Born 2.1.48

I started to put words on lines together at about 15. For years it seemed I wrote poems from words. This changed when I was about 18 or 20 on a cold, clear December night at a baseball field. I realized that everything was speaking, enunciating. The stars were hard and clear and I could hear the click of branches against each other like antlers in a heard. This was a major shift for me: to see language inherent in every thing. From then on the poem became a process of listening, of detecting the inner pulse of language present only in the state of the poem.

These were my beginnings with poetry in Holyoke, MA. I was born there in 1948. From Holyoke I began hitch hiking around New England at an early age. From there I moved to Cape Cod and worked as a shell fisherman. There were two years in Boson and then to Alaska for 6 years. While living in the far north I made a six-month trip to India and lived in a monastery. I returned to Alaska and left shortly thereafter to live in California, New York and Massachusetts. I now live in Northampton, MA with my wife Carla Bee and look forward to completing two collections of poems in the coming year.