It occurs to me that some people want more than the pithy, dust-jacket style biographies on offer on minimalist websites. We want to know about poets, our professors! Or at least I do. I loved learning about Donald Hall’s house repairs and sex habits in his wonderful Life-Work, for instance.
Here then, is TMI, as I think the kids are saying these days.
I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, I think, though maybe it was Scottsdale, and it may well have been a part of Scottsdale then categorized as Paradise Valley. I was there, obviously, but I wasn’t paying attention to such things as civic boundaries at the moment. I write about my feelings regarding these town in “Hot Wind” from Phases. My family went to People's Church, who helped take care of us, since my mother was so young. From there, we moved up and down the west: CA, OR, WA, and back to AZ. I moved schools 19 times (I counted once) before graduating high school.
Off then to Wheaton College, which, I have had occasion to mention elsewhere, was the best thing that happened to me. I had Leland Ryken, Alan Jacobs, Jeffrey Davis, Jill Peleaz Baumgaertner, and Jerry Root, among a great many others whom I count, some of them, as saints. Also—and I didn’t realize at the time what a wealth this was—the school introduced me to poetry readings. I saw Jeanne Murray Walker first, then Dana Gioia, then Li-Young Lee. What wealth! There is more to say about this time, and I have been saying it in draft which I may sometime share. Importantly, I went on Wheaton-in-England, studying at Oxford and stealing boats. I studied photography some as well.
Not knowing quite what to do thereafter, I went to Flagstaff to be near my brother, whom I had missed. We got a gig where we lived as sextons of a local church, which barely paid anything, but which gave us what was technically, though perhaps not legally, a place to live. Not having much else to do, and missing the life of the mind, I did an MA at Northern Arizona University. While in the public library, it became clear to me that I was to move to Seattle. I’ll have to tell you the story of how I knew another time.
Back in the Northwest, which I missed and longed for ever since leaving at 16, I went to UW where I got to study under the poets Richard Kenney and Linda Bierds for an MFA. Rick took me to Rome (travel pics here) and my aesthetic sense has never recovered.
I stayed at UW for a Ph.D., learning with Raimonda Modiano, Nicholas Halmi, and Charles LaPorte, the last of whom gave me the Spasmodics. Mid-dissertation, I went as Scholar-in-Residence to University of Tuebingen, where I began the poems that would become The Elegy Beta, and read some of them in the poet Holderlin’s house.
Just before that outing, I was married to the choreographer Amber Willett and we made the loveliest children! Here I am now teaching at Seattle Pacific, attending St. Ambrose Anglican, and praising the God from whom all this blessing has flowed.