I am a 63 year old native of New York City. My life as a serious poet began in the summer of 1968 when after having returned from sailing the North Atlantic I found myself sharing a houseboat at Gate 5 Sausalito, Ca., about 10 km north of San Francisco. It was a hotbed of creative artists and I rubbed shoulders with the likes of the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Alan Watts of Zen philosophy renown. The most fortuitous happening for me was when a friend wrote on a scrap of paper, "Hungry for breath like a kite falling stray,
the wire grows slack
the child within pulls at the empty air."
The author's name was Jack Campbell.
We had grown close, he was ten years my senior and a professor of literature at a Bay Area university. When I commented on its profundity & clarity, his
response was that until my pieces could stand alone as a "complete thought" I was not a poet. I took it to very much to heart and it has proven to be the bedrock of my authorship. D'Agate