Mark Weiss currently lives at the edge of Manhattan’s only forest.
Mark Weiss is an art dealer, former film maker (a film of his is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art), psychotherapist and social worker, occasional teacher of writing, literature, film making, history and psychology.
Mark
Weiss has published the following books and chapbooks of poetry: As
Landscape (Chax
Press, 2010) Different
Birds appeared as
an e-book (Shearsman Books, 2004)
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/ebooks/ebooks_home.html Figures (Chax Press, 2001)
Fieldnotes
(Junction Press,
1995) A
Block-Print by Kuniyoshi (Four Zoas/Nighthouse Press, 1994)
Intimate
Wilderness (New
Rivers Press, 1976) Letter
to Maxine (Heron
Press, 1974)
Other
books: Stories
as Equipment for Living: Late Talks and Tales of Barbara Myerhoff, which he edited with Marc Kaminsky
(Univ. of Michigan Press, 2005)
Mark
has edited and translated the following books: Editor:
The Whole Island (La Isla in peso): Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (Univ. of California Press, 2009)
Translating
and editing, with Harry Polkinhorn, Luis Cortes Bargalló’s book-length poem, Al margen
indomable (To the Unconquerable Shore) (forthcoming)
Notas
del país de Z / Notes from the Land of Z, by Gaspar Orozco (Chihuahua, MX: Univ.
Autonoma de Chihuahua, 2009) Stet:
Selected Poems of José Kozer (Junction Press, 2006)
Cuaderno de San Antonio / The San Antonio Notebook (La Paz, B.C.S., MX: Editorial Praxis, 2004), by Javier Manríquez
Across
the Line / Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California, with Harry
Polkinhorn (Junction Press, 2002) (a bi-lingual
anthology)
Translated
and edited: “The New Cuban Poetry,” a fifty-page special section of Poetry International VI
(2002) He
has also translated poems numerous Latin American and French poets.
Mark is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale, and the Rhode Island Creative Arts Center.
Among Mark's other literary activities, he founded and directed the West End Poetry Series from 1972 to 1975 and the Educational Alliance West Reading Series from 1988 to 1989, as well as coordinating readings at the Ear Inn from 1985 to 1987, all in New York. He was editor and publisher of the journal Broadway Boogie from 1973 to 1977 and a producer of special programs in the arts for WBAI-FM New York from 1975 to 1976. In 1991 he founded, and is currently Editor of Junction Press, a publisher of poetry.
Mark Weiss is a graduate of Johns Hopkins and Columbia University, and he has taught at the Brooklyn Museum School, Columbia University, Hunter College, University of Connecticut, SUNY-Old Westbury, Hunter School of Social Work, Pima College, University of Arizona, and University of California–San Diego.
“There are moments,” he has written of his current writing, "when the familiar object is seen with particular clarity, like a child seeing for the first time, and the words come forth spontaneously, simultaneous to and at the speed of perception. Cassirer in Word and Symbol describes the formation of language as the unlooked-for discovery of a series of what he calls “momentary gods,” the cthonic deities whose presence makes certain places sacred. Each of those places, he thinks, may be the site where object and sound appeared simultaneously. Named at the moment seen. Preintellective. This, to use Blake’s terminology, is the pole of innocence, the child’s perceptual moment and burst of surprise. The pole of immediacy. And I try to write from that pole. But there is also the inescapable pole of experience, the adult’s memory of object and word, the awareness that self and object are never more than for a moment apparently stable, that birth, death, and change inhere in all things. So the experience is always double: the simplicity of first perception and the ironizing presence of personal and tribal history."
"It may be easier to understand this in terms of visual art. Here’s an easy explanation of abstraction. I can imagine a perfect found object, a stone or a seashell. Then I can imagine making something that complete in itself. This is good as far as it goes, but of course I’m describing only one kind of abstraction. What describes Brancusi’s practice doesn’t do at all for Pollock. If Brancusi is creating perfect stones Pollock is creating undreamt-of organic networks. And each is working, given their goals, as succinctly as possible, so that the observing eye and mind has a chance to hold the experience for a moment and understand."
One looks at the world as new, trying to avoid the ironies of sentimentality, golden ages and such, and one looks at it as experienced, caught in the web of connectivities. At a point in my work, aware of having reached a limit, I discovered through the accidents of biography a way to work that suggested the possibility of doing both in the poem at once.
Out of the accidental and haphazard can come something both magical and variously resonant with the life one leads, internally and in the world."
Mark's translations are similarly acts of discovery, motivated additionally by his awareness of how limited American access has been to the lives and poetry of even our nearest neighbors.