About the Author

Here's my problem: for the past five years or so, I seem to have been (is that a split infinitive or merely the strange construction of the present perfect progressive?) making my higher education choices based on what I want my biographical blurb to look like in my first book. Obviously there are multiple things wrong with this way of thinking (not the least of which is "If you plan to deserve a biographical blurb, you had better start compiling the preceding pages"), but recently I have fretted less about the educational information ("She graduated from This College in This Year with a degree in This and This"*) and more about the place of habitation that will end the paragraph ("She lives in This Place with her Loving Husband, Two or Three Children, and a Cat Who Used to Be a Vivacious Kitten But Is Now a Yawning Lump").

What, exactly, will "This Place" be? The city is too crowded, the country is too sparse, so it will have to be suburbia, that meeting point of culture and landscape forever tinged (and rightly so) with the odor of materialism and artificiality. How specific? New England is too general, a town is too specific, so it will have to be a state, providing the hope of tracking me down but without enough clues to do so. Why? So my work is given a sliver of context, a peek into the composer's life? But shouldn't that be evident in the work itself?

Maybe I should simply ask the editor for permission to cut it, standing simply as "She lives."

*However, this still continues (is that redundant?) to be a pressing matter, which may suggest that I am plagued by enough neuroses to be a poet after all.