Born in Boston in 1954, I grew up in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, taking degrees from Brown and Columbia Universities. From my very early youth, my mother and English grandfather fostered my interest in poetry, and I began writing poems seriously in my mid-teens.

As an undergraduate and graduate student I studied with Edwin Honig, Michael Harper, Stanley Plumly, Philip Levine, Daniel Halpern, Carol Muske-Dukes, and Derek Walcott, all of whom broadened my poetic tastes and experience, many by introducing me to poetry in translation, and to the practice of translation. Reconciling distance with detail, intimacy with larger comprehensions, the habitual with the strange or exotic, the personal voice with the ‘other voice’ of mask and allusion has always been a central and consuming impulse in my writing, and I suppose, in the formation of my critical judgment as well. Though by no means a world traveler, I have sought the opportunity to visit places abroad, or elsewhere in the U.S., and like many I find the perspective of engaged observer or outsider congenial. An early experience as an AFS exchange student in Norway certainly kindled my fascination with cultural and linguistic experience outside the confines of New England, though my imaginative roots are, for better or worse, set firmly here. It may just be that I’m seeking some measure of estrangement or reorientation in my occasional journeys: for instance, in October of 2009 I crossed the Atlantic on a freighter, an experience I had craved since boyhood. In my view, the desire to make art in response to, or as a translation/transformation of varied experiences, and to seek immersion in art as practiced by people of very different background and traditions seems fundamental to our lives as imagining creatures.

My poetry has appeared in magazines across the U.S., in Canada and the UK, in two collections from Wesleyan University Press: Three or Four Hills and A Cloud (1982) and Honest Water (1989), and most recently in a new book, Rumored Islands (2010) from Harbor Mountain Press. For seven years (1998-2005) I edited poetry for the national quarterly The American Scholar, and in the summer of 2006 I was privileged to be the resident poet at The Frost Place in Franconia, NH. Over the years my work has won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a P.E.N. Discovery citation, and I have taught writing and literature in the SUNY system, at U.C. Irvine, Ithaca College, Colby College, and for the past twenty-one years at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where I live with my wife and two sons.