From the afterword by the author:
I never set out to write a poem. I will jot things down in my notebook, sometimes ideational, sometimes not, sometimes picked up from the environment, or misheard, or from a dream, and occasionally a phrase will have a rhythmic urgency that compels me to jot something further, and then I’m lost in process and have no idea where I or the poem is going. This is a liminal state fraught with both joy and terror, and it is processual. The process may extend over few or many lines and take a few moments or days and months. It lasts until one emerges at the other end, back into the everyday, arrival signaled by the loss of urgency.
. . .
One looks at the world as new, trying to avoid the ironies of sentimentality, golden ages and such, and one looks at it as experienced, caught in the web of connectivities. At a point in my work, aware of having reached a limit, I discovered through the accidents of biography a way to work that suggested the possibility of doing both in the poem at once.
Out of the accidental and haphazard can come something both magical and variously resonant with the life one leads, internally and in the world. |
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Mark Weiss is a poet in the valued and ancient but still valid sense of vater, maker, and one can trace a line to his work that might begin with Sappho and include Basho, Wordsworth, and Creeley. But his work will not be confused with theirs or anyone’s, as it is a vision earned and written through his own fierce yet generous commitment. He is a delicate stone mason in words, and through the architectures he creates, light pours, language illuminates. |
