At age 15, Jeff left home and joined a carnival sideshow troupe, shilling the eastern seaboard. Authorities apprehended him and returned him to his mother. At 16, he left again. For the last two years of adolescence, he was raised by a kindly Aunt and Uncle.

In 1973, panicky and looking for an answer to the Viet Nam dilemma, Jeff (cagily) enlisted in the Army, figuring not to be noticed there by those in charge of wars. As planned, he ended up in Europe, where he spent his days writing Army staff papers and the rest of the time traveling around. Upon his return, he attended University briefly. Then in 1978, with a partner, he opened a second-hand record store, Festoon's Records, across from the grad school at Yale. At the time, Festoon's was the only store of its kind between Boston and New York and was so unique, it earned an entry in The Catalog of Cool (Gene Sculatti, Warner Books, New York, 1979).

Jeff moved to Boston in the early 80s to babysit a second store, and spent eighteen months in Denver in 1987-88 designing and nurturing Compact Discovery, an early CD superstore. In '89, He came back to the Boston area and started a mail-order record business selling remaindered and cut out LP's, (yes, vinyl !) In '96, he moved the business to his home in North Andover, Massachusetts where he now lives with his lovely wife, Barbara Hyle. Since 2000, Jeff has worked a regular job as a Client Services Manager for Inforonics, Inc., a premium business and technology solutions provider in Littleton, Massachusetts.

Jeff's poetry has been published in The Aurorean, Meanie Magazine, Recursive Angel, 15 Credibility Street, The Unpublished Author, The Hudson Street Review, The Pictish League, a few one issue start-ups, and in countless Army training manuals. Three poems have won awards in the annual Lawrence Eagle-Tribune Poetry Contest. One (Her Unusual Journey) took first place in 1999.

He enjoys the surrealists, especially Eluard. He also likes Paul Haenel, Pound, Frost, Cummings, Seamus Heaney, Jane Kenyon, Jeffrey McDaniel, Erica Funkhouser, Anne Carson, Tony Hoagland, Stanley Kunitz, and his grandmother, Dorothy Cowles Pinkney. DCP was a prolific writer, publishing short stories and poems in over 75 magazines and literary journals between the 1930s and1970s. She won seven awards or prizes, including three Kaleidograph Awards, two Step Ladder Awards, the Lola Ridge Memeorial Award, and the 1934 Poetry Society of America Prize for the poem "Without a Candle". She published only one collection of her poetry, The Town Not Yet Awake: A First Book of Poems, in 1956. Thanks to Ray Lovell for the DCP research.

Thanks for visiting. Jeff hopes that while reading his work, you run across an image that affects at least one of your senses. In any event, he welcomes your comments about the poems.