He founded the Sono Nis Press in 1966 and was an editor of
Prism International from 1968 to 1971. He also founded
Canadian Fiction Magazine in 1968. He is now a free-lance writer and a prison guard in Vancouver. Yates has been married three times and has three daughters: Sara, Jaima, and Alexandra.
Yates's work is perhaps more satisfactorily discussed chronologically than generically, since he has often crossed generic boundaries. His fiction has the ring of poetry; his poetry looks like fiction; his drama has the musical quality of verse. He first had work published as an undergraduate and won a number of prizes for this early writing. Much of this material was collected in Hunt in an Unmapped Interior and Other Poems (1967), a book of promise despite the overly strong influence of T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats. "Basically all my writings," Yates has remarked, "centre around the polarities between absolute wilderness and absolute technology." This preoccupation appears in the early work in which he repeatedly uses the metaphor of wilderness for representing the self: "The shadow of my hand," writes Yates in Hunt in an Unmapped Interior and Other Poems, "Reaches forth and imprints/This wilderness of fewer and fewer words."
The concern with technology and wilderness is repeated in his next book, Canticle for Electronic Music (1967), which consists of twenty-four canticles, each of which has eight stanzas, three lines long.
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