at 13 i fell in love with a 15 year old girl, who sooned turned 16, & able to drive. i wrote long-hand love poems to her in notebooks, the most forceful act i cld do when not talking to her on the phone for many solid hours. i don't remeber how we ended, but at my first year of college in 1972 she was in an accident, her vett slipped under the back of a semi truck, decapitating her. poetry became energy. my highschool sweetheart kathy must have had hundreds of sappy loves poems written for her, & ultimately there's tragedy there too. i felt my being bend to forms of poetry, felt most comfortable with the likes of ez pound & charles olson & robert creeley & william carlos williams, but read various outshoots from w.s. merwin to ms. plath, to the beats, kerouac, to henry miller, buwoski, intrigued by language poets i.e., larry eigner, & the PROCESS, which i knew in my early 20's wld be a life-long process. a poet must live by his wit's, i remember creeley explaining in an interview, & my wits had me working in various factories for 35 years. still, thru all the decades, i wrote. i cldn't NOT write. it was NECESSARY. i had no control. wild years of drunken readings. & most of the details i cannot recall. these days, married to ann, who is also a writer, who fell in love with in the mountains of new hampshire 25 years from suddenly hearing her voice in my soon-be-lost house thru a long marriage into divorce & the rage of that, hell, but ann, my love, soul-mate moved up against lake erie & we married & aging without mercy, thanks the stars for the strike at the last factory, i'm out of that, into something different: weighed against 350 degree presses & fiberglass dust, all metals yell, & i sit in a partial cubicle now, headset on, keyboard under my finger & the computer screen. it isn't a job without stress, & it doesn't pay factory wages, & the hours change weekly; whatever, at age 54 i'm a poet. i've worked relentlessly. i never want to stop.

AnnMarie Eldon, an identical twin, evolved from cryptophasic origins in once densely industrialised Birmingham, England. She was taught by her gypsy grandmother to say the alphabet backwards before the age of three. Juggling various personae interiorae, children and hormones, she practices counter-cultural reclusiveness, adult differentiation and spiritual equanimity within the mediocrity of a picturesque Oxfordshire market town. Best Googled and poetry at 5 Trope, Arabesques, Argotist, mprsnd, Blazevox, Caffeine Destiny, Lily, Moria, Nthposition, Niederngasse, No Tell Motel, Shampoo, Stirring, Tears In the Fence, zafusy et al. Her collection Some2 is available from: http://www.lulu.com/content/4581886 follow: http://twitter.com/AnnMarieEldon