Lives in Boulder, CO
Born 1931, Chicago, IL
Poet, Teacher
My sense of art is intensely innovation-oriented, but to me innovation includes dense, unexpected sprinklings of the old-fashioned. I experiment with the "lame" and inappropriate. More conventionally unconventional are my "themes": nature (a.o. countless concurrent, contradictory definitions of it), quotidia, language as an intelligent animal, humor (i.e., "surprise," i.e., result of any close examination), internal rhyme, rhythm (that which stays), and the poetic insights of children.
My work process is multifarious, mostly early-morn, prolific. I have many files of "stuff being worked on," but/and I'm always making fresh starts (partly for the fun of it). My work seems to me bizarrely various, but I suspect there's a recognizable "down-home" Midwestern flavor even where the language is asyntactically processed. Currently, I'm working on (along with new poetry and its gatherings) a manuscript of variably juxtaposed (fifty-year span), nature-oriented prose and poetry, a sort of ecology smorgasbord, called Second Nature.
1974 M.A., University of Colorado
1972 B.A., University of Colorado
1952 B.S., Colorado State University
Adjunct Professor, Naropa University, Boulder, CO
2008 Situation Sings, with Lyn Hejinian, New York, NY: Adventures in Poetry
2006 Exchanges of Earth & Sky, New York, NY: Fish Drum Press
2005 Poetry Everywhere, with Sheryl Noethe, New York, NY: Teachers & Writers Collaborative
2001 Red Car Goes By, Berkely, CA: Tuumba Press
1997 Entering the City, Omaha, NE: Backwaters Press
1990 Arguing with Something Plato Said,Boulder, CO: Rocky Ledge Editions
1981 The Fox, New York, NY: United Artists
1972 Blue Heron & IBC, Pensnett, Staffordshire, UK: Grosseteste Press
1990, 1980 Poetry Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts
