Called by David Bottoms, "one of our finest spiritual poets," Michael Sowder, poet, scholar, essayist, former Buddhist, and long-time yoga practitioner, writes about wilderness, landscape, fatherhood, yoga, and spirituality. He is a Professor of English at Utah State University, where he teaches poetry writing, and an Affiliated Faculty Member of Yoga and Religious Studies, where he teaches the history and philosophy of yoga.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1956, Sowder moved with his family to Birmingham, Alabama, when he was nine. He graduated from the University of Alabama and studied law at the University of Washington. After clerking for a federal judge, he worked as a lawyer in Atlanta, where he obtained his MFA in poetry writing at Georgia State University with the poet David Bottoms. He subsequently enrolled at the University of Michigan where he obtained his Ph.D., writing a dissertation on Walt Whitman and American religion.
Sowder’s poetic influences have been the world’s spiritual poets: Walt Whitman, Kabir, Rumi, Hafiz, Mirabai, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Du Fu, Li Po, and Rainier Maria Rilke. Other influences include poets Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, David Bottoms, Pattianne Rogers, James Wright, and Li-Young-Lee.
Diane Wakoski chose his first full-length poetry collection, The Empty Boat, to win the 2004 T.S. Eliot Award. Wakoski praised the way Sowder “takes the crow myth of Ted Hughes and the wish for Electra's retribution in Plath, creating his own personal mythology out of American reclamation and spiritual revelation.” Sowder’s most recent collection, House Under the Moon, explores the challenges of living a contemplative life in the contemporary world. Also noteworthy is his chapbook, A Calendar of Crows, which won the inaugural 2001 Diagram/New Michigan Press Award.
You can find Sowder’s poems and essays in such literary venues as Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, Five Points, Green Mountains Review, Poet Lore, Sufi Journal, New Poets of the American West, Pilgrimage, The New York Times Online, Shambhala Sun, and elsewhere.
Sowder’s scholarly book, Whitman's Ecstatic Union (Routledge UP, 2005), explores Whitman’s poetry within the context of religious experience and mystical discourse within nineteenth-century American religion.
He is currently working on a new poetry collection, On Learning Sanskrit, in which each poem is based on a character of the Sanskrit language. He is also working on a prose book, Nine Gates to Enlightenment: Lessons from Yoga, Buddhism, and the World’s Contemplative Traditions.
Trained as a yoga teacher in a tantrik tradition in the late 1970s, Sowder has been a lifelong student of the world's contemplative traditions. He travels frequently to India to study yoga, Sanskrit, Indian literature and religion and work on his writing. In 2014, he was a Fulbright Scholar to India.
Sowder is the founder of Amrita Yoga, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching the practices of yoga and other wisdom traditions. He lives at the foot of the Bear River Mountains with his partner, the writer Jennifer Sinor, and their two boys.
Works
Former Attorney Offers Prayer of Thanksgiving For His New Job
Former Attorney Offers Prayer of Thanksgiving
For His New Job
-- for Ford Swetnam
I thank you, God, for this poem today, whether or not it’ll be any good,
and for a new home in a town called Preston with a desk under a window
of sky and the cries of cranes,
for a full moon that rises over the Bear Mountains at twilight and falls past mountains at dawn,
for a river named Bear that tumbles out of a canyon, meanders by our house, with
hot springs, kingfishers, osprey, and trout,
for our neighbor, Ezekiel, who comes to the door with cucumbers and carrots for
the forgiveness of sins and hopes for our redemption,
for new words, like jack-Mormon—reminding that even in Zion apostates like
dandelions grow,
and gravity water which runs down hills, which the city doesn’t charge for, which
rises over fields in silver jets, swords crossed against the desert sun,
for my commute across the bed of an ancient sea that one day, 14,000
years ago, broke its dam and spilled north for hundreds of miles,
for the oranges and reds of autumn spilling down watersheds of Oxford,
Bonneville, and Scout,
and the aspens that etch the fir-dark peaks in gold,
for light dawning clear as the Mediterranean,
while magpies rise from the nameless dead of the road where they dine in
tuxedos—Republican cousins of the crows,
and for my arrival in Pocatello, where treeless hills fold over each other with a
Renaissance love of the naked body,
a U.P. town of rails, cowboys and poets who, it has been said, actually—
and I shit you not—like each other,
and for a boss who says, Write poems, not briefs.
For this is a beginning, and it’s good to be beginning,
as Whitman and Merton and St. John of the Cross said,
for we’ll always be beginners any day we’re alive.
And now the streams are tumbling with syllables,
and the sea’s rhythms are printed on the land,
cranes trace calligraphs across the evening sky,
and rocks break like words on the ground.
from: The Empty Boat
Aidan Looks at the Moon
Aidan Looks at the Moon
Aidan Looks at the Moon
After the bugling of elk
and dinner by a wood stove,
we turned in and slept until midnight.
Then, you woke crying, inconsolable. So I
carried you out of the cabin,
across the porch, where September
poured over us
with fragrance of sage
and you were hushed.
In the moon-lacquered dark
aspens quaked with owls,
and I looked at you
awake in my arms,
five-months old,
eyes like pearls
staring at the moon—
that lantern lighting
this field and continent—
your first time to look at
the famous orb
that lit the plains of Troy,
the face implored by Sappho and Sidney,
that Li Po leapt for, drunk
and drowning, crone of Whitman,
Hecate to Plath.
O Ariel, O huntress,
light this boy’s nights
when he hikes these mountains
or comes home late from cards
or loving, illuminate his honey-moon
and housewarming,
and when he grows past
all my wanderings,
soften his sleepless nights,
as you have mine,
when I walk the house
in the dark
and find you in a window,
reminding me again that beyond
whatever carapace
of longing or fear
I’ve wrapped around myself,
something calls to me
from a home where the elk
steps in the river.
from: House Under the Moon
Kellen, First April
Kellen, First April
Steady in the new grass, feet spread
wide like a lifter’s,
you stand by your red dragon
blanket, head thrown back and laughing.
In your right hand you wave a wand
as your left reaches for cirrus.
I’m on my back reading Wilbur’s “Praise
in Summer.” And metaphors
tumble out: You’re Bernstein conducting
“Finches in a Blue Spruce,”
the child Adam praising another day,
Juwertamakai conjuring
buzzard and coyote, Brahma reborn,
fingers spinning starry pinwheels,
baby Ajax lifting the pillars of heaven.
But then the poet asks, “why this mad instead?”
Can I not see you as you are at all?
Eleven-months-old, sure-footed, second son,
transfixed by sunlight, the mystery
of balance, a finch-fringed tree.
Power resides in the shooting of the gulf,
said Emerson,
and like the goddess of secret and ancient
coincidences, Rilke named rhyme,
perhaps our leaping
passes our kenning.
Maybe your not the tenor of my imaginings at all—
but the vehicle—having leapt
from your mother’s body, half-fledged of me,
restringing lovers’ genes,
and eyeing a future we may never see.
Now you shake your stick and yell
at the sky, while across the April grass
a thousand suns light up your feet.
from: House Under the Moon
That Drink
That Drink
More and more things
kindle inside,
incandesce.
More and more edges
soften, thin,
until all the transoms open
and you see how things
are sunk and set in light.
Then the heart
finds its mate
everywhere.
There are streams
where we are going.
Whenever the water bottle
goes in the water
it always comes out full.
I tell you, pretty soon, that which is inside
and that which is outside
are going to have that drink
they penciled in
a million years ago.
from: The Empty Boat
Bibliography
- House Under the Moon, Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State UP, 2012
- Whitman’s Ecstatic Union: Conversion and Ideology in Leaves of Grass, New York: Routledge, 2005
- The Empty Boat, Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press, 2004
- Café Midnight, Pocatello, ID: Blue Scarab Press, 2003
- A Calendar of Crows. Grand Haven, MI: New Michigan Press, 2001