Douglas Oliver was born in 1937 in Hampshire, of Scottish stock. He has been a journalist and a lecturer and is well-known in Europe and America as a performer of his own poetry. In the States, while living on New York's Lower East Side (where Penniless Politics was born), he taught in New York, New Jersey and Baltimore, as a visiting poet at the Naropa Institute, Colorado, and worked secretarially in a cancer hospital. Married to the American poet Alice Notley, he now teaches at the British Institute in Paris. Douglas Oliver has published seven other books of poetry. His collected poems, Kind (Allardyce, Barnett, 1987), was Peter Ackroyd's choice as poetry book of the year in The Times' Christmas Book Supplement for 1987. His Paladin selection of poetry and prose, Three Variations on the Theme of Harm (1990), includes his much-praised satire on modern Britain, The Infant and the Pearl, a revised version of his novel, The Harmless Building, and a new work, An Island That Is All the World. His critical book Poetry and Narrative in Performance (Macmillan/St Martins, 1989) is a study of poetic prosody and its links with the mental experience of reading narrative fiction. Much of his work was for a long time only available from small presses, receiving critical acclaim unusual for such fugitive publications. First published in 1991 - under Iain Sinclair's Hoarse Commerce imprint - his book-length satirical poem Penniless Politics appeared in a new edition from Bloodaxe Books in 1994.
