My bio in issue #6 came from the back of The Quiet Poems and told the story from birth up to 1981. That book, and all my books and chapbooks, most anthology sets, but not magazine sets, are on line for easy reading in new annotated editions. They’re spread out on a virtual table and the URL is http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/fires.htm#bookshttp://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/fires.htm#books. The web of annotations hold the poems and the sequences, even the books, together. Annotations range from comments a poet might make at a reading to pieces of biography and literary mini-essays—forming a web from the mind and times of the poet. Or me. The table is the center piece in A “glass” Archive Visible from Around the Globe.

This bio, will overlap, starting in 62, 63 and coming up to what I’m doing with those books spread out on a cyber-table and the archive wrapped into and around them, my 21st century gathering of the work. The “center of the web” is FIRES: Selected Poems 1963-1976 and, now, bearing a subtitle, 2002+ Revised, expanded and Annotated Edition. The 2002+ is because I’m weaving the web and will be doing so while I last. When Paul Foreman, who did Fires 1 and Fires 2, does a Collected Poems, or Fires 3, it won’t be what I’m weaving here.

So, let’s find doors into my bio in real time in the Fires on that table. The first poem will point to just before I came out of San Quentin, after four-nine in, and 3-3 ahead on parole, from San Quentin. The time was for armed robbery, five to life, in north-central California. I came out in late 59 to Oakland, California, drifted toward Berkeley and by 1963 I was writing poems—using where, and when, I was and where, and when, I’d been. The first poem in Fires 2 (the Selected Poems) was, is and will be, Vivisection. It’s my prison poem... The poem’s been around and its been talked about. Nobody’s ever wondered, in my hearing, about that title. and that’s the kind of wondering my “web weaving” is intended to waken.... I deliberately don’t have an annotation on Vivisection but I do on the poem following that refers back. And on the Table of Contents page about the book. That ends...

I wrote this poem in Berkeley in the early hours of a 1963 morning, all 250 or so lines of it. Hilary Ayer, folksinger, poet, daughter of Richard Ayer, painter and sculptor, was asleep in the apartment. We'd been together for most of 1963 and would remain together until early 1970. This particular night I was awake with one of those wine hangovers that comes without being drunk first. I was looking at my few poems, making minor changes, humming the rhythms. I found some strange lines coming to mind...

                  You have sinned; such
                  Furies as we know shall
                                        be set upon thee
The "Courts" were speaking.... And I wrote a 250 or so line poem bringing to experiential life the five years I had spent in San Quentin prison for armed robbery, 1954-1959. I had not written, or read, poetry in prison. I had not touched my prison experience since beginning to write poems.... This was the beginning of Fires....

It wasn’t in Fires 1, which Grove Press bought, built a cover for, held for a year or so and dropped.... It wasn’t in my first chapbook, Field Studies, either or any chapbook. It was in one of my first anthology sets, Harry Smith’s The Smith Poets in which each of six of us had the pages of a full chapbook. And then Paul Foreman (who also picked up Fires 1) did a pamphlet containing only this poem. So, ...you can see that this bio, in real time, will bend chronological time to reflect a more to-the-point space-time.... Vivisection also appears in the latest anthology I was in: Joe Bruchac’s The Light From Another Country. 1984. Prison poetry. He had the prologue and sections I, III, IV, VI, VIII, IX, XII, XIII and XIV. I just looked and A.D. Winans’ Second Coming Anthology: Ten Years in Retrospect was also1984. My A Felon’s Journal (prose) was in there, so 1984 was “full circle” in a sense.

Through Fires 2, my whole real time (if not quite chronological) bio weaves, but it’s not always easily followed as it passes through areas such as Shaman Songs (which is not an American Indian poem, but...) or the three separated walking poems serving as the “pillars” of the cathedral: San Francisco Poem, Obsidian and Cosmic Language. The titles, like the one on my “prison poem,” show the silk of the web and tell something about the where and when “of it all.” The names I put on these gestures now hint at this. Urban Shaman (some poems fitted together, that are not shaman songs in the expected sense) and, now, My Way...

After reading the poems, maybe wrestling with why it’s “my way,” come back here. What I’ll end this “bio in real time” with is a chunk of my letter to Keith when he’d whittled a smaller, shapely gesture out of the heavy block I’d sent along and I was thinking about naming it....

So, I've got to think of a name for the gesture, though one following on Urban Shaman might be tough. I could borrow from Sinatra, call the set My Way. Nothing much from the song except for it's "hovering" and the ballad sense.... Here, the traveling going through, down into the table, up to the ...well, some "watershed", and, then, through the dream, and down some street (in north Oakland, walking distance from the Mediterraneum in Berkeley). Yeah, that's it. I was going to give you a couple, let you choose. But this is it. Sets a reader up to expect something BIG and FINAL.... Then, e (he or she, with e. e's, e, eself across the "personification" gap from it, its, it, itself) has to pump in e's own fullness....

That ought to pull e through....