Mark Scroggins: forage acanthus

Mark Scroggins is a poet, biographer, and critic living in Montclair (New Jersey) and Manhattan. He has written books on the American poet Louis Zukofsky and the English fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, and essays and reviews on a wide range of figures in both the verbal and visual arts. His central obsession, however, is poetry. His own poems have been collected in Damage: Poems 1998-2022 (Dos Madres, 2022), and since 2015 he has been at work on a long serial poem, the first tranche of which appeared in 2023 as Zion Offramp 1-50. Zion Offramp 51-100 (asemic dub) is forthcoming.

forage acanthus comprises two sections, 112 and 119, of this ever-shifting project. These poems, written in strictly patterned stanzas of word-count lines, lexically recursive and syntactically indeterminate, at times court sheer abstraction. But simultaneously they closely chart tides and flows of affect, open themselves to the contingencies of welcome happenstance and forbidding history, and throughout sound a plangent, seductive, if atonal music.