Mark Scroggins

Mark Scroggins was born in an American military hospital in Frankfurt, West Germany, as-quite coincidentally-Theodor Adorno prepared to deliver lectures on "History and Freedom" across town at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität. He spent his childhood on various army bases before settling in Clarksville, Tennessee. He taught for many years at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, and now lives in Montclair, New Jersey, and Manhattan.Scroggins has published critical monographs on the poet Louis Zukofsky and the fantasist Michael Moorcock, as well as a biography of Zukofsky. His essays and reviews have been collected in Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries (University of Alabama Press, 2015) and The Mathematical Sublime: Writing About Poetry (MadHat Press, 2016). He has most recently edited a selection of the erotic poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Our Lady of Pain: Poems of Eros and Perversion.As an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, Scroggins wrote iambic pentamenters for the "New Formalist" Wyatt Prunty; A. R. Ammons directed his MFA thesis at Cornell University. His first collection of poems, Anarchy (Spuyten Duyvil, 2003), was followed by Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles (The Cultural Society, 2011) and Red Arcadia (Shearsman, 2012). He is presently at work on a long serial poem entitled (perhaps provisionally) Zion Offramp.