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Author's Note The house I grew up in brimmed with poetry books. Both my parents were zealous readers, writers, and teachers of poetry. My father joked that my first words had been Milton’s "Of Man’s first disobedience...." By 15, I was spending five nights a week at the University of Washington attending my father’s workshops or student readings. For ten years, this was my social life, education, career, and, essentially, my family. Throughout college I worked at University of Washington Press, albeit as a lowly warehouseman. I attained a degree in cinema, making a handful of short films that incorporated poetry. After graduation, I dropped film: poetry was considerably easier to finance, not to mention produce. To support myself I managed a local wholesale distributor, a blind alley. Not much can be said for those years except that I can still spot a Rubbermaid #2957 from 100 yards. The best thing that ever happened to me was getting laid off. I spent a year enjoying my new marriage. Meanwhile, I had turned my writing almost exclusively to lyrics and
music for a terminally unknown power-pop band, Walk Don’t Walk. With the help of my
bass player’s wife, who was in the book business, I landed a position as office
manager with Seattle’s Madrona Publishers. There I also scored a few editing
assignments. These in turn got me a job at Microsoft when Madrona closed its doors in
1988: for an editor, Microsoft wanted a computer illiterate with publishing experience.
Since then I have learned more than I thought I would ever care to know about The band expired after nine years, and my new obsession became Tarpon: a 30-foot, 60-year-old cruiser. My wife and I lived aboard for a year and a half, cruising intermittently around Seattle’s Lake Union, and escaping as often as possible to dry places such as Yakima. With the arrival of our son, we relented and bought a house in the suburbs. This began a new period in my writing. We took biannual trips to Europe—it’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have to finance a wooden boat. I rediscovered black-and-white photography—and the poems of Albert Goldbarth, which inspired me to take a fresh tack with my own poetry. Most of the pieces in Grace & Desolation come from this period. A friend once told me he couldn’t write a poem that didn’t concern the "big things." (I visualized something on the order of an abominable snowman.) I was taught to avoid writing "political poems," since polemic tends to overcome the poetry. But politics, a four-letter word these days, is difficult to transcend. I hope these pieces sufficiently leaven tirade with particulars, the desolation with grace.
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