He taught American literature and creative writing at SUNY–Brockport for over 30 years before retiring in 2000. He briefly served as the director of the
Brockport Writers Forum, a series of readings by and video interviews with numerous American and international authors. His work has been published in numerous literary journals and periodicals including
The New Yorker,
The Ontario Review, ''
Harper's, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review
and online publications like Exit-Online''. His work has also been published in 200 anthologies, in dozens of limited-edition chapbooks and broadsides, and in audio recordings. He spent the 1971–1972 academic year as a Senior
Fulbright Lecturer in American literature at the
Leibniz University Hannover,
West Germany. During this time, he visited a number of
Holocaust sites. The experiences combined with his own family history (including an uncle who was in the
German army), resulted in three volumes of poetry on the subject published over the next 32 years. He has been awarded NEA, Guggenheim, American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters, and other prizes. Prior to the publication of his first collection, a privately printed ephemeral edition of the poem "The Mower," including several drafts, was printed in softcover. The final version of "The Mower" appeared in his first collection,
Depth of Field (1970). Other collections are
Noise in the Trees (1974),
The Swastika Poems (1977),
Long Island Light (1979),
Erika: Poems of the Holocaust (1984),
Pterodactyl Rose (1991),
Crazy Horse In Stillness (1996),
Pig Notes & Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry (1998),
Diana, Charles, & the Queen (1998),
Shoah Train (2003), which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry in 2004,
The Angel Voices (
Mayapple Press, 2010), and most recently
Straight’s Suite for Craig Cotter & Frank O’Hara (
Mayapple Press, 2012). He also wrote a novel,
Vic Holyfield and the Class of ’57 (1986). Selections of his poems have been translated into Italian (by poet
Frank Judge), into Swedish (by Stewe Claeson) and into German. He edited two major collections of poetry,
The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets, and
American Poets in 1976. He is also the editor of
September 11, 2001: American Poets Respond (2002). Many of his manuscripts, correspondence, and his collection of first editions of modern American authors are archived in the Rare Books Collection at the
University of Rochester in
Rochester, New York; at
Boston University, at the
Beinecke Library at
Yale University, and at the
University of New Hampshire in
Durham. In 2004, he was one of the five finalists for the
National Book Award for poetry for his volume
Shoah Train. Other volumes of the past few years are
September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (2002) a collection of short stories,
The Hummingbird Corporation (2003), and a collection of 30 years of essays called Home: Autobiographies, etc. His most recent collections are
Confessions of Doc Williams and Other Poems (2006) and
Titanic & Iceberg: Early Essays and Reviews (2006). ==References==