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ABOUT ME

A long time ago, my wife, Mary, and I published a couple of nonfiction books with W.W. Norton and what was then Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Since then, we have grown too old to go through that time-consuming process again. So we started our own publishing company, Girandole Books. We have published two books that Mary wrote about domestic life in the 19th century, and now we are in the process of publishing books I have been writing and rewriting for decades.

Originally from the Midwest, I went to the University of Missouri where I edited the campus humor magazine, Showme. I graduated in 1952, a year before the end of the Korean War. I was drafted, and while in the army I learned that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did. After I was discharged, I married, worked briefly for the Folgers Coffee Company, and then went back to school. After graduate studies, I taught first in a public and then in a private boys prep school in Kansas City. In 1963, I went to work as a teacher in the Panama Canal College on the American Canal Zone. We returned to the States in 1981 and bought a house in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. In 1990, we moved to New York City.



ABOUT THIS BLOG

I don’t know any poets—or anyone who has ever wanted to be a poet. I have no prizes or fellowships to boast of. In short, no credentials. I have, however, many poems and opinions. I intend to introduce each new book of my poetry on this blog, where I will also write about other people’s poems, and what I think about the state of poetry at the present time. I will also post ideas about art in general and easel painting in particular, an endangered species of art which Bonnard was afraid was an “outmoded passion” which would soon become “an anodyne amusement for young girls and old provincials.”