Fill in a form headed "Biodata" and you give your name, your date of birth, your parents. The poem takes that heading and asks what such facts can never settle: how much of "I" is simply inherited, and how much is something new? Its speaker is "dna of Andy, / Elsie else", and the names read like forebears, perhaps parents, though the poem never says so. What the speaker cannot do is "distinguish" the self from "its place here / and deeds done", from inheritance, circumstance and action all tangled together.
The grammar enacts this uncertainty. In the first stanza the speaker says "what I, dna of Andy ... is", which gives the "I" a third-person verb, as if the self were an object, an "it" with a "place". By the last stanza the verb has become "am". A person has crept back into the sentence, and the speaker is now asking about himself rather than about a specimen. The lowercase "dna" belongs to the same deflation, since the molecule is treated as a common noun. "Elsie else" is a pun worth pausing on: the second contributor shades into "else", the other, the not-me. Andy and Elsie come with a whole world of elsewhere attached.
The central image is the second stanza's "Melted tin in / water". Molten metal hitting water freezes in an instant into a shape nobody designed, and the poem says that shape "suddenly is I". This recalls the old custom of pouring molten metal into water and reading the lumps as fortunes, though the poem itself only gives us the tin. The self, on this picture, is an accident of cooling. The lines that follow multiply the accident: "infinitely others, who would / 've, thrown, grown". The contraction is split across the line break, so "'ve" dangles at the start of the next line like a possibility that never found its first half. "Thrown" and "grown" form the poem's only true rhyme, and they pull two ideas together: the tin is thrown, the child is grown, and neither chose the moment.
Hardness runs through the poem as a double meaning. "Difficult and hard" in the opening means troublesome, but once the tin has set, "hard" means solid too. The third stanza returns to it ("Inexperienced I / is hard, and intricate") and ends with the poem's cleverest knot: "no fire to re-fuse/refuse". To re-fuse is to melt down and rejoin, to be remade. To refuse is to turn down what you were given. The slash lets both words stand, and the question seems to be whether the speaker could have remade or rejected the self he was handed, and whether the chance has passed. "Too late if / or because" leaves it open whether lateness is the effect or the cause.
Notice, too, how the adjectives soften. "Hard" is replaced in the final stanza by "Intricate and delicate". The set metal becomes something fine and breakable, more like a living thing. Sound reinforces this. "Inexperienced", "intricate", "intransitive" and "infinitely" all begin with the sound and shape of the pronoun, so the letter I multiplies through the poem. "Intransitive" adds a grammatical joke: an intransitive verb takes no object, so an intransitive "I" acts, or simply is, without passing into anything beyond itself.
Formally the poem is free verse, with short lines, almost no end punctuation until the last full stop, and phrases broken mid-thought. This suits a speaker who cannot finish a clean sentence about himself. "Distinguish" opens two stanzas, which gives the poem a frame, and it carries two senses, to tell apart and to make distinct or worthy.
The final choice is between "recombinant" and "emergent". The first is a genetic term for a new arrangement of existing material, so the self is only a reshuffle of Andy and Elsie. The second names something arising from complexity that is more than its parts. The poem lets "or emergent." stand alone after a gap, so the last word is left hanging, neither confirmed nor rejected. That refusal to settle is where the poem's value lies. It takes a question usually argued in lecture halls and makes the reader feel it in the syntax, in a pun, in a drop of tin hitting water.