Michael Andre

Michael Andre (born August 31, 1946) is a Canadian, disc jockey, poet, critic and editor living in New York City.

Andre was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to a civil engineer doing wartime work on a military hospital. His mother's father was a newspaperman, Eyton Warburton; he died when Andre was an infant. Andre was raised in Kingston, Ontario. He studied at McGill University (Honors English, B.A., 1968), the University of Chicago (M.A., 1969) and Columbia University (Ph.D., English and Comparative Literature, 1973).

Andre hosted radio shows in Chicago and New York. He interviewed, published, and occasionally socialized with W. H. Auden and Eugene McCarthy, Beats like Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and homosexual esthetes like John Cage and Andy Warhol. He is divorced from Erika Rothenberg, an artist, and Jane Adler, a flautist and sign-language interpreter; he has a son, Benjamin Eyton Andre. Papers may be found at the University of Tulsa and at Yale University.

Andre is the editor of Unmuzzled OX, an occasional magazine of poetry, art and politics which began in 1971 as a quarterly and has produced 16 volumes. Andre edited and published two books by Gregory Corso, Earth Egg and Writings from OX. His opera, Orfreo, with music by Elodie Lauten, premiered at Merkin Hall in 2004. The two also collaborated on Sex and Pre-anti-post-modernism and S.O.S. W.T.C. He has two widely-available anthologies of selected poems: Studying the Ground for Holes (1978) and Experiments in Banal Living (1998). He has worked as a critic for The Montreal Gazette, Art News, Art in America and The Village Voice. His autobiographical essay was published in 1991 by Gale.

In addition to being a poet and editor, Andre was involved with social issues beginning in Paris in 1967 and sometimes appears as a Catholic homme de gauche. "A jackrabbit, if it could read ", according to Daniel Berrigan, poet and Catholic Worker, "would jump for glee. And if it could talk to itself, wd. undoubtedly be heard saying, 'Demme, wish I'd thought of that!'"

Andre has recited his poetry in London, Frankfurt and Paris, at various venues in New York including the Public Theater, St. Mark's Poetry Project, and the Bowery Poetry Club as well as at numerous universities and galleries throughout Canada and the United States. Since 1992, Andre has written a column called "New York Letter" for the Small Press Review.