David Swoyer is a painter as well as a poet. His paintings hang in both private and museum collections. For twenty-five years he has been a museum curator and presently works in that capacity at the Museum of Arts and Sciences (MOAS) in Daytona Beach, Florida. Swoyer is a Viet Nam veteran, "whose disability has not made him independently wealthy but has given him a higher regard for excursions to Canada." From A Glitch in the Parable, a poem Swoyer has not abandoned: "The time that remains depends / on the distance left to fall." The Dozen poems Swoyer has abandoned in Mudlark No. 1 have their language lives in that remaining time.