I was born in 1938 in Augsburg, Germany, the eldest and only boy of five children. My father was an artist who supported himself by working as a teacher and later in life, as an industrial designer. My mother was trained as a concert singer who chose not to pursue a career in order to devote herself to her family. Toward the end of World War II, I entered grade school in a small village where my family was evacuated after a bombing raid. By 1949, I was back in Augsburg and entered the gymnasium where my father taught art.
When I was 14, my family immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Rochester, N.Y. I finished high school there and went on to college at St. Bonaventure University and to graduate school at Yale.
When I was 14, my family immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Rochester, N.Y. I finished high school there and went on to college at St. Bonaventure University and to graduate school at Yale.
After a brief spell on the faculty of Nazareth College in Rochester, I joined the English Department at SUNY/Buffalo, where I taught until my retirement. In the course of my career, I produced a handful of scholarly and critical essays (Spenser and Shakespeare, modern East Germany poetry, and early opera), but worked chiefly as a teacher of undergraduate literature courses and as a poet/translator. (During the late ‘60s and early ‘70s I was also fairly embroiled in anti-war and civil rights protests.) I began seriously working in poetry when I arrived in Buffalo, at a time when the campus was buzzing with literary activity. (John Logan, John Barth, Robert Creeley, Lionel Abel, Raymond Federman, Dwight MacDonald and Leslie Fiedler were all on the faculty).
My first substantial collection of poems, Pat Sonnets, appeared in 2000. Along the way, I also produced a chapbook, All the Weight of the Still Midnight (Outriders, 1972; 2nd. ed. 2013) and two self-published monographs. A new volume, No Cartoons, was published in 2011. Over the years, almost 200 of my poems appeared in journals including American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Shenandoah. My short story, “The Scythe of Saturn” was among the winning entries in the first annual Stand Magazine International Short Story Competition in Newcastle-on-Tyne (England).
From 1966 onward, I have also been active as a translator, at first principally of poetry from German, especially the Austrian expressionist, Georg Trakl. I also translated into German (in collaboration with Hubert Kulterer) Tulli Kupferberg’s 1001 Ways to Live without Working. This appeared in Vienna (Austria) in 1971 and has recently been reissued in Germany. I have also been a frequent regional poetry administrator, as a charter member of Niagara-Erie Writers, a regional writers' collective; and as director of several summer poetry festivals, including one at Artpark in Lewiston, N.Y. I have been Director of the Outriders Poetry Project since 1969. I ran it as a reading series between 1969 and 1980 and relaunched it as a small press in 2009. My most recent contribution to the press was as compiler and editor of An Outriders Anthology.
My first substantial collection of poems, Pat Sonnets, appeared in 2000. Along the way, I also produced a chapbook, All the Weight of the Still Midnight (Outriders, 1972; 2nd. ed. 2013) and two self-published monographs. A new volume, No Cartoons, was published in 2011. Over the years, almost 200 of my poems appeared in journals including American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Shenandoah. My short story, “The Scythe of Saturn” was among the winning entries in the first annual Stand Magazine International Short Story Competition in Newcastle-on-Tyne (England).
From 1966 onward, I have also been active as a translator, at first principally of poetry from German, especially the Austrian expressionist, Georg Trakl. I also translated into German (in collaboration with Hubert Kulterer) Tulli Kupferberg’s 1001 Ways to Live without Working. This appeared in Vienna (Austria) in 1971 and has recently been reissued in Germany. I have also been a frequent regional poetry administrator, as a charter member of Niagara-Erie Writers, a regional writers' collective; and as director of several summer poetry festivals, including one at Artpark in Lewiston, N.Y. I have been Director of the Outriders Poetry Project since 1969. I ran it as a reading series between 1969 and 1980 and relaunched it as a small press in 2009. My most recent contribution to the press was as compiler and editor of An Outriders Anthology.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s I spent a series of happy summers in Perugia learning Italian, and eventually began to translate from that language. The Liberation of Jerusalem, my version of Torquato Tasso’s epic, Gerusalemme liberata, was brought out in 2009 by Oxford University Press. It was followed by my verse translation of Love Poems for Lucrezia Benadidia (the First Book of Tasso's Rime), published by Italica Press in 2011. In recent years, I completed the first English translation of Andrea da Barberino’s The Royal House of France . I am now working on a version of Tasso’s first epic, Rinaldo.
By my first marriage, I have a daughter who works as a therapist with troubled teens in Massachusetts. I retired from teaching in 2005, and married my second wife, Katka Hammond, in 2006. We live in Buffalo's pleasant West Side. For further details about me, please consult my Wikipedia profile. The dry career facts can be found in my Curriculum Vitae.
By my first marriage, I have a daughter who works as a therapist with troubled teens in Massachusetts. I retired from teaching in 2005, and married my second wife, Katka Hammond, in 2006. We live in Buffalo's pleasant West Side. For further details about me, please consult my Wikipedia profile. The dry career facts can be found in my Curriculum Vitae.
