This paper analyses the list of entries found in Latifi's (1491-1582) biographical dictionary of poets (tezkire) and problematizes the inclusions and exclusions through comparison with near-contemporary tezkires and anthologies of response poetry (nazire mecmuası), a genre that shares the tezkires' concern to cover the entirety of the Ottoman/Turkish poetic field. The preliminary results of such a comparison include the following: The completion date of the work gives a slightly misguiding impression of the actual contents which center on the times of Bayezid II and Selim I. This may suggest that the tezkire was conceived years or even decades before 1546. This impression is corroborated by Latifi's seeming ignorance of Sehi Beg's 1538 biographical dictionary and his assertion that he is the author of the first Ottoman tezkire, a statement that has escaped researchers' attention due to textual problems in the printed editions. Secondly, Latifi seems to be somewhat more distanced to Ottoman officialdom, the high ulema in particular, than other tezkire authors. Considered along with his penchant for mystics and mystical poetry, this may suggest a critical attitude vis-à-vis the ongoing cooptation and of elites by the imperial center. Thirdly, the underrepresentation of the Istanbul poetic scene is very striking. In fact, Latifi's tezkire is a veritable saga of the provinces, although certain Anatolian and Balkan cultural centers seem to be far more foregrounded than others. This raises the question whether one major factor that shaped the contents of work was Latifi's own trajectories in life as an individual. In other words, would it be possible to read the tezkire as an autobiography of sorts? If this can be shown to be true, we will need to formulate an understanding of the inclusion/exclusion criteria in this and other early tezkires that goes beyond the aesthetic and the political/ideological. In fact, the assumption that tezkire authors had unlimited access to the life stories and poems of all Ottoman poets and fashioned their works by making selections at their will, purely guided by their poetic and political preferences, seems to ignore the physical limitations of a biography writer operating in sixteenth-century manuscript culture. The paper will conclude with remarks on the problems with overemphasizing the "courtly" nature of poetry in Süleyman's times and projecting the political notion of "Ottoman patrimonialism" directly onto the field of literature.