of Larry and me, you’re speaking of friends you know personally. Who are some of the poet friends you find yourself speaking to outside of time? Who are some influences, in other words, and what do you take from them and what do you give them back?
Michael Lauchlan
Tom Lux appeared on my front porch in the middle of the night about five years after he died. In his kind, lumbering way, he chided me for being so tentative in my work. His dreamt voice actually had an effect on my work. A new permission, I guess. I met him at Goddard in 1980 (and then again at Warren Wilson in 1990, after the program moved). But I went to Goddard because of the voice I found in his collection, Sunday. He was a mentor, but his work was also a shaping influence, though I don’t try to emulate it. I’m fairly confident that you can go through the work of a good many poets and find turns of phrase that suggest Lux. Sometimes in revision I have to revise shifts that are too clearly Luxian. He offered me permission to leap from one level to another. His work encouraged empathy and a kind of dirt-honesty. And he was brilliant.
A few years before that I was failing out of my undergrad program, a very disorganized young man. But I read the collected Dylan Thomas, over and over, struggling with lots of the poems, but captivated by the cadences, the music. Then I read all of Merwin. The music and form of the First Four Books carried me along. I was empowered by a teacher who pointed out that I could simply look up allusions. I would sit in the library with the unabridged dictionary and the classical encyclopedia. The next four books demanded radically different attention, of course, but by then I was hooked. And his translations led me to Neruda, Lorca, Mandelstam and Akhmatova. Levertov helped me link my nascent anti-war activism with poetry. Maybe we feel a little less crazy and a bit more at home when that kind of merge happens. So when I picked up a stray New Yorker and opened to Levine’s “Rain Downriver,” I was stunned to find out that Detroit’s buses and streets could be infused with literary potency (á la Dublin or New York). Of course, Robert Hayden and Dudley Randall had been doing this forever, but I didn’t find them until a bit later. Similarly, I heard Gwendolyn Brooks read somewhere in Highland Park and Chicago neighborhoods appeared in the air. Place became an important focus for me.
What I’m able to give back is a question for other people to answer. But I know that I was propelled beyond a myriad of obstacles by writers, including Lux and Dudley Randall, who were kind to me when they had no reason to remember my name. When I was an undergrad at U of D (now Detroit Mercy), Dudley Randall was Poet in Residence. I recall his pipe and his generous smile as he walked around the library. He generously attended my first public readings. As I now teach on the same campus, I hope I can channel some of his goodness.
Cal Freeman
I know for a fact that you do, and how cool that you are now the Poet In Residence at University of Detroit Mercy. What will that role look like for you?
Michael Lauchlan
An honor and an utter, unmitigated gift. I will teach, as always, and try to be present to students and my astonishing colleagues. This has become a vital community for me.
Cal Freeman
In many of your poems, your history as a construction worker shows up, and mundane and strenuous construction tasks seem to serve as figurations for poem writing. Do you think it’s important for poets to have had occupations outside academia to draw upon? What are some of your favorite poems that draw upon this past life of yours?
Michael Lauchlan
I love my colleagues but my ideal reader also includes people who are not primarily concerned with teaching (and producing) literature. I think it can be a real gift when poets draw on the places and jobs that are located in the reader’s domain. Your life in music (and the local venues where firefighters rub elbows with barbacks and waitstaff) has given your work a real grounding. William Carlos Williams became important to me partly because he wrote while he sat at his patients’ kitchen tables waiting for fevers to break and babies to arrive. Or waiting for death. It’s not hard for me to picture him at the yellow formica table I grew up with. For the moment, I’m going to pass over Wallace Stevens’s labor of counting money. Levine’s poems—“What Work Is,” “To Cypriano, in the Wind”—are obvious examples. They provided a lot of encouragement for me. I also think of Rukheyser, Wright, and others for whom the WPA [Works Progress Administration] was a doorway into the lives of otherwise voiceless people. Rukheyser’s accounts of the testimony of the “white lung” workers, who had drilled through a mountain in inhuman conditions, would fit well into any post-modern/post-colonial anthology.
In our culture, some of these images don’t make it to the page, because a waitress who drags her sore feet home to put a couple children to bed doesn’t always sit down at a computer and start typing. If she is somehow able to return to these images later, you get a Tillie Olsen. But publishers are not often looking for unheard of older voices.
The poem “Fulcrum” contains some of the grim elements of work: tasks that suggest futility, time that is elapsing on a day, and the serious price we pay with our bodies when we ourselves must leverage weight out of the earth. Of course, I wrote this poem a few decades after I stopped building porches for pay. It took a long time for my writing skills to catch up with the demands of memory. “Knuckles and Words” is a quirky example, blending my passion for etymology (and public radio) with the grit of trying to fix a crappy car using crappy old parts. Being economically on the edge means you end up making imperfect decisions (Will the starter actually work?) and performing tasks that you aren’t very good at. Writing often involves imperfect, improvised turns, as we bludgeon our language into place on the page. Someone could undoubtedly write this more deftly, but he wasn’t lying under a car looking up and I was. So I have to do the best with what I have. Work is often a doorway into empathy and community. I heard partners and crew members utter some remarkable lines of wisdom and pain. “Like a Song” leaves out my favorite roofing line, after one friend saved another from slipping off the eave: “Thanks just doesn’t seem like enough.” And, of course, only in a plumbing supply shop could I be confronted by a guy who was convinced I had been killed, and didn’t seem pleased to be dissuaded by my corporeal evidence.
Cal Freeman
It’s fitting that in that last answer you end on a dark joke. Your poems don’t shy away from mortality and the sense that time is running away with us. I was just re-reading the poem “Laughter,” which seems to encapsulate your preoccupations with time passing, with finitude, and with work. What separates your stuff, though, is also your gift for both dark and whimsical irony. There’s laughter here, in other words. How do you strike that balance between irony and earnestness in poetry?
Michael Lauchlan
When I do, it’s luck, I think. Through no effort on my part, I wake up in a good mood most days. And then I read the news. But the act of writing is often exhilarating for me, even when I’m revising something that began long ago, even when I’m wrestling with work that will never take a readable shape. The work of writing is illuminating. Also, I am surrounded by writer-friends that challenge me and enliven me. I appreciate your use of the word earnestness, though I suspect some writers would shy away from it. I suppose I am perpetually ready to rush in and make a fool of myself—as when I was a kid pacing beside a coach until he inserted me into the game.
We need to earn irony, rather than wear it. The root irony was identified by Camus: our fierce attachment to enter a future which is more proximate to our deaths. A more topical irony lives in our culture’s current proclivity (with ancient roots) for valorizing and empowering intellectual and moral bankruptcy. My earnestness keeps me showing up to work for demonstrations and elections. My irony helps me cope with the results.
On the page, I think I am carried along by the thrum of music, by the truth that rises from a well-struck line, even in an obscure or incomplete context. I came of age reading without a lot of guidance, so cadences and sentences carried me past elements that mystified me until much later. I write in the spirit in which I speak to a friend. I am trying to sort things out and hoping that something makes sense. I write in the hope that readers will find something of value even in poems that seem “innocent” or disjointed.
Cal Freeman
I like the phrase “the thrum of music,” and allusions to music, especially twentieth-century jazz, show up periodically in your poems. I’m looking at “The Fourth” and “Getting a Drink” with references to Etta James and “St James Infirmary.” What do we love about music, and how should it inform what we do in poetry? Do you trust our love of music? Do you listen to music when you write?
Michael Lauchlan
I believe Frost was on to something when he said, “The road to the heart is through the ear.” So music wields potent magic, sometimes awakening deeply submerged memories or offering us the architecture of emotions we might not otherwise access. It sometimes offers a clarity beyond language. Of course, this also suggests a potential to engage an emotional response or to promote nostalgia, ethnic exclusivity, violence. The same issue exists in poetry, when convincing cadences are married to solipsistic (or banal) thought.
I once played Tommy Flanagan’s version of “Sunset and Mockingbird” for an entire evening, while I tried to find phrases to match the highly suggestive “syntax” of Ellington/Flanagan. That experiment “failed” to produce a successful poem, but I may again be seduced into following the lead of music. Maybe it’s always there. Maybe I just can’t afford to (or haven’t learned to) let it lead the way. I sometimes begin with a solo pianist (Flanagan, Hank Jones, Bill Evans) or even someone playing Debussey. As the writing develops a focus, I opt for silence. What passes for silence.
“Getting a Drink” combines some late learning about a truly fundamental American blues with an experience of hearing you perform in a local bar. Tragically, you did not include “St. James Infirmary” in your set, so I had to invent. It is stunning to me how those roots lyrics, from Ireland, the Delta, etc. have been carried forward, often unconsciously, in our language. The wisdom and pulse of the poorest folk undergird our every sentence.
Cal Freeman
There’s a part of me that dislikes music, especially the music that I play, but I like the idea of trying to get close to silence when we write. “What passes for silence,” and what does it have to do with finitude? I’m thinking of “Vanishing” and “On a Marsh.”
Michael Lauchlan
I love that you connected those poems. One describes a remembered/imagined sax player vanishing into his solo. The other describes a friendly parting outside a jazz club, a conversation with the very real and fondly remembered McKinney brothers, kind lions of the mid-twentieth-century jazz scene. When we are fully engaged, I think we (our personas, egos, social security numbers) do vanish into our art. No one is around (thank goodness) when we are writing, but musicians do it nightly in public. It’s truly one of the miracles, when someone is really playing, when someone is there to listen and to watch. Unlike Keats’s “unheard” melodies, these poems describe a sound still hanging in the air, heard as it slips away, recalled after the musician is gone.
I want to avoid sentimentalizing this essential vibration of our humanity. “We are the music makers” and the music listeners and the people who can, with a little effort, attend and recall. All of this marks us as human. Like poetry, music endures in spite of overwhelming odds. In the past, of course, countless performers have gone unrecorded. Some must be imagined. Others left an indelible (if anonymous) mark on others, who carried the gift forward. Many years ago, a student in one of my college comp classes revealed that he performed traditional West African music. From Kefense Chiki, I learned that the rhythm of “Night in Tunisia” was from ancient Mali, a kingdom that vanished more than 500 years ago. Somehow, the gift endured the Middle Passage and emerged in Dizzie Gillespie and Art Blakey. Unspeakable, unimaginable, and true.
I hope to write in the thrall of the last tones of a brushed cymbal. In that near-silence, I need to breathe in something I haven’t known before. And what emerges may be loud or soft, it may be a public matter or something entirely intimate. My job is simply to give it room to emerge into light and language.
Cal Freeman
I know the poetry of place is important to you, and your first full-length collection, Trumbull Avenue, is a very Detroit book. Although Detroit and Dearborn spots show up in Running Lights, the sense of place seems more subdued in these poems. How much of that was by conscious design as you were drafting these poems, and how would you contrast this book with your earlier work?
Michael Lauchlan
Not an easy question. Writing about place is crucial because thereness is part of our humanness. It’s crucial that our poetry notice the people around us in the place. Also trees, a stray dog, this morning’s blue jay. All of that is part of being alive, but it’s easy to get confused and actually just write about the names of places or about an ideology of place without evoking an immanence, without fully inhabiting my own skin within a place. If I’m not first within my own skin, then the meaningfulness of my distracted self being in a coffee shop in a strip mall or a church that houses a soup kitchen doesn’t really matter very much. If I’ve reduced myself to a pretentious video recorder and voided my own personhood, who should really care where I place the camera? If I’m really inhabiting myself and conscious of the place, I just might bring the bodied work to the page. That’s what I’m doing when I’m at my best in terms of writing and just being a human being responding to the dystopia that we find ourselves in.
Early on, I was deeply affected by “witness poetry” from all over the globe: Russia, Chile, Ireland, etc., as well as from Detroit. Of course, the trick about such work is that the writer needs a good deal of humility and self-awareness. Why am I choosing to frame these individuals in this way? Who am I, anyway, and where am I standing, and what (self-aggrandizement?) motivates me? Seamus Heaney famously warns against “Here come the good guys” poems. Reginald Dwayne Betts warns against becoming the hero of your own poems.
We moved a few years ago. OK, almost 30. My heart hasn’t completely caught up. Maybe the move shook some of my assumptions about writing poems of witness. To the extent that I appear in my narrative driven poems, I think I’m a more complex, flawed persona. Maybe that suggests growth in self-awareness. Maybe it was fortunate that I got knocked loose from a too-familiar urban starting point. I think the poems of recent decades are more formally and thematically varied than earlier work. I hope my work “places” me in an open-handed way. Those within my immediate view (an elderly stranger at the corner table) have a claim on my compassion simply by their proximity.
Let me expand the scene a bit. If someone reads my poems a decade on, they might recognize something about the time and place and ask how I responded to the cataclysm of our moment in this place. My poems can’t (shouldn’t) contain diatribes, defenses, or rhetoric—all too easy to be helpful—but if they don’t occasionally touch down in southeast Michigan in the dystopia of 2026, they will be little more than the fluffy rom-coms where all the characters seem to have their pockets stuffed with cash for the dinners, cabs, and hotel rooms in which they enact their personal crises. I’m thinking here of Eavan Boland’s critique of easy romance in Against Love Poetry. If I want my poems to engage the world in a credible way, I need to inhabit that world with my eyes and ears open.
Cal Freeman
How does a city poet navigate the noise with ears and eyes wide open and get back to the kind of silence you mention earlier in this piece? And would you mind retelling the story you’ve told before about walking into the closed Detroit auto parts store after a long day and calling the police on yourself for trespassing? It’s a great story, and perhaps emblematic of the way your poems not only note vivid facts about the exterior world but also come to epiphanies about your place in it? I read a poem like “Consider Utopia” and realize that the “unmapped realms” are quite magical but not necessarily remote.
Michael Lauchlan
So funny that you asked about that story, which I just retold for the benefit (?) of my grandson. He got the short version. I was in my mid-thirtiess re-roofing a porch for a neighbor, trying to finish up and hustle home. Planning badly, as always, I realized that my bright silver flashing would be visible from a block away against her red bricks. All I needed was a can of auto primer to make them a tad less conspicuous. Across the street was an auto parts store that I had been single-handedly sustaining with repairs on a series of old cars and trucks. I left the ladder and tools in place and literally sprinted to the store, glad that I actually had five dollars in my pocket. I pushed through the glass door and spotted the primer instantly. Then I noticed that I was quite alone in a strangely silent place. The analog clock over the counter gestured at 6:05. The store was closed, but no one had locked up. I was uncharacteristically alert and my tiny experience in the world included an awareness that a silent alarm would be buzzing at the police station and that I would very soon be confronted by armed men in blue. I went behind the counter and dialed 911. I was still on the phone when the officers arrived and handed one of them the phone, which seemed to ease the tension. I think I actually pointed out my ladder, quite visible from the door of the shop. In a few moments, we found the owner’s phone number (remember handwritten phone lists?) and the cops allowed me to take a can of primer so I could finish the job. I think I left some cash on the counter.
It’s impossible to overlook the layers of privilege that made my trespass excusable. And it’s also true that much of my adult life has been spent in some form of crossing, or passing, or transgressing. I’ve done work for which I was not prepared in the customary ways. At many points, people might have stopped me and asked: “Lauchlan, do you have any idea what you are doing?” In those roles, I’ve had surprising access to a wide variety of people. As a preteen, I heard the coach who shaped me recount the forces that shaped him as an African American man. Though his words were directed primarily to my African American teammates, I was included. In my time doing rehab, I replaced a garbage disposal while a mother and daughter discussed what men found attractive in women. Of course, they eventually asked me (lying on my back under their sink) to weigh in. As a teacher, I watched students unroll incredible griefs. My responses were not always on point. At times, I was less than helpful. But I was allowed in through a door that might have been locked, and I was transformed by what they shared.
I can’t remember what launched me into “Consider Utopia.” But once there, snared by the perfectly obvious etymology, I was enchanted by memories of time spent in alleys, those secret connectors favored by wandering kids and desperate mechanics. Sometimes, as busy adults, we get “mazed” by our habitual paths through our cities. By what routes (in soothing tones) will our chosen map program direct us to work today? But the city is stitched together quite differently and there are other ways of “going.” One of my brother’s friends lived across the alley from us. On his way home from school, he regularly cut through our house, pausing in the kitchen for a glass of water before continuing out the back door. I can’t help but think of the many circulatory systems of the body (lymphatic, arterial) and of the myriad of ligaments and the mysteries of nerves and fascia and skin. Without which no one lives. Likewise our friendships and our communities are intricately woven.
You, for instance, have occasionally written about Ecorse Creek, a water route that links neighborhoods which, superficially, seem quite separate. I want a poetics of such stunning proximity.
POETRY
Running Lights
by Michael Lauchlan
Cornerstone Press
Published on September 15, 2026
