My quest for recognition of any kind has not been a roaring success. I had nothing published until I was in my thirties, and--except in college publications--have never won a literary competition, or gotten any kind of fellowship or grant. I take pride in my present position here at SPR/SMR and in a couple of similar positions elsewhere, but I've yet, at age 56, to get my writing to any reasonably large general readership.

So it was quite a shock to me when when Shelly Andrews, the editor of the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, asked me for an essay this past spring. A spin-off of the Contemporary Authors series, a respected who's who that lists thousands of writers, the Autobiography Series covers only three or four hundred authors, among them high-profilers like Poul Anderson, Edward O. Wilson, Irving Wallace, Robert Creeley, Howard Fast--as well as SPR/SMR's own Robert Peters (and in its advertising literature refers to them as "noted writers"). What was I doing in such fast company?! Particularly since I wasn't even listed in the parent series!

It turns out I'd been recommended to Andrews by my friend, Oakland poet/critic/hyper-etc. Jack Foley. I have no idea how Jack was able to pull it off, but he was also instrumental in getting Jake Berry, Susan Smith Nash, Jim Leftwich, Harry Polkinhorn and John M. Bennett into the series--Jake into Volume 24, me and the others into Volume 25. Also appearing in Volume 24 are Jack himself, his friend Ivan Arguelles, and Charles Bernstein, while Rae Armantrout has a piece in Volume 24. So my making the series was no isolated oddity but part of what might turn out to be a major breakthrough for burstnorm poetry, particularly visual poetry, which all of us but Bernstein, Arguelles and Armantrout have composed.

The Autobiography Series has been coming out since 1984. The essays in it (for which authors are paid $1000 apiece) are from 7,000 to 15,000 words in length, and include ten or more personal photographs from their authors' collections; mine, for example, has one of me as an infant in the arms of my grandfather, another of me with my cat Sally (it now being obligatory, it would seem, for authors to be photographed with at least one cat), and one of me and Bennett and Ackerman (in spite of Ackerman's offering me thousands in Polish banknotes not to).

All the essays in the recentest two volumes that I've so far read seem first-rate to me. Those by Arguelles, Armantrout, Polkinhorn, Foley and Berry are vivid and personable. The one by Bernstein, actually an interview, is a little low in narrative thrust, but is a good read, nonetheless. Leftwich's essay is predominantly a series of aesthetico-philosophical meditations. Bennett's is perhaps the most revealing about his literary practice of our group's, but is also interesting about his personal life. Nash's autobiography is the most personal, most truly autobiographical, not even quoting any of her poems.

I'm still not sure whether I like my own piece or not. It was a bear to write. My life seemed sometimes too impoverished, sometimes too rich to deal with (but much more the former). Matters like how much space I should give to childhood, how much to adulthood, or how much to my writing, how much to my personal life, were also a concern. I felt that I particularly needed, because of my obscurity, to discuss in some detail (and quote) my poetry; but because my piece would be for a more or less general if comparatively literate reading public, I didn't want to get too abstruse. Then there was the problem of just how to describe, or even if I should describe, some of my more embarrassing experiences, such as my arrest for the use of the mails for the conveyance of obscene, defamatory, degenerate articles, matters, things when I was nineteen; and what I should say about the females who have been so vilely cruel to me at various times in my life. My main challenge, though, was figuring out how to organize my material.

What I finally did was hit the reader in the very outset with one of my loonier mathematical poems, which I chose also because it had to do with my tree-hutted, code-faring boyhood. After discussing the history of my involvement in mathematical poetry, and what I was trying to achieve with it, with a few easier-to- take specimens of the form, I was able to use my opening poem to get into my middle childhood. After that, and a flash-back to my birth and earliest years, I covered my later boyhood. The rest of my essay was fairly straight-forwardly chronological.

I left a lot out--not my arrest, but all the females (there weren't really many), just about all my struggles as a still- unproduced playwright, practically my entire four years in the Air Force, many names of important friends. . . . My final copy was around 13,000 words in length, and included the full texts of eleven poems. If nothing else, it ought to give a reader a pretty complete idea of what I'm like as a poet. If it's anywhere near as useful and entertaining as the other essays in this series, I'll be more than satisfied.