San Francisco, CA
Born 1945, Toronto, Canada
Painter, poet, translator, teacher
"...as if art derived from an inability to find solutions." -Samuel Beckett.
Working, I am always in a present moment that consists of and insists upon looking forwards and backwards at the same time. I'm interested in what we can know, or what we can ask, and how poetry is a form of this asking and knowing, this trying to remember or foresee, grasping the ungraspable and playing with it in a territory of risk and of permission. One of my concerns is song, the lyric and its contradictions. Another is time, the sense of time in a form. Another concern is memory, its history in the word, and what happens when words are placed by or near each other.
We attend to each other. Informed by the world, poetry goes back out into the world, and the world returns with the text. Experience and imagination are in a dynamic relationship of gesture -- the body in motion -- between idea and thing. So the body of the poem, its voices and images, fill the space between, for a time.
1968 M.A., French Language and Literature, University of Toronto
1966 B.A., Modern Languages and Literature (French and Italian), University of Toronto
2004-6 Collective Memory, installation, performance, and publication for "Poetry and its Arts: Bay Area Interactions 1954-2004," California Historical Society, San Francisco, CA
2005 SCOUT, text/image work in CD ROM format, Krupskaya Press
2002 SPINOZA IN HER YOUTH, Omnidawn Press
2001 Stay Songs, for Stanley Whitney, Bill Maynes Gallery, New York
1996 Contrafact, Potes & Poets Press
1996 MOIRA, O Books
2004 The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen, Fouad Gabriel Naffah, Post-Apollo Press
2003 Notebooks, Danielle Collobert, Litmus Press
2000 Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, Burning Deck
2004 Creative Work Fund Grant
2003, 1999, 1994 Fund for Poetry Grant
2000 Richardson Award for Non-Fiction Prose, Poetics of Vertigo
1992 Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award for Poetry
