Inventors (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Michael Blumenthal was born on March 8, 1949, to Betty Blumenthal and her husband, Julius, a furrier. Blumenthal grew up in Vineland, New Jersey, and was educated at the State University of New York at Binghamton and at Cornell University, where he took a law degree. Raised in a German-speaking household whose members regularly attended synagogue, Blumenthal was sensitized to language at an early age. He credits Jewish liturgy and prayer — especially their incantatory rhythms — as being influences on his poetry. Before settling on a career of writing and teaching, Blumenthal held a variety of jobs, including German language teacher, editor, lawyer, arts administrator, and television producer. The diversity of work exposed Blumenthal to the richness of language peculiar to specific professions. Blumenthal has spoken of his dissatisfaction with other kinds of work, saying that he came to writing “through the back door, having struggled through years of seemingly desirable yet (to me) unsatisfying jobs, while ‘stealing’ the time for my true work.” While working as an arts administrator in Washington, D. C., he began attending readings at the Library of Congress that were hosted by Stanley Kunitz; he subsequently developed a passion for poetry and a desire to make a life out of it. Helping him develop his confidence to write poetry was poet Howard Nemerov, whom Blumenthal heard lecture at the Breadloaf Writer’s conference in 1979. Nemerov’s talk, on poets as the first namers, sparked the refrain Blumenthal uses in his poem “Inventors.” Blumenthal’s other poetic influences include W. S. Merwin and Robert Creeley. Blumenthal has published six books of poems, a novel, a collection of essays, and has won many awards for his poetry and his fiction, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and Fulbright Fellowships. His third collection of poems, Laps, received the Juniper Prize for Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Press, and his novel Weinstock Among the Dying, a lampoon of academic life at Harvard University where Blumenthal taught, was a cowinner of Hadassah magazine’s 1994 Harold U. Ribelow Prize for Fiction