I spent my twenties and early thirties as a musician, writing songs and forming pop/rock bands in what turned out to be a vain effort to become famous, or even self-supporting. It was fun, and I might have kept it up indefinitely, except that I found that songwriting had stopped affording me a language in which to express what I wanted to say. Also, I got sick and had to give up the drink-and-drugs musician's lifestyle, and no longer enjoyed carrying heavy equipment out of bars at 3 a.m. while everyone else was sloshed.
          I decided to write stories. I reset my internal clock, rising at 7 in the morning instead of 3 in the afternoon, and wrote for a couple of hours before going to work -- my first actual steady employment. (I still hold that job today, as a writer for Communities In Schools, a national stay-in-school program.) This was about 10 years ago. Since then, I've published fiction in a variety of literary mags, including Missouri Review, Five Points, and Northwest Review. I got a Pushcart Prize nomination but, alas, no prize.
          In 1994, a friend died, slowly and with great dignity. I wanted to write about it, but it didn't work as fiction. Suddenly, poems arrived, and they seemed to work better. So I kept at it, and now publish poetry about as often as stories. Quite a bit of my stuff has appeared in British journals, as I find that U.K. poetry is often a lot closer to my own sense of what a poem should sound like and accomplish.
          As to that, I don't have any aesthetic of writing poetry. I try to write things that any literate person can grasp and be moved by. If I subscribe to any motto or program, it would be Philip Larkin's. He said something to the effect that he wanted his poems, once read, to be completely understood, without need of explication or interpretation. An academic's nightmare, but I am happy to give them nightmares -- they gave me enough of them.
          I've also carved out a minor niche as a -- what? critic, interpreter, fan -- of the work of Vladimir Nabokov. Interested readers can find my essays in The Southern Review, The Nabokovian, and the Vladimir Nabokov Society's on-line journal, Zembla. The Zembla site also contains a centennial poem I wrote for VN. It mimics the "Onegin stanza" so beloved by him.
          Presently, I'm married to my second and final wife, the Welsh novelist Roberta Murphy, and live outside Washington, DC. I teach part-time at the Writer's Center. The past couple of years I've returned to music in a small way, recording new songs in a modest basement studio and playing and singing everything myself – which permits, I just now realized, the same sort of comfy isolation as writing. You can hear one of them by clicking here. It's entitled "Portrait of the Artist"; perhaps you should listen to it on Bloomsday.
          NDR has kindly offered to post a bit more of my poetry, so here are four poems prompted by that dreadful death in 1994. They appeared originally in Envoi, to whom many thanks.