He also briefly served as Director of the Brockport Writers Forum, a series of readings by and video interviews with numerous American and international authors.
He spent the 1971–1972 academic year as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American literature at the Leibniz University Hannover, West Germany.
These experiences, combined with his own family history (including an uncle who served in the German army), resulted in three volumes of poetry on the subject published over the next 32 years.
Other collections are Noise in the Trees (1974), The Swastika Poems (1977), Long Island Light (1979), Erika: Poems of the Holocaust (1984), Pterodactyl Rose (1991), Crazy Horse In Stillness (1996),[6] Pig Notes & Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry (1998), Diana, Charles, & the Queen (1998), Shoah Train (2003), which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry in 2004, The Angel Voices (Mayapple Press, 2010), and most recently Straight’s Suite for Craig Cotter & Frank O’Hara (Mayapple Press, 2012) .
Selections of his poems have been translated into Italian (by poet Frank Judge), into Swedish (by Stewe Claeson) and into German.