 While in Canada, writing his PhD on the poetics of Pound's early cantos, he served as overseas editor for New Poetry and as a scout for the Literature Board of the Australia Council, helping to arrange Australian residencies for Michael Ondaatje, Galway Kinnell, Mark Strand and others.He was also the hand-press printer and demonstrator for Massey College at the University of Toronto.In 1978, in Toronto, he experienced a period of paralysis from the waist down, which he believed for many years to have been a manifestation of Guillain-Barré syndrome.