Michael's Bio/CV

Michael Jacobson is a writer, artist, book and sound poetry publisher, and independent curator from Minneapolis, Minnesota USA/Turtle Island. Michael was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on 9/11/1973 but grew up in the Minneapolis, Minnesota area. His ancestry is half Finnish, and a quarter English, with traces of Swedish, Norwegian, Welsh, and French. He was raised as a Lutheran, but considers himself to be an Agnostic Pantheist, a video game pacifist, a pescetarian, a cyclist, and sober (since June 2020). In his late teens and early 20s, he played in a few punk rock bands where he began to write song lyrics. After quitting playing in bands, he developed an interest in fine art painting. Eventually, he combined his art with his writing and created his trans-symbolic, asemic, calligraphic novella The Giant's Fence. It was his first book, which he spent two years hand drawing (1999-2000). The second book he published is a collection of spirit graffiti hieroglyphics titled Action Figures; the title is due to his obsession over the Star Wars figures from his youth, and the comfort they brought to the author when he was homeless and suffering from schizoaffective disorder. Michael also utilized his Action Figures for the cover art of Rain Taxi’s 2014 winter issue.

Michael's latest book is an abstract illuminated manuscript id est: neo scribalist asemic expressionism (Post-Asemic Press, 2023); it is a collection of 73 paintings in full color, using gouache paint and watercolor pencils on watercolor paper, collected and bound in a hardcover edition. He worked on the book from 2021-2023 and released it on his 50th birthday. id est is about going on a psychological journey through mental hell and emerging as a spiritual survivor who has evolved into an Agnostic Pantheist. It is a book about losing the anchor of negativity and facing the malevolent forces trying to control his mind, body, and soul.

For Michaelmas 2023, he released a colorful futuristic hieroglyphic chapbook ZIPPOGLYPHS (PAP, 2023). It is a short 26-page work that was digitally drawn on a Wacom tablet and processed through several photo filters. Other works of Michael's include a prose poetry novella titled Somnolent Game (PAP, 2022), which is a stream of conscious story of love, death, and escape. During the covid lockdown, Michael spilled his guts in his autobiographical collection of senryu poems Hei Kuu (PAP, 2020); the poems are mostly true with a few myths and legends thrown together to keep things interesting. He also recorded an EP of sound/noise poetry titled Schizo Variations (PAP via Bandcamp, 2022). His asemic calligraphy, visual poetry, and 9 interviews are collected in Works & Interviews (PAP, 2018).

4 older asemic works of Michael's include: his trans-symbolic novella The Giant’s Fence (Ubu Editions, 2001-2006), his post-graffiti spirits Action Figures (Avance Publishing, 2008), an animated 8-minute-long calligraphic kinetic novella Mynd Eraser (YouTube, 2012), and his peripheral-vision poem crown The Paranoia Machine (1999). Michael is also co-editor (with Tim Gaze) of An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting (Punctum Books, 2013). In the past, he was published in The Last Vispo Anthology (Fantagraphics, 2012), which included two pages from Action Figures.

A recent book of Michael's is Somnolent Game, which is a prose poetry novella about a disgruntled video game soul named Itallica Loghost, who has become sentient do to someone else's memories. He is an insomniac and is trying to quit violence and dream his way into paradise and become a clone in the after-after-life.

Michael explores his personal mythology further in his autobiographical collection Hei Kuu (2020), which is 409 senryu poems all circulating around his life and place in time. Hei Kuu means "Hello Moon" in Suomi/Finnish, and is also a play on the word "haiku." It is the first collection by Michael that is purely verbal. The book collects the good, bad, and ugly parts of his life and is mostly honest with a few flourishes thrown in to keep things interesting.

Currently, Michael is working on an epic poem about a poet escaping from his purgatorial addiction to chloroform and his journey on the twisted road to recovery. The book is titled The Chloroform Religion. It originally began as an exercise for Michael to learn how to write a novel but has evolved into an epic poem. The setting takes place in a gravel pit where science and religion control the last survivors in existence with chloroform. The final factory-church-hospital is the locus of salvation for the desperate who are looking for a way out of their drizzling gray, bleak condition. It's a long poem that Michael plans on publishing sometime in 2025.

2017 was an important year for Michael, he established and became a book publisher at Post-Asemic Press. So far, PAP has released 27 titles by an international group of poets and artists. Ideally, the press publishes 4 titles per year, one book per season. From the lessons he learned by self-publishing books, he founded the press to focus on releasing book length works of "asemic writing and beyond." It has become a home for many exciting collections of asemic writing, visual poetry, and avant-garde literature. Here is a list of PAP books available at Amazon. In 2021, PAP became sonic at Bandcamp to publish audio recordings of experimental poetry, noise poetry, and sound poetry by various international poets.

Besides writing books, Michael curates a gallery for Asemic Writing called The New Post-Literate: A Gallery of Asemic Writing. In 2017, Michael guest curated the Minnesota Center for Book Arts exhibit: Asemic Writing: Offline & In The Gallery; it was the first large group show of asemic writing in the United States. Other countries where he has curated exhibits of asemic writing include Mexico, Spain, and Malta. In his spare time, he curates and designs a cyberspace gallery of sci-fi art and planet pohmz dubbed THAT: A Plan(et).

Michael likes giving interviews over email; his online interviews are available at Poemeleon, Utsanga, Samplekanon, Asymptote, Twenty-Four Hours, David Alan Binder, GAS, Schizoaffective, SCRIPTjr.nl, Prate/Full of Crow, and at Medium. He prefers being interviewed over email because he is not a performer or a politician, and he likes to be more thoughtful with his answers.

In 2019, Michael was written up in the book Asemic: The Art of Writing (University of Minnesota Press) by Peter Schwenger; it has an entire chapter dedicated to Jacobson's calligraphic work. He also sits on the editorial board of the online magazine SCRIPTjr.nl. During 2010 Michael founded, and currently administers, the Asemic Writing Facebook Group, which has expanded in membership to the size of a small city (pop. 27,000). Since he often raids the art world for ideas to apply to his writing, here is a link to his Fine Art America store where he sells prints of his asemic poems and textual artworks. Here is a link to his YouTube channel, where he posts asemic animations and other short films.

Over the years, Michael has made multiple attempts to finish college, and currently he is working on getting a bachelor's degree in art and a certificate in editing & publishing from the University of Minnesota.