Literary essays, reviews, and other observances by Mark Scroggins

The short answer is that Mark Scroggins is a poet, biographer, and literary critic. The long answer is that Scroggins is a child of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who has written passionately and smartly about the poetry of Algernon Swinburne, Don Mee Choi, Susan Howe, Geoffrey Hill, Marcella Durand, and Uche Nduka. (Dear Reader, is your head spinning?) He has read all of the books of the English science fiction and fantasy writer Michael Moorcock and the polymath, art critic, and philosopher John Ruskin (both prolific authors). He has written and edited authoritative books on Louis Zukofsky, which is how I first discovered him. I suspect that Scroggins is a 21st-century polymath, but we don’t give degrees in that (we should). He reads sympathetically and carefully, attendant to everything that makes a poem a poem, which we have not agreed on since the death of Alexander Pope. That’s why I read Scroggins, no matter who or what he has turned his attention to. He has no axe to grind in a world where it seems everyone does. It is never about whether I agree with him or not: it is that I am interested in engaging with the level of attention and precision he brings to each thing he reads, each work of art he looks at. He teaches me.

—John Yau