
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Poetry
MEB

|
Anarchy
by Mark Scroggins
ISBN
1-881471-74-8 $10.00 US |
$14.00 CAN 80 pages
Find
the book on Amazon>
Scroggins
is the best known critic, and now also the biographer, of Louis
Zukofsky.
While this first volume of poems shows some affinities with
Zukofsky, its attention to
Cromwell, Ruskin, and Charles I's apocryphal "Eikon
Basilike" also locates it somewhere
between Susan Howe in The Noncomfomist's Memorial and the
recent work of Geoffrey
Hill, if one can imagine either one of these poets also
taking an interest in Johnny Rotten
and the Sex Pistols. Notre Dame
Review
What
does the London punk rock scene of the 1970s have to do with the bloody
religious
turmoil of seventeenth-century England? And why
do "the occult
connections
between Munster antinomianism / and Johnny
Rotten" so concern
a young
American poet and cittern player (originally from
Tennessee) who also
happens to be
one of the world's leading authorities on
Louis Zukofsky? In Mark
Scroggins'
Anarchy (cf. Paradise Lost II. 959-967 and the
Sex Pistols), "Baalim /
and Peorim
smash a thousand / Telecasters and Marshall
amps." Scroggins
ransacks
British history to give us "words for a t-shirt /
traced white / on black"...
and so much
more. Norman
Finkelstein
Like
a kaleidoscope ("a pretty seeing") that offers a new snowflake symmetry
with
every jiggle,
these poems of Mark Scroggins teach us that
chaos is a restless order
livelier than
order itself. These poems are
annotations about the insults, both spiritual
and physical,
that have terrorized history from Sodom to
the Twin Towers. Guy Davenport
Mark
Scroggins
Mark Scroggins is
a
poet, biographer, and literary critic. His graduate degrees
in creative
writing and literature were from Cornell University. He is the author
of Louis
Zukofsky and the Poetry of
Knowledge
and a critical biography of Zukofsy.
His first
full-length collection of poems, Anarchy,
appeared in 2003. He has served
as editor of Epoch
magazine and the Diaeresis Chapbook Series of new poetry, and
has an
ongoing interest in poets whose writing reflects an active reconception
of the
modernist and
late modernist tradition in verse and prose. He has
published poetry and
poetry reviews
in a wide range of venues, including the
journals Epoch, Parnassus,
To,
American
Letters & Commentary; and Facture,
as well as the anthology The Gertrude
Stein Awards
In Innovative American Poetry.
|