Hazelfaern Again

I was once a snub-nosed blonde. My name was Betty. I had a perky personality and was a cheerleader for the college football team. My favourite colour was pink. Then I became a poet. My hair darkened overnight, my nose lengthened, I gave up football for the cello, my real name disappeared and was replaced by one that had a chance of being taken seriously by the literati, and my clothes changed colour in the closet, all by themselves, from pink to black. I stopped humming the songs from Oklahoma and began quoting Kirkegaard. And not only that – all of my high heeled shoes lost their heels, and were magically transformed into sandals. Needless to say, my many boyfriends took one look at this and ran screaming from the scene as if their toenails were on fire. New ones replaced them; they all had beards. ~ Margaret Atwood, "On Writing Poetry"

I was just browsing through Ray Caesar’s online art gallery when I stumbled across his biography, which is amusing, enlightening and thought provoking (in a highly surreal fashion).

It started me thinking about that funny little  thing, the bio — a funny little thing I’ve struggled with, as a writer, just frequently enough to have developed an exasperated reverence for it (normally, thoughts of "brief biography" bring about flashbacks of the rhythmic smack of my forehead against the palm of my hands, synchronized with the mumbled mantra "Jennifer Walker is… Jennifer Walker is… Jennifer Walker is…" repeated endlessly)

After all, what does the bio say? Theoretically, it gives the reader just enough information about the author to frame a proffered bit of writing through the silhouetted sketch of a personal history. The author has a given age, has lived in various places, usually prefers these kinds of books, has or has not been published here or here, does or does not approach third person descriptions of him/herself with an irritibly droll touch of irony, etc…

Yet, which bits are the important ones? Does it inform my poetry more to say that I live on the East Coast or that I frequently dream of myself as a thirteenth century poeverty-stricken Infanta? Should I tell you that I attended five different high schools (more than half religious) or that I find myself referring to Voltaire with frequency and cannot garden? Should I give you glimpses of my right brain’s memories, my left’s, both at once or neither?

I think the difficulty in crafting a bio lies in the honest appraisal that not only is this brief third-person thing a blatent affair of brokering an intellectual sale, but that salesmanship must also navigate across the difficult terrain of ego — what do we dare allow others to see of ourselves?

A surreal, highly metaphoric biography has the advantage of being immediate and elusive, personal and impersonal, simultaneously. A mythic language may better describe the brief history through which a given work has slowly evolved.

Or, truth be told, the metaphoric bio may have a simpler basis: when lacking in wit, the artist reverts to oblique obscurity.