Michael Cartright hails from the Ozark Highlands of Southwest Missouri. He has devoted forty years to the study of poetry and music. Nature drives his poetry inward and outward. He once described his poems as frames of film, momentary photographs. The odd rhythms and beats in the poems are driven by his interest in jazz music. American language, as it is spoken by the natives, is a feature of his poems with a focus on the accuracy of the frames clicking by.