The current issue of the New Yorker includes an article by Mary Norris, a long-time copyeditor for the magazine. Although she doesn't answer most of my questions about the publication's curious style choices (why nineteen-seventies instead of 1970s? why focussed instead of focused?), she does write beautifully, and often comically, about the way in which the job "draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, Midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience."

This is true. In the course of my job I have absorbed a great deal of fascinating information about uranium mining, foie gras, asbestos, Audre Lorde in Germany, in vitro fertilization, physics in the nineteenth century, and hair-removal practices during the Middle Ages. I have also drawn on my own expertise in goat farming, Victorian pulp fiction, pie baking, youth-sports anxiety, pit-orchestra performance, being a Quaker, and driving in snow.

A copyeditor wallows in details of style, information, spelling. Yet as Norris points out, "so much of [the job] is about not going beyond your province. . . . Writers might think we're applying rules and sticking it to their prose in order to make it fit some standard, but just as often we're backing off, making exceptions, or at least trying to find a balance between doing too much and doing too little." Copyediting "is interpretive, not mechanical--though the answer often boils down to an implicit understanding of commas."

That remark about the commas is also true. While my own comma predilections are less rigid than the New Yorker's, I do feel that, as a copyeditor, I expend considerable thought on the implications of comma placement. As a poet, I also concentrate on this issue . . . although my poet answers are not identical to my copyeditor answers.