Laura Moriarty was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on the eighth of April, 1952. She spent childhood in Cape Cod--adolescence in the Sacramento Valley. She lives and works in San Francisco. Her publications include Two Cross Seizings (Sombre Reptiles, 1980) and Persia (Chance Additions, 1984), which was chosen as co-winner of the Poetry Center Book Award (S.F. State) judged this year by Beverly Dahlen.

WORKING NOTES FROM LAURA MORIARTY:

Because the limiting of choices occurs naturally, it became appealing to operate willfully within these limits. Perhaps anyone's life revolves around certain phrases which, empty in themselves, have to do with whatever can exist. "To do" in the sense of making, allowing to be -- to allow the point around which everything turns to be revealed in all its plainness.

The task was to say the phrase knowing that whatever words follow must lead to the same phrase and then even sooner to the phrase again made ponderous by now with meanings piled on each other.

And the enveloping project involved repeating the repetitions within limits that seemed to narrow with each solution as to how to arrive on time and with the correct phrase.

The fact that this was maddening made it all the more appropriate to the twin activities of resisting convention and attempting to imagine its alternative. Using a form that is close to song evokes the odd power of that medium to lull and convince. "We believed in the philosophies of popular songs," admitted Zelda Fitzgerald on her way to the madhouse. These rondeaux desire to engage this pervasive philosophy on its own terms.