I am Michael D. Main, educated at Indiana University-Bloomington. I have a B.A. in English; and an M.L.S. degree in Library and Information Science. A Midwest writer, I currently live and write from Indianapolis, Indiana. Previous lives have included residence in Minnesota, Portland Oregon, and twenty years living in a beach cabin on the Oregon Coast.
 
I am a past recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission. Trained at IBM, I am also highly skilled as a 25 year career-long Senior Information Developer and Technical Writer. Previous to this, I engaged in an 18 year career in a multitude of professional library roles at Indiana University Libraries - Bloomington.
 
In 1996, I was among the first writers in the U.S. to mount a literary web studio offering electronic multi-media text/graphic presentations. As of 2023, I cull daily inspiration from a home library of nearly 4,000 audio media titles, two editions of the complete OED, and robust personal collections in poetics, literary theory, philosophy, history, biography, and theology.
 
My current life project involves producing works to empower and further explore the dynamics of poetics, the essay (in particular the micro-essay format), and language for the 21st Century.
 
I believe that daring explorations of language position the writer to embody realistic prospects for cultivating adept levels of revolutionary linguistic practice. My experience with language poetics suggests to me that earnest practice is fully capable of bringing writers and readers to levels of linguistic energy, intellectual discovery, and emotional joy that must be critical to the survival of any advancement of adept and alert culture in the early 21st Century.
 

If we attempt to demonstrate the failure of language merely through the pathos of an ‘anti’ stance that employs comic, else lethal instantiations of our own failed language, if we cease to believe that language is an adequate instrument of expression and human communication, we summon horrific realms of isolation, and, ultimately, we are left to command our own utter ‘disuse’ as human beings.
 
Perhaps this is the goal: to compel a retraining of the critical sensibility towards greater complexity and a broader contextualization, or rather a new idea of context, seen in maturity as something neither imprisoned simply inside the language of a text, nor outside it in society.
 
With regard to my third book of avant-garde language poetics — “(In)Sens(e)lms” —  five poems from the manuscript were published in the Caketrain literary journal:.Caketrain – Issue 10 – January 2013.
 
Copyright © 2023 by Michael D. Main. All rights are reserved. Michael D. Main holds the copyrights to all works authored by Michael D. Main, including and not limited to all his poems, notes and photography posted on this author website. No part of these publications may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, republishing, recording or otherwise, without express written permission from the copyright holder. Be aware that although these works may be freely accessible on the World Wide Web and may not include any statement about copyright, the U.S. Copyright Act nevertheless provides that such works are protected by copyright laws.