|
(November 21, 1941- ) is an American poet, usually associated
with the Berkeley Street Poets and the Poets of the Pacific Northwest. He
studied with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Jack
Spicer, Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder. His
friendships with Luis Garcia, Belle Randall, Charles Potts and John Bennett
have strongly influenced his writing.
In 2004, he was a recipient of a Jack Straw Fellowship. Born in Santa Clara, California, and raised in the Oakland Hills near Joaquin Miller Park, he entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1959 but left the following year to find his education on the street. He worked at Moe's Books and was the Poet of the Berkeley Barb.
Self-exiled into the Alaskan woods, printing with a 1927 Kesey hand press
small, smudgy chapbooks, he founded dPress. After nearly forty years, there
are two hundred books in his backlists. He returned to University in 1972
and took his BA in English and Philosophy at University of Alaska,
Fairbanks.
For twenty years the proprietor of Four Winds Bookstore in
Ellensburg, Washington, a turn toward Eastern wisdom prompted him to begin
the practice of Vajrayana Buddhism at Tara Mandala near Pagosa Springs,
Colorado. He has since returned to California where he is a California Poet
in the Schools and caregiver to his elderly mother near Sebastopol. His
Collected Poems: 1961-2000 was published by Comrades Press. |