A native of Johnstown, NY, I retired in June 2016 after 29 years of teaching writing and literature at Ripon College in Wisconsin.  I've published six collections of poetry, including Stutter Monk and Second Wind; I also co-edited (with Kate Sontag) the essay anthology After Confession: Poetry as Confession.  Essays, reviews, and individual poems have appeared widely, both in print and online.  In recent years I've spent nearly as much time on photography as poetry.  A gallery of my work is online here: http://instagram.com/doctorjazz

​​

The Lecture I Did Not Give In the Last Class of My Final Year of Teaching


It's not all about me, that's always been obvious.
Yet neither is it all about you, my beautiful students,
or the generations who have sat and sweated
in this room.  The quizzes and discussions and dust
rising from the radiators in late afternoon light.
The never-completely-erased blackboard, speaking
in many tongues for longer than you or I have existed.

None of that’s the point.  Even moments—so many!--
of glad inspiration, doors opening: such is the stuff 
of any life, any learning.  What I think but do not say 
is how little this lovely hive of language, buzzing away 
nine months per year, can ever capture the currents and 
cross-currents, the flow as of a river one moment, lightning 
scorching down the next.  No, no summary is possible.

Which is why we need new faces in the room 
every year, fresh students and teachers stepping
in this new river again and again. May we all
remain faithful to this flow beyond doubt 
and even past our own obvious flaws and errors,
heading toward a place we cannot know and will never
witness, and yet still trust is worth the journey.

I think I will remember best the laughter, better 
than the sun and more reliable than the moon— 
for learning is absurd, isn’t it? and improbable, 
and fun.  We’re all too ridiculous and too real 
for anyone to take us solemnly as we delve and linger,
backtrack, review and resist, and sometimes,
for an hour or an afternoon, somehow, arrive.

And here we are.  Here we all still are. 





Morning Music


When Whitman heard America
singing, it wasn't just symbolic,
not just the clatter and the clang
of horseshoes against anvils,
nor the blustery gusts of words
from pulpit, courtroom, or stage— 
it was carpenters and housewives
and boys walking to school 
and woodcutters actually singing:
ballads and hymns and love songs
and all the popular tunes 
as they hung laundry to dry,
nailed rafters to beams, shoveled
coal into locomotive engines,
and hauled lines to raise sails 
above the decks of schooners
putting out into the harbor.  

There were no transistor radios
sitting in the gutters as roofers
tacked shingles down, no TVs
in doctors' waiting rooms playing
whether or not anyone is there,
no joggers wearing ear buds,
no pop singers crooning as citizens 
shopped for fruit or bolts of cloth. . . .

But every school child and soldier
had a head full of plaints and a heart
drumming like a woodpecker
against the trunk of each day,
singing, with open mouths,
their strong melodious songs. . . .
into the gray and complicated air.





Mostly Standing Around


Children at the track for gym class
on a cool spring afternoon
stand swaying in the breeze
like tufts of grass in the sun.
Their slim legs and unmarked arms
glinting like stones underwater.  
Mostly standing around, awaiting
the gun, ready to jump or sprint,
which they can do all day,

but it's mostly awaiting their turn,
clustering in gossipy groups,
eyeing the other groups, 
measuring rank and shine--
the whole pageantry of self
so keen and stark, so blade-sharp
at that age.  

                 I want to tell them
not to worry, it will all be OK,
but they're not about to listen
to a drifty scrap of fog, a swirl
of dust there and gone before
they could blink.  It's right they
do not see me walking past, 
as I do not see with the same eyes 
I did fifty years ago, nor are 
my legs the same, either, so 
tired now from half a century 
of mostly waiting around 
for my name to be called.