The Pasadena, California native received his Ph.D. from Stanford University. In 1970 he married his second wife, Phylinda Wallace, a translator, and has two children, Robert and Geoffrey.

McMichael is a professor of English and director of the Master of Fine Arts Poetry Writing Program at the University of California, Irvine.

"McMichael writes densely; his language is compacted, coiled, sprung (in Hopkins's sense) and highly allusive. It is never simple or straightforward," writes Liz Rozenberg in a Boston Globe review.

Eric McHenry, in a brief review of Capacity in The New York Times, wrote: "Since 1980, his [McMichael's] sole contributions to the genre (excluding a "new and selected") have been three book-length poems, each strikingly different from the others and from anything else on the market. In Capacity, he has exchanged the long lines and explicit autobiography of the previous two for dispassion, elision and lines as short as a syllable."

His first new poetry collection in a decade, Capacity, was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for Poetry.

He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, the 1999 Arthur Rense Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Academy of American Poets' Fellowship.

Poetry

• Against the Falling Evil (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971), ISBN 0-8040-0552-4
• The Lovers Familiar (Boston: David R. Godine, 1978), ISBN 0-87923-175-0
• Four Good Things (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), ISBN 0-395-29913-6, "a sprawling autobiographical meditation on life, death, and real-estate, set in [...] Southern California"
• Each in a Place Apart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), ISBN 0-226-56106-2
• The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ISBN 0-226-56104-6
• Capacity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), ISBN 0-374-11890-6

Other

• The Style of the Short Poem (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1967)
• Just What the Country Needs, Another Poetry Anthology (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1971), ISBN 0-534-00137-8, ed. with Dennis Saleh
• Ulysses and Justice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), ISBN 0-691-06547-0, a study of James Joyce

Poems online

(in alphabetical order)

• [1] "The Believed-In"
• [2] "The British Countryside in Pictures" from Capacity
• [3] from "Each in a Place Apart"
• [4] from Four Good Things
• [5] "Itinerary"
• [6] "Posited" from Capacity
• [7] untitled
• [8] "The Vegetables"
• [9] "The Very Rich Hours"

Book reviews

Capacity:

• [10] Jennifer Clarvoe in The Cincinnati Review, republished at the Poetry Daily Web site
• [11] Marta Figlerowicz in The Harvard Book Review
• [12] John Demming in Coldfront
• [13] Eric McHenry in The New York Times