From associate professor of English to management trainer to retiree, I’ve journeyed from New Jersey through California to Oregon to discover Douglas firs, months of rain, and dry summers. After years of writing academic papers and business books, I’ve realized that poetry is the way my mind interacts with the world – in images, rhythms, sounds, and intensities of language. So I’ve settled into the joyful challenge of translating experience into as few words as possible. My aesthetic is embodied in Jack Kerouac’s comment in Dharma Bums: “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple,” and in Galway Kinnell’s statement, “To me, poetry is somebody standing up … and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”
My poems attempt to be simple in words as they grapple with the complexity of being on earth right now. In the process, I embrace Anne Sexton’s dictate: “One of the secret instructions to myself as a poet is: Whatever you do, don’t be boring.”
My poems and book reviews have appeared in more than 200 publications throughout North America, Europe, and Australia. The Poetry Box released my sixth collection, Splitting Open the World, in March 2025. I currently serve as the book review editor for the Oregon Poetry Association.