I was born in San Francisco on January 7, 1935. My mother, Frances Hayden, and my father, Howard Johnson Abbott, had been married for over ten years, and my sister, Nancy Hayden, had been born on April 2, 1926. That she was nine years older than me became very important later on. During the summer after I was born, my mother took my sister and me to New York by train, stopping in Minneapolis to visit my father's parents, Howard Strickland and Mary Johnson Abbott. In New York she took up residence with her mother, Frances Stenersen. My grandmother had taken Hamilton Stenersen (known as Tony---actually Big Tony, since I was now little Tony) as her third husband at some point, and they lived in an apartment in Manhattan. As a baby I suffered from bilateral club feet, and a number of surgeries were required to remedy the problem, and throughout my early childhood I was very self-conscious about my feet and about not being able to walk or run like other children. I eventually got over it, but I still get asked frequently why I am limping. I just finished a poem called "The Man Who Walks Funny," which deals with that. Ironically, I no longer limp, because in December of 2000 I had a complete hip replacement, which solved the problem.

My mother divorced my father and married a lawyer from Mississippi named William R. Covington, whom I called Bill. We moved to Norwalk, Connecticut, where we lived in a series of houses, first in South Norwalk on the corner of Soundview and Highland Avenues, and then on Newtown Avenue in Norwalk. I have revisited those locations in recent years.

I liked school, and I did well in school. School was orderly, it was safe, and you knew what to expect and what was expected of you. Vacations were another matter. I seldom knew where I was going, who was going to take care of me, and what was going to happen next. Sometimes I stayed with Bill in his apartment in Greenwich Village. Sometimes I stayed with my mother at the hotel on Madison Avenue and 92^nd St. where she had gotten a job. After my sister got married to Leonard C. Gordon, I stayed with them. I stayed with Warren and Gwenn Chapin in South Norwalk,--across the street from one of the houses in which we had  lived.  By the late ‘40’s my father’s sister, Emily Abbott, had married the painter, B.J.O. Nordfeldt, and had moved to New Jersey from Minneapolis. After that I frequently stayed with them at their home outside Lambertville.

During the summer of my ninth year (1944) things began to get worse and worse in the family. My sister, now eighteen, graduated from high school, and I was sent off to a boys’ camp nearby (Camp Saugatuck). At the end of the summer Bill came to pick me up and announced that I was going to boarding school. My mother was sick, my sister, Nancy, had moved to New York to get a job, and the family home was gone. I was sent to the Fay School in Southborough, Massachusetts, where I remained for five years, graduating from Fay in 1949, in the eighth grade.

Anthony Abbott and his sister, Nancy

From time to time I visited my grandparents, the Stenersens, at places they had rented during the summer. And later,  after my grandmother’s death, I stayed with Tony Stenersen at his apartment near Lexington and 48^th St. I considered myself a New Yorker, because that was my base of operations, and I memorized every railroad station between Framingham, Mass. (Fay School) and New York City.

During my eleventh year (1947) I discovered that I was being sent to school by my godmother, Marion Somers Lowe,  who had been my mother’s best friend in San Francisco. I did not know she existed, because she had kept herself out of the picture, preferring to work through family members, primarily Bill Covington. But when Bill left New York to begin a new life for himself and his new wife, Muriel, Marion Lowe had no choice but to come forward. But what she did was to engage my father, who had since remarried, to take care of me. So I was flown to San Francisco, to spend the summer with my father and stepmother, Helen Wolfe, at a ranch in the Sacramento Valley, not far from Marysville. My father and Helen had two children, Martha and Bill, and the summer was an awkward one for me because they were much younger, and I simply did not have enough to do. The following summer my father and Helen moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where I spent part of the summer. I was finally able to visit my godmother at her ranch just outside Santa Cruz, Cal., in a little community called Bonny Doon.

This period of my life, from 1944 to 1949, is the basis for my novel, LEAVING MAGGIE HOPE, which won the Novello Award for Literature and was published in the fall of 2003 by Novello Press of Charlotte.

Between 1949 and 1953 I attended Kent School in Kent, Conn, in the northwest corner of the state, very close to both the New York and Massachusetts state lines. Our great rivals were Hotchkiss, Loomis, Taft, Choate, Berkshire and Trinity-Pawling. I loved Kent, and was active in soccer and wrestling as well as drama, debate, and journalism. I worked on the weekly newspaper, becoming Editor my senior year.

During my time at Kent both my mother and my grandmother died. They had been so symbiotic in life (my mother being an only child) that it seemed ironically fitting that one could not live without the other. Both of them had drinking problems, and both died finally from cancer, my mother first in December of 1950, and my grandmother soon after in early 1951 (these are guesses and may be wrong).

I didn’t pay much attention to their deaths at the time. I was growing more and more apart from the family, and loved my friends at school, their families, and their lifestyles. I wrote about this in my poem, “Dust Beneath my Shoe,” in  A Small Thing Like a Breath.

I graduated from Kent in 1953 and was privileged to spend a year in Europe, on an English Speaking Union Schoolboy Fellowship, at Uppingham School, one of the oldest of the British “public” schools. I have a detailed diary that I have saved from my year at Uppingham and hope to use it one day soon as part of a sequel to LEAVING MAGGIE HOPE.  What a grand and glorious year. In the fall of 1954 I became a sophomore at Princeton, and took some time to adjust. After the glories of Kent and Uppingham, at Princeton I was a nobody. I had never been a nobody before, so it took time to find a place and an identity there. I’m still working on that.

On January 7, 1954,  the date of my twenty-first birthday, my sister, her husband, Lenny, and their two children, Sally and Chris, got in the car and drove to California. My last real contact with New York City was gone. I always stayed with them in New York in their apartment in the Bronx, not far from Yankee Stadium, and I considered that place home as much as any place. It was my legal address and the address I used when filling out forms. The move was very difficult for me, and when Christmas came, I just didn’t know what to do, so I went to California to be with Nancy and Len and the kids, because that was home—but Los Angeles (they lived in the “valley” in North Hollywood) was not home.  I spent more time with my aunt Emily in Lambertville. I had spent the summer of 1952 with her, working at a restaurant in nearby New Hope, just across the Delaware River, and the summer of 1953 I spent with my Kent friend, Bur Sienkiewicz, in Doylestown. From Bur I learned to drive a car, finally, at the age of seventeen, and got my license. My poem, “First Love,” in Yellow Raincoat comes from the summer of 1952.

When I graduated from Princeton, I was fortunate enough to win a Danforth Fellowship to go to Harvard Graduate School in English. I was going to be an English teacher—that was that. Of course, I had to teach, because school was the only thing I really knew anything about. I loved English, I loved to read, I loved to write, and I loved my teachers. My teachers had been my mentors, my models—at Fay, at Kent, and at Princeton, too many to mention here, and so to me the good life would be imitating them.  If I hadn’t won the Danforth, I don’t know what I would have done. Marion Lowe had released me—she sent me through college, and now I was on my own! So to Cambridge I went, and spent a year partying—or at least a semester, and finally got my act together by the end of the first year. I remember that you had to have 2 A’s and 2 B’s to stay in school, and at the end of the first semester I had one A and 3 B’s. I went to one of my teachers for advice, and he said to me, “Well, Mr. Abbott, it looks as if you need more A’s.” I got four A’s the second semester and never went to another teacher for advice while I was at Harvard. I liked my professors, and learned a great deal from them, especially from my drama professors Alfred Harbage, Harry Levin, and Bob Chapman, but I never felt that Harvard as an institution really cared about the individual.

I took a job at a ranch in Wyoming, a Dude ranch called Tepee Lodge, that I had visited with a family I had worked for in college. I had spent my college years taking care of the children in the Hornblower family from Washington, DC, --Margie, Jenny, Nancy, and Joe—at a wonderful resort in Northern Michigan called the Huron Mountain Club. One of those summers we had all gone to Wyoming for a month, and the head of the ranch invited me to come back when I no longer worked for the Hornblowers. I went back in July of 1958, and here I met my wife, Susan Dudley of South Orange, New Jersey, who had just graduated from the Beard School and was on her way to Wheaton College, in Norton Massachusetts, just 38 miles from Cambridge. We spend the summer at the ranch dating, then dated for a year, went back to the ranch, and dated another year. I adopted her family. I lived with her family. They were everything my family wasn’t. Here I found the order, the stability, the love, the support that a family brings.

We were married on August 27, 1960 in Orange, New Jersey, I finished my Ph.D. in English at Harvard in the spring of 1961 and we moved to Lewiston, Maine, where I had my first teaching job at Bates College. Our first son, David Johnson, was born on August 23, 1961, at Boston Lying in Hospital, and our daughter, Carolyn Dean, was born on May 8, 1963 in Lewiston. We decided to leave Bates in 1964. We loved the students, but the climate and the overall situation at the college was not appealing to us, and I took a job as Assistant Professor of English at Davidson College in North Carolina. Our second son, and third child, Stephen Dudley, was born on October 8, 1964, at Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte.  In 1965, my first book, Shaw and Christianity, a revision of my doctoral thesis at Harvard, was published by Seabury Press. I loved teaching, my family was flourishing, and Davidson seemed like the ideal place for us.

Then, on March 27, 1963, the event happened which changed our lives completely. Our daughter, Lyn, died unexpectedly during the night—it was the Monday after Easter. The autopsy showed a “massive swelling of the brain cells”—a form of encephalitis.  I had never really dealt with grief before. Raised as I was to “be a man” and take care of myself, I had simply distanced myself from emotional problems, and so I had no real resources for dealing with this tragedy. We went on, and the other children were our greatest blessing, as were the students at the college, and the community in its outpouring of love and support.

I often measure my beginnings as a poet from this event. I realized that not only had I not allowed myself to grieve for my daughter, but I had never grieved for my mother and grandmother.. See especially the poem, “Before Forty” in Girl in the Yellow Raincoat, which outlines the story.  It took me a long time before I was able to cry, able to find words to express all those feelings that lay inside me for years and years.  Gradually, slowly, those feelings began to come out in poems—the earliest of them written around 1974 and 1975, many of them in the late ‘70’s.  In 1978 I was invited to participate in the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury College as a Scholar in Poetry. I went to Bread Loaf again in 1980.  I was now writing poetry with some regularity.

There are a good many poems about Lyn in my three books of poetry—most importantly “Carolyn’s Poem” and “Out of Mourning” in the Yellow Raincoat and “Remembrance” in Small Thing Like a Breath. She also appears in “Point of Light” from The Search for Wonder. .  . I have always thought of her as my muse.

Poetry not only opened up my capacity to have feelings and to grieve for my daughter, but it allowed me to go back and write about other members of my family—my mother, my sister, my father—whom I had in many ways forgotten during my period of marriage and child raising. I was a very active father,  deeply involved in the lives of my children. Our third son, Andrew Halsey, was born on March 1, 1968, and we had a household with three sons, with activities centered on sports, church, music, and drama. But I had ignored my “blood” family, and now I was able to regain a relationship with them. I sent poems to my sister in California, to my father and my aunt in New Jersey. Poems like “Leavings” and “Yesterday, My Father” in Yellow Raincoat are good examples.  When my aunt, who had been a tremendous supporter of my work, died in 1989,  I wrote “The Legendary Stillness of Herons” in her memory.  I also wrote “Artist’s Lives” for her. My first book of poems, The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat, was dedicated to her. She died only months before its publication, and it made me very sad that she was never able to see the book.

My best work is, I think, elegiac. It memorializes those people who would otherwise be lost unless we find words to keep them alive in our hearts. Poetry, on some level, is about saving things. Even a poem so simple as “Growing Up” in A Small Thing is about saving the wonder of the child in an adult world that conspires to destroy it.  Maxine Kumin uses the term “Retrieval System” in one of her great poems. Poetry is a retrieval system. Things die—poetry retrieves them. Or, in another way, things have no life until art gives them life. Art gives shape to that which has no shape.

My most intense period of writing poetry was from 1974 to 1989. The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat was published in 1989 and A Small Thing Like a Breath in 1993, but the most of the poems had been written in the ‘70’s and early to mid ‘80’s. In 1989 I was made Chair of the English Department at Davidson, and remained Chair until 1996. That was not a good time for poetry. When my books came out, people asked me how I did it, and the answer was—before I became chair. I also did nearly all the work on my modern drama book, The Vital Lie: Reality and Illusion in Modern Drama, during the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s. I had grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study at Princeton (’79) and NYU (’82), where, under the guidance of Michael Goldman and Tom Bishop, I got the book together.

In the spring of 1993 my wife Susan and I took a sabbatical trip to Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Greece, and Italy, which became the primary source of the title section of my 2000 book of poems, The Search for Wonder in the Cradle of the World. I had traveled to France to work with my friend and colleague Larry Ligo during the spring of 1985, and had written some French “cathedral” poems which had been published in Small Thing Like a Breath.  At the heart of these poems was the attempt to recover the sense of the holy or the sense of wonder in the modern world. This became the ruling theme in the new book of poems, especially in the poems that grew out of our trip. I was constantly struck by the tension between the commercial and the holy. You see that especially in “Walking on Water,” my poem about the Sea of Galilee.  After I wrote the poems, I put together a reading with slides so that I could combine the visual with the auditory.

During the ‘90’s I began to go back to work on my novel, which I had begun in Melbourne, Australia, in the spring of 1977 when we were on sabbatical. I wrote the story of my life from birth to college graduation (1935-1957) and upon our return to Davidson found an agent who tried unsuccessfully to sell the book. Eventually, upon the advice of both the agent and other readers, I divided the book into two stories, the first ending when the central character is fourteen, and the second covering high school and college. As I continued to work with the book, the story became increasingly fictionalized. Though the new novel was based on my life, I felt freer and freer to meet the novel’s needs rather than the needs of  “factual accuracy.” Through the kindness of many, many writers, friends, and editors, I received useful criticism, which I incorporated in each revision. The novel was selected by Novello Festival Press in Charlotte, NC, as the winner of the Novello Award for 2003, and it was scheduled for publication in October of that year. During the final revision for publication, our most difficult challenge was finding a title. My first title for the book was simply “David,” the name of the central character. Then I called it “Almost a Beginning,” a phrase that suggests where David is at the end of the novel. He has made “almost a beginning” in discovering who he is. My third title was “The Fourth Thing,” which is a reference to the four things his mother tells him he must learn. My fourth title was “The Boy Who Could Not Say Love,” which is a wonderful title for a poem, but not a title that anyone was very excited about for the novel.  We ended up with “Leaving Maggie Hope,” which is a good one. The title refers to the boy leaving his mother, whose name is Maggie Hope, but it also suggests that at the novel’s end he is leaving her hope. He is the family hope in a world where so many adults have had such difficulty with their lives.

My current projects are a new book of poems called “The Man Who Poems.” and a sequel to Leaving Maggie Hope.

Every poem in the collection has a title which begins either “The Man Who” or “The Man Whose.”  I don’t have any yet, but I might get  “The Man Who’s….”  The project started as a way of writing about a lot of different characters, using the title as a reference to either the narrator or the central character. Some of the poems are dramatic monologues in the style of Browning. Some are third person narratives.  I now have a book length manuscript of these poems, but I am still revising them, refining them, and adding to them.

I have also completed three chapters of the sequel to Leaving Maggie Hope, chapters which take place during the fall of 1948 when David has started at prep school and discovered a new family member. I’m writing the sequel in part because I enjoy it and in part because the response to the first novel has been so rewarding. I have enjoyed promoting the novel enormously. I have visited a number of boarding schools, including my own schools—Fay and Kent—and Deerfield, Taft, and Woodberry Forest. I have spoken to dozens of books clubs and writers’ groups. I have visited bookstores where I have encountered many old friends, including former students from Davidson.

In the meantime, I have become a grandfather seven times, have retired from full time teaching, down to one or two courses a year, and have remained active in community and state-wide organizations.  My wife Susan and I look forward to the visits of our grandchildren to our house on Lake Norman during the summer months, and to our visits to their homes during the spring and fall.