I have loved poetry since my teenage years decades ago when I first read Keats and Dickinson and Frost. I enjoyed the way poets sharpen and bind together words, first, to tear open the mended world, and then reveal beneath the repair patch an original astonishment.  Reading poetry aroused in me the urge to write. I began with the sweet rhythmic rhymes of standard juvenilia. As the collision of experience and language continued, my poems took forms more faithful to the punch-and-jab pugilistic nature of life.