DAVID B. AXELROD

For all the intervening years of fun, UMass still feels like glory days to me. I'm thrilled when I hear from fellow UMies and friends. Feel free to email me at axelrodthepoet@yahoo.com

Graduate school felt right to me. As long as they were paying and I wasn't working, how bad could that be? In fact, I may have at least tied the record for the longest case of a prolonged adolescence--with 13 1/2 years of full-time college.

I have a truly immodest CV on line at my website, www.poetrydoctor.org, but suffice it to say: Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, M.A.; University of Iowa Writers Workshops, M.F.A.; Union Institute, Non-profit Program Design and Administration, Ph.D.; other grad schools along the way (Penn State and SUNY Stony Brook).

After all that college, I walk with a limp...

Then, I stayed in the SUNY system and taught creative writing and English for 40 years. I was always a writer who taught, not a teacher who wrote, so now that I am not in the classroom, I am not retired, I just write all the more.

For my part, I have always been proud to be a YAHOO, though I sure wish I were the progenitor of the internet manifestation of that name now. If you don't recall our college magazine, YAHOO, consider that when I edited it, it was said that college humor magazines all wanted to be a combination of THE NEW YORKER and PLAYBOY. (You know, you can pretend you are buying it to read, but ahhh, the pictures.)

Or, you can simply reference GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. I am certainly still a Yahoo—that odd creature you will find among the trees--only I have tried to find my better nature, avoiding the violence, cheating, stealing. I suppose I am kind of a Buddhist Yahoo: First, do no harm; then, try to help. The result is, for all my years, people have either enjoyed my presence and my sense of humor or ducked for cover.

I see a button below this entry for our "School Story" which asks for "Military Service." Know that I started in AFROTC and got tossed out for medical reasons just as I decided to quit. Many of the fellows who went through ROTC were shipped off to Vietnam, where some got killed. The epigram for that war should always be, "What was that about?" Enough said on that...

I've traveled the world and lived in enough countries to be grateful to live here. Mine is a fortunate life in a plentiful land--but I go with a friend's tag line: "Remember, if you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention." If I lose my finely-tuned sense of injustice, I will be sad. I'd like to fight the good fight--firing my poems and articles at injustice for as long as I am able. Then, to belie any accusations that I am a pacifist, when I am unable, incontinent and a nuisance, please shoot me.

Call or email me and we can continue this story...

David "Axel" Axelrod