William Walrond Strangmeyer was born in Roanoke, Virginia, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and Brofus, New Jersey, where he went to Rugrats University, starting out as a classics major, changing to musicology and finishing with an abnormal psychology, all of which he declined to follow up on or to practice due to a certain inappropriate nostalgia for the evanescent present, that virtual curry of import, pleasure, pain and fat.He has worked in many different fields of endeavor, including Palisades and other amusement parks as a caller, as well as banks, book stores, the cinema, the theater, door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales (alternating between the Abbott and the Costello roles), two failed marriages, restaurants, retail and – God forgive him! – insurance sales, taxi driving, telephone sales (light bulbs and the San Francisco Chronicle), warehouses and as a tour guide and was also co-editor of Upstairs at Duroc, a Paris literary review – thereby blowing his chances at working-class hero status – around the U.S. and in Copenhagen, Athens, Crete, London and Switzerland. Now a resident of that same Paris since 1977, he continues to earn his living as an English language trainer, formatting young adults and other undesirables so that they can produce growth in business, and as a translator, as if he were a young James Joyce.He is also the author of several other volumes of angrily sentimental and vulgarly picturesque Rococomantic poetry (all slim), his other principal interests being various forms of boxing and marshalling Art, bull fighting and aged music. He is Archon of Paris for the Moorish Orthodox Church and a member of various other organizations embracing a few essential beliefs and having even fewer doctrines.He has read all over Paris over the years and in London, NY and Florida.His main influences are science fiction, doo-wop and psychedelic (as we said in those lost and heartfelt days) music and a mis-spent youth, along with the usual Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Poe, Catullus, Larkin, Elroy, Doctor Seuss, Forugh Farrokhzad, Beaudelaire and also Emmylou Harris, Roy Jones Jr., Stoya, Leonard Cohen, Fedor Emilianenko, Bartok, Rodney Crowell, Nolan Strong, Leroy Griffin, Roy Orbison and other sadly missed voices that often come and go. His motto this year is, “All dust is gold,” but sometimes he forgets and thinks to himself, “A life in exile comes to feel like home but still home gnaws and eats away at the bone.” He usually tries to keep a straight face