Poet

Journey to a Far Land
Journey through Darkness
Journey around the Sun
Autumn's Gold and Brown
Poems of my Green Guitar

I believe that my first poem was my rhyming verses expressing the anger and frustration with which my teenage self hiked down into the river bank forest not far from our house and how nature calmed me. Not long afterwards I was moved to write quatrain verses honoring the emergence of the transient loveliness of crocus in spring. Half a century later, I still have that tribute to crocus' evanescent beauty, my immature handwriting on looseleaf paper. Throughout my twenties and later decades, poetry became my vehicle for processing angst and psychological pain, particularly after I somehow stumbled into a twentieth century American poetry course at Carleton University in Ottawa, the city where I was living and working. I still recall my excitement at discovering William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman and others - models for my urge to express myself. While living in China, I wrote a number of free verse celebrations of what I saw and experienced; I submitted a selection of these to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and they were read on the radio; my parents made a cassette of the reading for me to hear later after I returned to Canada. Recently, a long hiatus in my writing poetry ended when I joined the Catamount Lane Poets, a group in Bennington whose members meet to read and criticize each other's poems, as well as to talk about poetry, rhyme,and meter. Poetry-writing may be a solitary act, but I found involvement in the group has stimulated me to create new poems, after years of simply re-working my old ones.