How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resounds?
My mother loved, recited, and wrote poems, but her idea of poetry was homespun favorites like Edgar Guest. I think I always wanted to write, but I knew from a very early age that Guest’s rollicking domestic platitudes were not my thing. I was probably 11 or 12 when I realized that poetry could be as cool as science fiction or fantasy—indeed, it could actually be fantasy, since I was coming across poems in books by H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Somehow I read Blake (at least the straightforward Blake—Songs of Innocence & Experience; the Prophetic Books would only come much later).
I was fascinated and enthralled by poetry’s formal aspects, and it was only when I encountered The Waste Land—at maybe 14—that I began to figure out that poetry was more than a matter of rhymes and regular meters. I wrote poems off and on from a very early age, but I only began writing seriously in college, when I had been intensively exposed to people like Donne, Dickinson, Pound, and Robert Duncan.
So much about poetry “resonates”—it’s hard to know where to start. Working with the sounds of words, their shapes and texture and flavor in the mouth, the way they chime against each other and strike discords or harmonies. (Clearly I have an oral/aural fixation.) The simultaneous freedom and responsibility—a sense of license, that I’m not bound by strictures of narrative or character or argument or discursive thread, but that each new piece of writing is a sortie into the unexpected—a kind of Enterprise-voyage towards “strange new worlds.”
How does a poem begin?
A line, or a phrase, or even a bit of rhythm; something I overhear, or mishear, or that just pops into my mind. From there a given passage will accrete, and be woven together with or soldered to other passages. My poetry is generally an affair of collage, of sticking things next to each other to see what sort of energy in generated by their proximity. I don’t generally begin poems responding to particular experiences, though experience and occasion often enter into them, sometimes by the back door.
Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
Louis Zukofsky said somewhere that every poet writes a single poem across her or his life, and I suppose that’s true from a certain distance; but I think I’m too closely involved with my own work to be able perceive it as an extended whole. I see each project as more or less its own thing, and accordingly compartmentalize my attentions. For the last eight years, most of my energies have gone into the serial poem Zion Offramp, though I have written a number of short poems along the way—pieces that don’t really have a place in the ramshackle unfolding scheme of the long thing. For several months, I’ve been planning and doing groundwork for a large-scale conceptual project, a kind of “remix” of perhaps half the works of Andrew Marvell. That’s been entirely separate from my other poetic pursuits, and I honestly don’t see how they relate to one another.
How do you see your poetry and critical work in conversation, if at all?
Obliquely. In my poetry I write about things that interest and move me, and I do the same in my criticism; sometimes they coincide. When I’m intending to write in prose about someone or something, I read a lot about them, and sometimes the results of that reading bubble up in the poetry. When I was editing Our Lady of Pain: Poems of Eros and Perversion by Algernon Charles Swinburne, I did a very deep dive into Swinburne—the poetry, the life, the criticism—and various oddments of that research turn up in Zion Offramp.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
Not really. I toggle back and forth among various pursuits: reading, writing, drawing, making music—and of course the necessary activities of sustaining a viable bourgeoise household.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I don’t really follow literary journals much, I’m afraid. I read the poetry reviews in Norman Finkelstein’s Restless Messengers; I like rob mclennan’s periodicities; I like Blazing Stadium and B O D Y; I will look at whatever anyone brings to my attention, but mostly I read books.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately who most excite you?
I’m
deeply involved in writing a group biography of the Objectivist poets, so heavy
re-reading of Zukofsky, Oppen, Niedecker, Rakosi, Reznikoff, and Bunting
occupies much of my time. I’ve been revisiting with pleasure Bruce Andrews and
Jackson Mac Low. I’m very late to the party, but impressed by M. NoureSe
Philip’s Zong! Nonnos’s Dionysiaca, in the new translation from
the University of Michigan Press (Tales of Dionysus). David Brazil. Aby
Kaupang. Eliot Cardinaux. I am more or less continually reading or re-reading
J. H. Prynne.
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Most of Mark Scroggins’s poetry is in print in the volumes Damage: Poems 1988-2022 (Dos Madres) and Zion Offramp 1-50 (MadHat) and the chapbook Pest: Zion Offramp 65-70 (above/ground). Zion Offramp 51-100 is expected in late 2024. His essays and reviews are collected in several volumes, most recently in Arcane Pleasures: On Poetry and Some Other Arts (Three Count Pour). There are also critical monographs on the British fantasist Michael Moorcock and the American poet Louis Zukofsky, and the widely reviewed The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky. Scroggins lives in Montclair, New Jersey, and Manhattan.