And yet Jazz/poet, above, was one of the first poems he wrote and was published in his first book in 1971. He has been "seriously interested" in jazz since he was 16 years old, but didn't start writing poetry until his mid-20s. But it is only now, at the age of 74, with 30-odd books behind him, that he has finally sat down to write a jazz memoir.

"I did actually attempt a verse memoir of a more general nature, but I didn't like it, and I've finished it now because it was too difficult to be completely honest when other people are involved as well," he says.

A more focused memoir made more sense, and Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir (Picaro Press), is a slim, appealing volume split into two parts. The first tells the story of his love of jazz – one that seems, even now, to have been against the odds from the outset. "It's only a phase," declares his mother, on page one. And later: "My second wife, for all her merits, was not a jazz fan. 'Forced jollity' was one phrase I remember her using, somewhat short-temperedly, about my favourite art form." His son, coming of age in the 1990s, wasn't onside either, turning inevitably to alternative rock and grunge.

Their difference in opinion leads him to wonder whether it was disagreements such as this, leading to family car trips spent listening mostly to music you didn't enjoy, was what led Tolstoy to his immortal observation about unhappy families.

But Page, a self-described purist when it comes to jazz, has never once wavered, recognising the simple, oft-overlooked fact that if our time on Earth is limited, why waste it listening to anything other than what you love most?

"For some reason or other, which I could articulate but it wouldn't convince you necessarily, I just like this sort of music more than any other," he says.

He has never owned a rock album, and listens to classical musical in the same way that he views painting and other arts.

"A properly educated citizen needs to know about the history of Western painting, and the history of Western music, so yes, I know about that, it's just I don't love it the way I love this," he says.

Like any adolescent feeling their way through the process of self-discovery, jazz spoke to him right from the start.

"I felt that way about jazz when I was 16. There were three of us who liked jazz, with all our friends and colleagues who liked rock – Bill Haley and Elvis Presley," he says.

"We just couldn't see the point of Haley and Presley, it kind of just seemed like a waste of space, relatively speaking."

The Beatles registered only slightly more.

"I could understand that they're quite good tunesmiths, and some jazz people played them, but they've got their place in history," he says.

"I didn't mind dancing to them at parties in my 20s, but I've never owned a single Beatles record. I've never owned a single rock record. I'm a purist."

The second part of the book comprises eight new poems about jazz, in addition to the ones that make up the book of jazz poems compiled over 40-odd years and published in 2011, entitled A Sudden Sentence in the Air.

In the professional sense, poetry and literature have always taken precedence. Page was head of the English Department at Narrabundah College for nearly 30 years, where he taught generations of students about the basics of poetry – and, if they were so inclined, how to read it and, hopefully, love it. He also sat in on Thursday afternoon jazz classes at the school, jamming along with the students, and privately bemoaning the fact that he'd never learnt to read music by sight.

But, despite the professional-amateur dichotomy, jazz and poetry have always had a parallel appeal for Page.

"Is it the necessarily 'part-time' nature of one's obsessions which gives them their intensity, I wonder?" he muses in the book.

Long-time culture-watchers in Canberra would know that he is the founder of both the long-running Poetry at the Gods series, featuring readings from poets around Australia and sometimes overseas, and the more recent Jazz in Concert at the Gods. Aside from the setting – the tranquil cafe deep in the Australian National University campus – there is a similar ethos to both traditions.

"They're both minority art forms, in a sense," he says.

"Jazz is not the most popular form of music and poetry is not the most popular form of writing, so there's that similarity. But there are lots of differences as well … between, say, a poem as a finished art object that you create and then it's left for other people to interpret, reading to themselves or aloud, whereas jazz is a performance in real time. It changes every time you play that tune, the solos are significantly different, so it has this element of spontaneity which is almost the opposite of both poetry and classical music."

Both are often associated with renegade types, although Page, who today is sipping on a decaf flat white in the searing Canberra spring heat, is quick to point out that there are countless respectable practitioners of both mediums.

He is a respectable practitioner of both, although with jazz, only in the amateur sense. His passion began squarely with listening.

"Actually, I did play drums early on when I was at university, in a traditional jazz band, but I was completely uneducated, I was just faking it really," he says.

"I knew much more about drumming than I could ever play myself without taking a whole series of proper lessons, which I never got around to."

Aficionado is a memoir that has been years in the writing (parts of it have previously appeared in various literary magazines), and he says it's aimed mainly at fellow aficionados – not many of whom, he points out, are also poets (his friend poet Alan Gould, for instance, had already firmly declined to attend the book's launch, for the simple reason that he doesn't like jazz).

It is, he admits, aimed more at jazz lovers than poetry buffs, but there is always scope for crossover.

"It's one of those books that's written for almost a certain sort of person, probably a person of roughly my age, but a person who is quite young, in their 30s, could find it interesting as well from a historical point of view," he says.

"But I've already had some good feedback from people my own age who had very similar experiences of jazz, who liked the same sort of things at the same sort of time. They played music, and they had domestic conflict around jazz and one thing and another, so they just really liked it because it was addressing an aspect of their own lives that they very rarely saw written about."

Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir, by Geoff Page, is published by Picaro Press.