Rupert Schmitt has been a teacher and an underground laborer. A full time writer and performance poet he loves water and lives in the Sonoran desert. As a youth while walking a breakwater with Black Mountain poet Charles Olson, ignoring the imposing BMC icon, Rupert scratched the back of a huge angler fish.

He climbed Douglas-firs and big leaf maples with ropes and a chain saw and became an expert in wetlands, Millipedes and toxics. After a brief workshop with Charles Stafford, Stafford said Good Luck. Rupert moved away looking at him. Stafford kept looking at Rupert like a friend at the...