To find a cranky, resolute, dry-witted champion for Michigan’s water, you need look no farther than Michael Delp. In his prose and poetry – especially as his alter ego, the Mad Angler, he has written lyrically of trout and forcefully condemned polluters. Mike is just out with a collection, The Mad Angler: Poems, that deepens the Mad Angler’s story.
On Friday, September 20 at The Alluvion on Traverse City, the Mad Angler will join the Mad Cellist, Crispin Campbell, as the two perform from their 2019 recording: “The River Under The River – The Mad Angler Meets The Mad Cellist.” Campbell’s cello will echo Delp’s rendering of the sounds of the river, the raucous calls of the crows, and the down and dirty earthiness of the blues.
Mike saves his words for his poetry. Asked to provide a biography, he said: “Michael Delp lives and writes in Northern Michigan.” But the world knows him as much more: an accomplished writer and a legendary former instructor of creative writing at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, and a profoundly decent man.
We thought it was a good time to check in with Mike and ask a few questions.
Who is the Mad Angler, what does he stand for, and what troubles him these days?
The Mad Angler has undergone many transformations over time but his pledge to himself is to one day know what is like to be an actual river…how it would feel to lie down in the grass and suddenly feel yourself undulating away from what you thought you were.
The mad Angler is mad crazy and mad about most every river in America being under siege either from overkill in plastic boats or any number of ways runoff finds its way into streams. We are living in dark times when it comes to those who would steal our water. We need to put up some kind of monitoring system to keep Lake Michigan from being used to water lawns in Arizona.
The mad Angler stands for what he stands in. A river.
Where does your poetic sensibility come from?
Poetic sensitivity: first felt it in the 5th grade in Mrs. Wycoff’s class when she read Huck Finn to us. My DNA hopefully has some Whitman in it, and maybe one tiny speck of that wildly free, Jim Harrison. Mary Oliver wanders around in me as best I can tell.
Do you have any advice for would-be poets?
Advice for would-be poets: learn to weld and play a guitar. Ignore advice about writing. Fish and fall asleep next to a river whenever possible. Figure out how to approach being a sorcerer, knowing that you can’t figure it out.
Any other words of wisdom today?
Poets might be able to save us if we could actually read them without interference from English Teachers.
You can’t have too many fly rods.
The Mad Angler takes solace from the fact that his cabin is at the very end of a dead end road.
Most writers want to be read but too many want to be noticed.
From Mike’s poem, the “Mad Angler Ghazals”:
