Mark Scroggins: obelisk absinthe

These six sections from Mark Scroggins' serial poem Zion Offramp were written between July 2023 and May 2024. They are bracketed by the two poems of Scroggins' earlier Bodily Press chapbook forage acanthus (2024), which contains sections 112 and 119.

Mark Scroggins is a poet, biographer, and critic. He was born in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, in the depths of the Cold War, and grew up in various places—Germany, upstate New York, California, Texas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. He now lives in Montclair (New Jersey) and Manhattan.

Scroggins has written or edited three books on the poet Louis Zukofsky (including The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky) and a study of the English fantasy author Michael Moorcock. His essays and reviews have been collected in three volumes, the most recent of which is Arcane Pleasures: On Poetry and Some Other Arts. He has edited a selection of the erotic writings of the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and (with Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas) a selection of Zukofsky’s uncollected writings.

Scroggins’s first four volumes of poetry, along with a selection of previously unpublished and uncollected work, are gathered in Damage: Poems 1988-2022 (Dos Madres, 2022). Portions of his ongoing serial poem Zion Offramp, underway since 2015, have appeared in Zion Offramp 1-50 (MadHat, 2023) and in the chapbooks Pest: Zion Offramp 65-70 (above/ground, 2023) and forage acanthus (Bodily Press, 2024). Zion Offramp 51-100 (asemic dub) is forthcoming.