Red Arcadia

by Mark Scroggins

Poetry. The poems of RED ARCADIA present a jittery, spasmodic often obscured series of moving x-ray images of contemporary culture in its frenetic contradictions, its self-destructiveness, and sometimes in its moments of fractured sublimity; a wobbly digicam portrait of the bewildered, mournful, and sometimes bemused subject caught in the rush of sounds and images, scrabbling through the levels of the city's palimpset/midden, checking his watch for the arrival of some heroic Captain Modernism.

"These sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued poems register damage, reading commodities or movies for us, out there in shopping malls or imaginary museums. They resolutely think through the world, half-scratched mordant footnotes to our political realities. They offer small consolation. This neatly organized book presents a poetry of ideas, then, but concocted by an intelligence unusually passionate, raw nerve-endings tingling with 57 varieties of ersatz. Mark Scroggins's ventriloquy knowing, ironical, satirical is the book's singular pleasure, its delicate likeness chiming in our ears with delight." Robert Sheppard

"Mark Scroggins practices a literature of contained excess, drawn from the welter of experience and its reflexive twin, theory. His poetry combines Benjaminian and Zukofskyan author functions, disclosing the cultural logics of distributed financialization through the method of materialist inversion. As it turns out, these condensed surfaces are identical to the ages' insights insofar as we could ever hope to live them. Consonantal lushness, vocalic variation, beautiful lineation, sublime contradiction are the predominant features of Scroggins's perverse constructivism. Poetry is thereby redeemed in its damaged finality." Barrett Watten"

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 6, 2012

About the author

Born as military brat just down the street (he likes to imagine) from where Theodor Adorno was lecturing on the culture industry & modernist aesthetics. Bounced all over in his formative years -- Monterey CA, Syracuse NY, various bits of Germany, west Texas, western Kentucky -- then more or less settled down in middle Tennessee, but not before contracting a permanent sense of dislocation. Studied at Virginia Tech & Cornell University, with concomitant degrees. Now in south Florida, where he lives with his wife, a scholar of early modern & contemporary drama, & his two just unbelievably beautiful daughters.

Considers poetry his first calling (after several ephemeral chapbooks, Anarchy [2003] his first full-length collection), but has been deeply involved in scholarship on the poet Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978), whose biography he has written.

Reviews

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mark Scroggins's "Red Arcadia: Poems" is a perfect example of what's wrong with poetry today. It's poetry written by a poetry professor for a tiny audience of poetry professors. There is nothing in this book that connects with the reader on a human level.

Scroggins cannot go more than half-a-page without showing his contempt for consumer society. The reader early on picks up the fact that Scroggins is probably a Marxist, but Scroggins likes to keep hammering-and-sickling his point into the ground.

Any place where Scroggins achieves a felicitous turn of phrase or delightful image he then buries in an avalanche of chaos, gibberish, and pompous verbiage. Indeed, most of the poems come across as collections of words randomly pulled from a hat. The reader has no idea what is going on in most of the poems, and after a few pages ceases to care.

Even Scroggins's line breaks prove irritating.

The following blurb should be enough to scare any reader away:

"Mark Scroggins practices a literature of contained excess, drawn from the welter of experience and its reflexive twin, theory. His poetry combines Benjaminian and Zukofskyan author functions, disclosing the cultural logics of distributed financialization through the method of materialist inversion. As it turns out, these condensed surfaces are identical to the ages' insights insofar as we could ever hope to live them. Consonantal lushness, vocalic variation, beautiful lineation, sublime contradiction are the predominant features of Scroggins's perverse constructivism. Poetry is thereby redeemed in its damaged finality."—Barrett Watten

My bottom line: Don't waste your time with this pretentious nonsense. It's intellectual masturbation of the worst sort.