Mark Harris : part five

What poets changed the way you thought about writing? 

It’s tempting to respond with a page-long list. To never stop changing my thinking, that’s my wish. Influences on my early writing include Emily Dickinson, Robert Creeley, Lucille Clifton, Jorge Luis Borges, Basho, Robert Lax, Amiri Baraka, Lorine Niedecker, Raymond Roseliep, Gustaf Sobin. I’ve also learned so much from reading Paul Celan, Rae Armantrout, Anne Carson, Elizabeth Robinson, Fred Moten, and many others.

Connection to authors I’ve come to know through Ornithopter Press means the world to me. Their poetry has changed my appreciation of poetics, and how could it not? To read holding others in mind, and then to reach a concerted understanding, and common cause, is transformational. To think I’ve had the good fortune to publish such brilliant people—I’m grateful.

Mark Harris : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry? 

The desire to get it right, to make an impossibly perfect creation, gets in the way. I need to tear that impulse down before I can write.

Mark Harris : part three

How does a poem begin? 

The source of the impulse itself is a mystery, isn’t it? And everyone is different. I might be motivated by a desire to convey a notion difficult to express through conventional means, one that resists linear narrative. I’ll start with a few words I enjoy the sound of, or an observation, because why not start where attention is currently trained. Some people get things going by using divining systems like the I Ching. There are many approaches to staying open to possibility. I’m interested in what happens after the beginning, how we, author and reader, construct a world. The poem will end up going where it goes. I think it helps to remember a text is composed of words that have their own heft before and after the meanings we individually ascribe them.

Mark Harris : part two

How did you first engage with poetry? 

I came to poetry in a roundabout way, through other avenues. I’ve been involved in the visual arts since I studied painting in art school, and fascinations I embraced then continue to influence my thinking. Eventually I noticed my favorite artists often employ text in their artwork, and I slowly came to understand those texts as poetry.

Looking back to childhood, I want to give thanks to my mother, who recently passed away. She read aloud to my sister and me every night, picture books, novels, poetry. I remember liking a rhyme by Hughes Mearns that begins, “Yesterday upon the stair / I met a man who wasn’t there / he wasn’t there again today / I wish, I wish he’d go away” and will recite it to myself to this day. Mom was a fan of the blues. She loved to play recordings of her favorite singers. Dinah Washington was in heavy rotation, and I became intrigued by (without totally getting) her creative interpretation of song lyrics, the way she’d slip in slyly coded euphemisms, just behind the beat.

Mark Harris : part one

Mark Harris’ most recent booklet The Other Other reprises a collaboration with artist Keith Crowley at Art Center Sarasota in May 2019, an exhibition that paired paintings "Familiar (1–12)” with a multi-part poem "Nocturnal". His poetry has appeared in a wide range of magazines, and several compilations, including NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems and a Norton anthology Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years. He currently resides in New Jersey, where he devotes an increasing amount of his energy to Ornithopter Press, an independent publisher of poetry.

Photo credit: Laura Harris

What are you working on? 

I’ve returned to a manuscript I had set aside for a while. Its initial impetus was a group of poems inspired by my part-time art museum job. I work with objects in the collection hands-on, and those poems reflect that experience. They became the bones of a longer project that has branched out into formally varied pieces loosely united in questioning the nature of perception, cognition, gaze, shared attention, identity, aesthetics, etc.