Curriculum vitae, "course of life," formally means a professional biography but more literally names life's entire trajectory. In poetry, this phrase suggests both the official resume and the actual lived experience it represents and distorts. Poets invoke it when contemplating how lives are summarized, what such summaries reveal and conceal, how achievement is measured and displayed. The phrase captures tension between public accomplishment and private experience, between curated narrative and messy reality. It appears in poems about work, ambition, and self-presentation, where speakers recognize that the curriculum vitae both documents and falsifies life, creating coherent narrative from discontinuous experience, transforming accident into progression, making legible what was chaotic.

Curriculum vitae literally means "course of life," but the term now primarily designates the professional biography—list of education, employment, publications, honors. Poets use the phrase when exploring gaps between official narrative and actual experience, between public achievement and private life. The CV creates coherent story from discontinuous experience, transforms accident into progression, makes legible what was chaotic. Related to questions about self-presentation, about what counts as accomplishment, about how institutions measure value. Useful for understanding poems about work, ambition, and the construction of professional identity. The phrase also connects to broader concerns about how lives are narrated, how biography gets packaged for consumption. Contemporary poets increasingly question whose achievements get recognized, how CV measures privilege rather than merit, how the form itself encodes values about what matters—paid labor, institutional affiliation, measurable output.