Michael R. Burch
Bewildering Stories biography
I fell in love with poetry as a young boy when my mother recited Alfred Noyes’s eerie poetic ghost story “The Highwayman” to her transfixed children. Mom knew the poem by heart and can still recite it from memory in her eighties. I later learned that Noyes died the same year that I was born. Many years later, as the editor of The HyperTexts, I began to tout “The Highwayman” as one of the most musical story-poems in the English language. I recently saw it popping up in Google searches like “the best poems of all time.” So perhaps I did my first mentor a favor, or at least I would like to think so.
I had my first published poems in my early teens and now have over 6,000 publications including poems that have “gone viral.” Thus a single drop of inspiration can lead to a veritable Deluge!
My poems, translations, essays, articles and letters have appeared in TIME, USA Today, Amnesty International’s Words That Burn, Writer’s Digest–The Year’s Best Writing and hundreds of literary journals. My poems have been translated into fourteen languages and set to music by eleven composers including Mark Buller, Alexander Comitas and Seth Wright. I also edit www.thehypertexts.com and serve as the international poetry editor for Better Than Starbucks.
Copyright © 2019 by Michael R. Burch
