I was born in New York City and raised in a resolutely middle-class housing development, designed for Paris by Le Corbusier but built on the Lower East Side by Met Life. By high school, I was heavily inclined toward math and science by ability and a neurotic need for unambiguous answers, and despite the fact that it was my English teachers, especially Margaret Hegarty, who taught me Melville, who over the long haul proved most memorable. I attended National Science Foundation summer programs at Syracuse University , where I worked in a microbiology lab with a couple of graduate students who encouraged me study biology at their alma mater, Amherst College. I went, but it was the 60s, and before I took my first biology course I was already a psychology major. Then a religion major. But I was dissatisfied, I was looking for meaning, not scholarly methodology, and I wanted to make something that might allow me to know myself. Ham-fisted draughtsman, tin-eared musician, I nevertheless had an ear, for words, and a habit of reading. So I became an Independent Scholar, my two-part project including a 150 page thesis on prosody and a handful of poems painfully influenced by John Berryman.

After graduation, I spent two years working as a microbiology lab assistant helping with research on the composition of dental plaque, to support my writing habit, or more accurately my effort to develop one. Needing more discipline than I could provide, I enrolled in the writing program at Colorado State University to study with Bill Tremblay, whom I had heard give a positively inspirational reading in the Amherst town library the year before. But much to Bill's chagrin, I fell under the spell of Dick Hugo's ghostly West, and in my poems pursued myself through miserable towns. My M.A. in hand, I next married, taught, started L'Epervier Press, worked as a cameraman for a printer, and wrote. But after a few years of that, I felt the need to read all the literature I'd missed by being an Independent Scholar, so I enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Washington. Six years later, having read some more literature but a lot more criticism and theory, and written a dissertation called Alternate Selves: Pound, Eliot, and the Contructivist Ethos, I received my Ph.D. and got divorced. Since then, I have been writing poems more complexly and less obviously influenced, and have recently left behind the personal mode I'd worked in, one way and another, for some time. I have also been teaching, and happily, in the Interdisciplinary Writing Program at the University of Washington. And married again, also happily. So.

Along the way, I've published one book of poems, Second Messengers (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), and individual poems in twenty-five-plus journals, including Agni, The Antioch Review, Field, The Gettysburg Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review, Northwest Review, The Ohio Review, Portland Review, and Poetry Northwest. I've also published critical articles on Eliot and Pound in Pacific Coast Philology and Contemporary Literature.

L'Epervier Press got off to good start with the help of a terrific board of editorial assistants and some invaluable help from Bill Matthews and Marvin Bell. It had a good eleven-year run, publishing more than 45 books of poetry with the help of three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

I've also had help along the way. In 1987, I was given a Creative Writing Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1993, I received a Fulbright grant to pursue a writing project in Calcutta, India, which led to my collaboratively translating the work of the contemporary Bengali poet Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay. Some of these translations have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The New Orleans Review, and Visions International. A book of these translations is currently in search of a publisher.