Born in Vancouver, raised in Calgary, exiled by my parents’ move to Montreal at fifteen. I began to write poetry in response and shifted my passion for the study of animal behaviour gradually to literature. Found friends and a community around poetry, studied literature at McGill, found myself a professor there thirteen years later. Some success as a teacher and scholar of Canadian modernist poetry, including two major books and several editions of poets now too little read. Submitted poems and poetry collections to journals and publishers until about the age of fifty, until their indifference—apart from two idealists in the U.K.—convinced me to stop. I’ve recently published Paper Black Leaf: Selected Poems 1976-2004. My plan is to publish two more collections, Chapbooks and Later Poems, in the next two years.

My relation to Taoism is intimate and lifelong. My dedication to meditation comes and goes. The Meditation Journal available here embodies about three years of consistent “sitting still” that began with my retirement. The connections between meditation and poetry continue to compel me.