He immersed himself in teaching school and virtually left his poetry behind. He prepared his lessons and spent all day in classes during the week. On Saturdays he coached a soccer team and on Sunday he played soccer himself. "Life was good," he says. Eventually, his renown as a teacher earned him a series of promotions, to principal, then to the university level and finally to the university administration at South Hampton Institute of Education. By then he was earning a good salary, but he wasn't teaching and he wasn't writing much and he was unhappy.

"I didn't whistle, I didn't sing, I was going to die," he says. So he quit and for a year, "I didn't make a cent." He wrote children's programs for the BBC for a while, but eventually he returned to his poetry.

"I had to make a choice: Am I an educator or a poet?" he recalls.

He began writing more while also accepting poetry reading engagements and teaching university courses. He worked during the week and on weekends retired to a farm he kept in Wales, where he could do his writing.

He accepted an invitation to teach summer term at the University of Washington and discovered he liked it. He did this for several years in the '70s. One of his doctoral students had connections at BYU, and one thing led to another. He was invited to give public readings and lectures for two weeks at BYU. In 1983, at the age of 61, he was asked to teach at BYU for six months. He wound up staying two decades.

For seventy hardening

seasons I've watched

the stopping of waterfalls.

some of the time

I knew and perhaps

understood how water

changed in winter,

Story continues below

what happened to molecules,

how the structures

of elements could petrify

In a night from bounding liquid to

an obdurate smoothness.

Not any longer.

All that's confusing now.

I am content to

watch the world turn cold

with its old grace. — Excerpt from "Bridal Veil Falls, Early Winter"

"I'd never heard of Provo," he says. "I had never seen anything like that. The snow was dirty by the roads. There was not a bit of green. Kitty said to me, 'Do you think you can make it for six weeks?' But there it is. We've been here all these years. Although it is a beautiful place, it is mainly because of the people we are here. They have been very welcoming. I don't think there was another gentile on the staff when I came."

Years later, they sold their house in Sussex when they realized they were here to stay.

"The students were very much a revelation to me," he says. "They are able and hardworking. There was no tension as there was in some universities at that time. If I made an assignment, it would be done. It was a pleasure for me to go to school. What I taught in my classes was more intense than I had taught previously. Some of it had been part of my doctoral classes."