. 2. By the oily Rock River: factory nights

In the late sixties, in my sixteenth and seventeenth years, I underwent a basic meltdown, and put my parents through a harrowing ordeal which they did not deserve, and which they did nothing to cause. I ran away repeatedly, on one occasion to the island of Bimini in the Caribbean, where, stepping out of a bar, [...]

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. 5. Bohemia on the Mississippi

In later years: amid the bones of bohemia Once I began publishing poetry and some criticism in the 90s, I had hopes of finding the sort of bohemian literary community I had known a decade earlier when I had worked and rather starved in the Dinkytown neighborhood of Minneapolis for a number of years in [...]

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. 8. Along the stripling Thames: in search of the Scholar Gipsy

As mentioned in the section “literary nationalism” (‘the river ran red: literary wars’), the so-called ‘poetry wars’ of the early ’90s left me in a state of considerable expasperation for many reasons, one of which was the charge that to write in rhyme and meter was to place oneself in a relationship of indentured servitude [...]

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. 9. By the banks of the Seine: paupers & Symbolists

My wife Marian was cheated of a life in Paris by Adolf Hitler. Her natural mother, a Jew, whom she never knew, was a performer in the Paris theatre before the war. By 1945, in a state of expectancy, she had fled to Montreal, in all probability to escape the Gestapo sweeps which would have [...]

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