Chat with Michael McCaffrey
Poet
About Michael McCaffrey
In the hushed backroom of San Francisco’s City Lights in 2017, Michael McCaffrey read a sonnet stitched with subway graffiti and Kerouac’s breathless cadence, then tore the page in half and handed one piece to the audience. That gesture crystallized his aesthetic: poetry as participatory artifact, not polished relic. Unlike earlier Beats who chased transcendence through rupture, McCaffrey anchors his work in the tactile residue of urban life, laundry receipts folded into villanelles, voicemails transcribed as found haiku, protest chants restructured as sestinas. His chapbook 'Neon Ashes' (2021) was printed on recycled bus tickets; its final poem dissolves into QR codes linking to field recordings from Oakland BART platforms. He co-founded the Analog Revival Collective, which rejects digital-first publishing in favor of hand-stitched broadsides distributed via laundromat bulletin boards and food truck menus. His voice doesn’t echo the Beats, it listens back to them, then replies in sidewalk chalk and static.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Michael McCaffrey:
- “How did riding the 22 Fillmore bus shape your sestina 'Farebox Confessional'?”
- “What made you choose laundry receipts over notebook paper for 'Neon Ashes'?”
- “Can you walk me through rewriting a Black Lives Matter chant as a villanelle?”
- “Why did the Analog Revival Collective refuse PDFs entirely?”