Brief Bio
I studied writing under a private tutorial, at the University of Michigan, with the poet Robert Hayden and edited both Hayden’s Collected Prose (University of Michigan Press) and his Collected Poems (Liveright). I hold a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from U of M, the latter in English. At the college and university level, I taught rhetoric, American and non-Western literature, humanities, world religions, etc., for ten years.
I lived for more than fifteen years outside Michigan—in Japan, where I taught at Gunma University in Maebashi; in Arizona, on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation, site of one of the largest internment camps for Japanese-Americans during WWII; in Illinois, on the central farmlands and on the Mississippi; ultimately returning to my suburban hometown of Rochester.
A Fulbright-Hays scholar to China in 1994, I studied at Beijing University, the Buddhist Mogao Caves on the old Silk Road, and elsewhere in China, including Hong Kong and the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. While a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar in 1995 on India, I further explored the conflicts between the traditional regional civilizations of Islamic and Hindu cultures and modernity.
I have been an outspoken advocate of the United Nations and was an accredited participant at the UN Millennium Forum (2000).
Given the radicalization and the spiritual, moral, and intellectual decline of the humanities in the university, the pervasive nihilism and Marxism underlying deconstruction and other academic theories, the obsession with the self in poetry and literary studies, the corrupting professionalization of both, the duplicities of race politics, and the exploitation of teaching assistants and adjunct faculty, to name only a few of the commonly cited maladies, I resigned from Oakland University in 1996.
I believe the university has often failed the best interests of poetry, literature, and culture, as have publishing and the media. Under the aegis of scientism, further decline demonstrates that respect for the humanites, which no longer seriously engage with the vital spiritual issues of human experience, their raison d’etre, appears but a remote memory, held, it seems, only by Stendhal’s "lucky few."
Since the mid-1970s I’ve been a member of the Reform Bahai Faith, which traces its roots to 1844, a modern religious movement that is paradoxically an unorganized, universal religion, recognizing the truth of all the great religious traditions, while
affirming the Enlightenment values of
the separation of church and state, science and reason, the non-exclusivism of religious truth, and the unity of all peoples, grounded in democratic pluralism, protected by an international body of global cooperative governance, a "spiritual democracy," as Abdul-Baha often envisioned it.
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