Bio
I was born and raised in Northern New England, spending my adolescence and teen years roaming New Hampshire’s Eden-like lakes, rivers, mountains, and small towns. If ever there was fertile ground for the development of poetry, it’s New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and they schooled me when I was a youth in natural rhythms of flora and fauna that spoke to me in a language full of longing, promise, and eroticism that rapturously rhymed with my body and mind. I hiked forest trails that led me up New Hampshire’s 4,000-footers to stand in sunlight and occasionally starlight with my consciousness awake and aware of my belonging to all of it. On 90-degree days, I played naked in lakes fed by snowmelt, their icy water smoothly feeling up my body, torrid winds wicking and licking water off me with their hot tongues, these early experiences of natural intimacy giving me my first definition of poetry.
I earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Salem State University (Salem, Massachusetts), then a Master of Science for Teachers (MST) degree in American Literature from the University of New Hampshire. By the time I was ready for college, I fortunately knew nothing of poetry’s so-called rules and regulations, how a poem should be written, what topics were permissible and which were forbidden, or the creative writing shibboleths of editors, critics, and English teachers that actually demean and obfuscate the creative process. Although in high school I had found (or had been found by) Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, poetry didn’t come alive for me until I fell in among college liberal arts professors for whom poetry was an accurate chronicle of Space/Time as well as metaphysical nourishment. To this day, I remember the University of New Hampshire’s Professor Edmund G. Miller walking nonchalantly among his students while perfectly and movingly reciting lines from Wordsworth’s The Prelude from memory, and I happily recall Professor G. Harris Daggett, a glass of porter beer in one hand, leading several of his graduate students at a local tavern in reciting a rousing rendition of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, “The Bells.” The most important lesson I learned in college about poetry is that a poem is a telescope for searching, discovering, and examining the universe of thoughts.
I then taught English for one year at Masconomet Regional High School in Topsfield MA before the then-universal military draft caught up with me. It was a rewarding year, introducing me to those paternal feelings that adults have for adolescents emerging at long last from their childhood cocoons, as well as reintroducing me to the overpowering, all-encompassing forces of teenage angst.
It took my experiences as an officer in the U. S. Navy during the Vietnam Era to really bring poetry to the forefront of my life as a means of personal expression, intimate exploration of existence, and direct association with metaphysics. The Navy sent me to cryptography school, so I learned new ways to use numbers and the alphabet. I served as an Assistant Operations Officer at Commander Anti-Submarine Warfare Forces Pacific before being sent to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis MD to teach English, sea power, and naval history to midshipmen. It was at the U.S. Naval Academy that I met my husband, another naval officer, and we celebrated our 50th anniversary together in September 2024. During my time in the Navy, I wrote many of the poems published in my first poetry collection, War Poet.
After leaving the U.S. Navy in 1972, I taught English at Northern Virginia Community College’s Annandale Campus. Because of my unique security background, I was subsequently hired by the U.S. Navy at Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific (SWFPAC) at Bangor WA as a writer/editor in their administrative department, and I later became the first civilian security officer for Naval Submarine Base Bangor. I was promoted to a security position with Naval Sea Systems Command at Crystal City in Arlington VA, and for the final eight years of my federal employment, I worked as a writer/editor for the Inspector General of the Department of Energy in downtown Washington, DC. I retired in 1997 and moved with my husband to Bainbridge Island WA, thus ending my 25-year technical writing career as I settled into the Pacific Northwest’s eternal greenery with winters that never stayed all that cold, springs that promised sun and warmth, summers that usually failed to deliver on springs’ promises, and autumns not really all that much different from winter.
My life has come full circle: I’m spending my final years roaming Washington State’s Eden-like lakes, rivers, mountains, and small towns. If ever there was fertile ground for the development of poetry, it’s the Puget Sound’s Olympic and Cascade Mountains, and they school me, now that I’m awake and aware, in natural rhythms of flora and fauna that speak to me in a language full of longing, promise, and eroticism that still rapturously rhyme with my body and mind.
With warm regards,
Rob Jacques
