As a child, I was reading at 4, on a third grade level.  My first poem was written when I was, I believe, 4 or 5.  It felt comfortable, like my worn out teddy, a place I could go where nothing would follow me.  I wrote all through school, and into college, where I wasted a colossal amount of time and learned nothing other than I was certainly not destined for academie.  So life went on as lives do, and I wrote for myself, to entertain myself.  I wrote as a form of therapy.  It kept me relatively sane.  Note that relatively is the operative word, and I describe it as neither good nor bad.  My major influences were eclectic.  Millay, certainly, but I lived and breathed Dorothy Parker and the whole Algonquin bunch.  e.e. cummings, obviously, and some brief infatuation with t. s. eliot, all the lower case guys.  I totally identify with Marge Piercy, and believe Maya Angelou to be a saint.  She does not need canonization.  She's there already. And then, of course there's the fact that I'm an old, worn out anarchist who wants nothing more than to return to a house by the sea to live out what's left, writing my poems to the night songs of owls and tree frogs, quilting in the good strong clear unadulterated sunlight through my North window.  I will ask no more of life than that.

I have achieved nothing, been certified at least once, and have never been awarded anything.