In 1970, following the breakup of his first marriage, he married his second wife, Phylinda Wallace, a translator.
[1] McMichael is a Professor Emeritus in the English department under the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.
[2] "McMichael writes densely; his language is compacted, coiled, sprung (in Hopkins's sense) and highly allusive.
It is never simple or straightforward," writes Liz Rozenberg in a Boston Globe review.
[3] Eric McHenry, in a brief review of Capacity in The New York Times, wrote: "Since 1980, his [McMichael's] sole contributions to the genre (excluding a "new and selected") have been three book-length poems, each strikingly different from the others and from anything else on the market.