Michael Davidson

Michael Davidson (born December 18, 1944, in Oakland, California) is an American poet.

Life and work Davidson has written eight books of poetry as well as numerous historical, cultural and critical works. He has been affiliated with the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) since 1974 and as a professor of American literature since 1988 with areas of study and research in Modern Poetry, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Disability Studies.

Davidson served as the first curator of the Mandeville Department of Special Collections (UCSD) where the George Oppen papers are stored. The Archive for New Poetry is a campus, community and international resource for studying post-1945 English-language poetry, and is one of the four largest American poetry collections in the U.S.

Davidson, who recently became Deaf, has written on disability issues, "Hearing Things: The Scandal of Speech in Deaf Performance," in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, "Phantom Limbs: Film Noir and the Disabled Body," GLQ 9:1-2 (2003), and "Strange Blood: Hemophobia and the Unexplored Boundaries of Queer Nation," in Beyond the Boundary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context. A collection of essays on disability was published as Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (University of Michigan). Another critical work, On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics, was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press. This latter book gathered his essays concerning formally innovative poetry from modernists such as Mina Loy, George Oppen, and Wallace Stevens to current practitioners such as Cristina Rivera-Garza, Heriberto Yépez, Lisa Robertson, and Mark Nowak.

Davidson is represented in the 2004 edition of Best American Poetry by a poem entitled "Bad Modernism".