After high school I worked on crews that travelled the U.S. doing field work for topographic maps. At age 21 I decided to be a painter and went to the Art Students League in New York, an atelier school in which students choose artist/instructors and work in studios free of academic requirements. I soon learned I would be a landscape painter (my preference for the outdoors asserting itself). During my second year at the League I was drafted into the Army for 2 years- in Korea for one of those years. Upon discharge I went to Italy, worked at landscape painting and discovered my passion for poetry, learning what I could by reading the great poetry of the past. In Florence I married an Englishwoman and had one daughter. Eventually we decided to separate. I returned to the U.S. after 7 years, realizing that in Italy I would forever be a visitor, and to develop in art I had to live within my native culture and landscape. I have lived in New York, Maine and now Massachusetts, making a living as a housepainter and carpenter, all the while continuing to write and paint, showing in New York and Boston galleries and beginning to publish poems, eventually in the Goose River annual Anthologies, leading up to this, my first published collection. I am married to Patricia Cobb, a visual artist, and we have two grown daughters.