| |  | The poet is in his 70's now and has lead a peaceful life since
his marriage almost 40 years ago. But his 20's-- the time he
came of age-- were more like Dickens's '...the best of times, the
worst of times...'. At 20 he went to England to do his junior
year abroad. A couple years after college he suffered a major
clinical depression; he almost drowned in a Vermont river and
had a near-death experience, one that shook his former agnosticism to the
core. He was opposed to the Vietnam War yet for some reason, still rather
inscrutable to him, he went to teach ESL in the war zone of Phnom-Penh,
Cambodia, in '73-'74. There he developed a deep affection for the
Cambodian people, and though he heard stories about the brutality of the
Khmer Rouge towards their own people, he could not believe they would
have been capable of the genocide of the 'Killing Fields'. After the war
forced him to leave Cambodia, he spent over a year teaching ESL in Taipei
and later Tokyo. A year after he returned, he met the woman he would
marry. Some of his poems are about the strange thing called aging and its
paradox of wearing down the body while gradually-- or so it seems to him--
freeing the soul. The rest try to explore that inexplicable Mystery
permeating each one of us as it seems to manifest Itself every so often,
in ways subtle or strange. At times the poet has felt that life is just one long
dream, and he has dreamed such dreams many, many times before. Recently a publisher put out a paperback collection of his poems under the title, 'The Enormity of Existence', a title Nolo chose as he's known for 1/2 a century that the problem with life is not that it is meaningless, as some would hold, but that it is so replete with meaning that at best we can only grasp a minute portion, for each of us is trapped in a dream, and cannot see beyond the walls of whatever dream is being dreamt. |