Mark Antony Owen : part one

Mark Antony Owen is a syllabic poet writing in nine self-developed forms (occasionally, with variations). Though he has a handful of publishing credits – five poems in three journals, two of these online – he’s chosen to self-publish his digital-only poetry project Subruria rather than look to be published by either a new or an established press. Mark has been writing poetry for many years, but only ‘returned’ to it in the autumn of 2010. You can follow him on Twitter at @MarkAntonyOwen and @Subruria, and read his work at markantonyowen.com and subruria.com. Longer term, Mark aims to launch Advocate Poetry – a new kind of digital-first poetry press.

What are you working on?

Good health permitting, I’ll be working on the same project for approximately the next 30 years: my ‘magnum opus’ (too grand a term by far), Subruria. Troubled by the conceit of writing lots of different collections, all with separate titles but essentially cycling around the same themes, I wanted a broad concept into which all my work could fit. As I’ve lived most of my life in what I call ‘subrural’ places – areas where town and countryside meet – it made sense to me to write about what I knew. Further galvanising my resolve to do this, and to do it as a long-term, self-published project, was a Twitter chat with Adrian Slatcher and J T Welsch about Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. This flicked on a green light in my head. History seemed to be saying it was okay for me to do my ‘collection’ my way. The first release of Subruria would later appear online from April 2018.