Gary Lemons

I've been so lucky in my life that when i most needed guidance teachers have miraculously appeared. Starting with my first meditation teacher, Rudi Schuster, right through all the gifted poets I studied under like the brilliant Norman Dubie, Marvin Bell, Donald Justice and John Berryman up to today with my yoga teacher Erich Schiffmann and dear friends like Anne Jablonski. My teachers have been the blessing that has held my life together when it might have come apart.

I was also given two amazing sets of grand parents as a child, two sets of loving and wise parents and awesome brothers and a sister--i'm grateful to the lineage i know as family both in the immediate sense as well as in extension.

And i save for last my forever love and huge admiration for my wife--the brave and gifted sculptor Nöle Giulini--

My poetry now draws from all of this--from my yoga students and community, my decades of work in the woods and with my hands in the air and on the sea, my academic background at the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa and from the sense of play that has run like a fire through the dry times when things leaned toward the serious. The play I learned from my animals--my horses, my cats and mostly from my sweet dogs--especially from the recently departed and always cherished little Lila--whose name is Sanskrit for Divine Play. Laughter matters more to me than just about anything these days. It opens the windows--lets the light in.