The Mathematical Sublime: Writing about Poetry
The poet Mark Scroggins has long been known as a leading authority on Louis Zukofsky, a prolific reviewer and critic, and the author of a series of authoritative essays on the history of twentieth-century poetry. The Mathematical Sublime presents a selection of Scroggins's reviews, short essays, and weblog posts about a dazzling variety of poets, poems, and poetry criticism: from Andrew Marvell to Rae Armantrout, Beowulf to Ronald Johnson, from the high modernists to Language Poetry and the contemporary avant-garde.
Scroggins expores the varieties of poetic form, the interplay of the personal and the political in poets' and critics' rhetoric, the role of race and gender in the writing and reception of poetry, and the sometimes maddening squabbles that make up the poetry "scene." Along the way he writes about "hauntology" in popular music, occultism among the modernists, the relationship of poem-making and gardening, and his own sense of almost paralyzed awe at the rich and overwhelming plenitude of poetry that has been written over the past century. In Robert Archambeau's words, "Fluent, honest, and undeceivable, Mark Scroggins is just what a critic ought to be."
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Become an affiliateMark 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: Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries, The Mathematical Sublime: Writing About Poetry, and Arcane Pleasures: On Poetry and Some Other Arts. He has edited a selection of the erotic writings of the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. For the past seven years, Scroggins has been working on a long serial poem, Zion Offramp; the first fifty sections are being published by MadHat Press.