During the 1980s he was one of the organisers of the exhibition "Pound's Artists: Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts in London, Paris and Italy" at Kettle's Yard and the Tate Gallery, co-edited the magazine "Numbers" and was advisor to the 1988 Poetry International at the South Bank Centre, London. After teaching for the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and at the University of Cambridge, he held various posts in Japan. His most extended employment, from 1991 to 2005, was teaching English Literature and English as a second language at Tohoku University in Sendai. He underwent a successful brain tumour operation in 1993 while his first marriage was failing. He remarried in 1995 to an educationalist and now has two daughters, Giulia and Matilde. In 2007 he returned to the UK to take up a post as Professor of English and American literature at the University of Reading. There he founded Creative Writing at Reading and collaborated in its development into a full joint degree programme with English Literature and a number of other arts subjects. He leads research on poetry and poetics, has organised a centenary conference on the work of the poet Bernard Spencer (1909–1963), instigated the publication of an annual creative arts anthology, and helped found the Reading Poetry Festival (2013-17). He is poetry editor for Two Rivers Press and literary executor for the estates of the poets Roy Fisher (1930–2017) and Mairi MacInnes (1925–2017).