Born in Vancouver, raised in Calgary, exiled 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’m sitting on two manuscript collections, Paper Black Leaf and Last Poems—the latter title the very definition of a hostage to fortune.  One outcome of such a life is a growing dedication to sitting still, zazen, meditation.  The relation of that quest after stillness to poetry drives a lot of my present thinking about either.