Daily News and as a waiter and writing for an ad agency. During this time, Porter traveled in the South Pacific and meeting artists and writers and observing the rebirth of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. In 1955, upon his return to California, he married the anthropologist and writer Margaret Eudine Preston. They worked in Burnie, Tasmania in a wood processing plant and in Venezuela. In the 1960s, Porter was part of the Saturn V program at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama until 1967). Margaret died in 1975. Porter spent the next thirty years creating poetry, mail art, correspondence, travelling and hosting visitors at his Institute of Advanced Thinking in Belfast, Maine. As artist Porter is best known for his "founds", which he has published in numerous collections including Found Poems, The Wastemaker, The Book of Do's, Dieresis, Here Comes Everybody's Don't Book, and Sweet End. Publishers of these works included Something Else Press, The Village Print Shop, and Tilbury House. Bern Porter's underground reputation as an artist-writer-philosopher-scientist is well established among visual artists and writers, and his philosophy of dissent is respected. Dick Higgins, the avant-garde writer and publisher/editor of the Something Else Press, was inspired to call Porter the Charles Ives of American letters'. Recognizing Porter as one of the earliest and most prolific practitioners of found poetry, Peter Frank (in his book on Something Else Press) has written: "Porter is to the poem what [Marcel] Duchamp was to the art object, a debunker of handiwork fetishism and exemplary artist-as-intercessor between phenomenon and receptor. He rejects the typical artist's role of semi-divine creator. Porter's eye never tires of seeking accidental, unconventional literature in odd pages of textbooks, far corners of advertisements, the verbiage of greeting cards and repair manuals, ad infinitum." Porter's career is complex and filled with contradictions. He was born in 1911, in Porter Settlement, Maine. All his life Porter had a love for literature, the visual arts and poetry in particular. As a child he created countless scrapbooks filled with collaged cut-outs of texts and images from newspapers. This process, used in the early scrapbooks, would later be developed into his technique of visual collaged poetry that he refers to as "Founds". As a pioneer author of artist's books, experiments in poetry, typography, and collage Porter published his first artist book in 1941. Since then he authored dozens of books and