Mark Scott, 48, the author of two collections of poems, “Tactile Values,” published in 2000 and “A Bedroom Occupation,” published in 2007, will help the Park City Library close its celebration of Poetry Month this weekend. But beginning at 4 p.m. on Sunday, at the Park City Library, Scott’s reading will not be, in his own words, “precious.”
“People should not expect to be embarrassed,” he explains. “People should expect to hear a person talking to other people.”
Scott, a professor of composition, creative writing and literature at Omaha’s College of St. Mary, finds his poetry in daily life, and especially in conversation. He prefers idiom and vernacular and often begins writing upon hearing something said by a friend or neighbor. One of his poems, “Accumulations,” was conceived immediately after an exchange with a coworker who admitted to smoking a single cigarette with his wife before going to sleep.
“I’m probably closest to Robert Frost’s idea that ‘all the fun is in how you say a thing,'” Scott mused. “Tones of voice are important for me to get down on paper and I get to a poem by saying something in my head or hearing something said and that leads me to start a poem and go with that, with the impulse In that sense, it’s a style of poetry that’s closer to talk than it is to something that sounds literary or fancy or theoretical.”
With “A Bedroom Occupation” Scott aims to capture the sound of one person talking to another in a kind of intimate conversation that the reader is allowed to listen in on. “To me a poem is an imagined utterance. It’s not a record of something I said to somebody or something the poet said to someone,” he says. “It’s more like things I am now able to say that I wasn’t able to say at the time.”
Another of Scott’s pieces, entitled “XX,” is a response to a girlfriend asking him where his poems come from. His initial response was “inarticulate,” he confesses, but later, pen in hand, he was able to come up with a better answer in poetry.
“I want to convey a mind in the act of thinking or a life in the act of being lived,” he says of his work. “I want there to be a recognition in the reader that something’s going on in these sentences that can dislodge something settled and make it something unsettled, something worth exploring, thinking about further I suppose I would like to unsettle a reader, not in a simplistic way.”
In addition to Frost, Scott admires the work of Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Frederick Seidel, a contemporary poet. Of late, essays also inspire Scott. “Lately, it’s nonfiction prose – essays – that get me thinking,” he says. “You have the evidence of the mind in action on the page – somebody really working with trying to find a clarity about something, not, maybe, lasting, but for now. You see it in action. You see it, hear it, something being worked out.”
Scott says though he wrote poems throughout high school, it was a poem he wrote while home from college in 1980, after climbing a water tower in Englewood, Colo., that steered him in the direction of literature. “I was going to London to study European history – I was going to be a history professor,” he says. Then the Denver Post published his water tower poem.
Scott holds a doctorate and a master’s degree from Rutgers University in Literature, but says he has “written deliberately” throughout his studies, though he never took a creative writing course. “Sometimes I think of myself more as a reader or thinker than as a poet,” he admits. “It’s more of an avocation to me than a vocation.”
Scott notes few people read poetry – by his estimation 4,000-10,000 nationwide. The title of his latest collection of poems comes from American poet Hart Crane who said, “In this town/Poetry’s a bedroom occupation.” What Crane means is, “in our culture, there isn’t much of a place for poetry – literary poetry – poetry of the page, of the book,” Scott explains.
Still, he finds poetry to be something that happens daily and something that almost anyone is capable of understanding – or creating – should they take the time to write things down.
In an essay Scott wrote, “In any given time and place, poetry is a concern of a small minority. But that’s one of the great things about it: poetry’s unpopular. It’s also unnecessary. Food, water, and shelter are necessary. And yet poetry persists But we don’t need to get another education before we can start writing poetry Writing is also ordinary, as most of us are, and each of us is capable of newness, if only we knew it. And practiced it. We may, then, think of poetry as valuable along with other useful and common things, like forks and cups.”
XX
So you would know where poems come from, Susan? I can’t answer that. But if you ask
the source of mine, I can. Not confusion,
first of all, not beauty of the first degree, not emotion recollected in tranquility; not
other poems and their poets; not
animus against another coming toward me, howsoever the travel is taken; not by way of
vision, nor by a vision; not by hope or wish,
not in longing; neither through an image that encloses some complex in an instant,
nor through vortices; not out of a spout
conjoining sea and sky, nor in a fable handed down by a tractatrice who washed and set
the hair of peripatetic Greece
and marching Rome, that frantic seat, where Janus, looking before and after, could keep
no peace; nor by strength of fields,
snatches of song or scent, last breath, ash; not out of envelopes that hold affairs in grief;
nor from joy at relief or possible despair;
still less from the red-winged blackbirds’ dart of scarlet, orange; from saying
saxifrage and persiflage, from cumquat leaves
and blueberry, their waxen surface, gaugeless veins, that fruit bitter, this sweet,
stem-end and blossom-end, plum-seam and peach-fold.
–By Mark Scott