Background
Denner was born in Santa Clara, California and raised in the Oakland Hills.
Denner was born in Santa Clara, California and raised in the Oakland Hills.
In 1959, he enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley but dropped out the following year, initially working in Moe"s Books and for The Berkeley Barb. "I was trying to be like a street poet," he recalled later, "using magic markers to write on napkins at Cafe Medical for espressos, on girls’ arms and feet." Soon after, he founded the one-man printing operation, dPress, the backlists of which now contain some two hundred titles. In 1965, he attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference, what John Bennett, in "Air Guitar" (an Ellensburg Daily Record column), has called, “an event creating white light intensity that rivaled any drug high and had more staying power.” This convergence of the Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, Beat and Northwest Schools gave Denner the pivotal opportunity to study under such avant-garde poets as Charles Olson, Editor Dorn, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, Lew Welch, and Jack Spicer.
Later he would study with Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Denise Levertov and Carolyn Kizer at Fort Worden Center for the Arts in Portuguese Townsend, Washington.
But it was Jack Spicer’s molding of series poetry into little books that had the most singular effect. In 1972, he went back to college and received a Bachelor in English and Philosophy from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
His most recent major work is a long series of cantos in collaboration with David Bromige.
