Mark Sullivan
Photo by Elizabeth Terhune
Bio
Mark Sullivan's first collection of poetry, Slag, was published in 2005, the winner of the Walt MacDonald First Book Series competition. He is also the recipient of a "Discovery"/The Nation Prize. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Mid-American Review, New England Review, Orion, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, and other journals. He was born in Willmar, Minnesota, raised in eastern Massachusetts, and educated at Middlebury College, Oxford University, and Columbia University. He lives with his wife in New York City.
Author's Statement
I think it was Thoreau who said that any serious work has in back of it a long leisure. For me, a literature fellowship from the NEA will provide precisely this crucial margin -- -an opportunity to take time off from a part-time job that I have held for many years to support my writing, and for the first time to be able to devote myself completely for several months to creative work. I am currently preparing poems for a second collection and hope in the course of this year to finish a working draft of the manuscript. I feel hugely privileged by this gift of time in which to reflect and write and grateful to the NEA for supplying it.
"Landscape in the Manner of Huang Gongwang"
Beginning of February, ice-melt
across the tar of the landing
making its bleak little landscape
beyond the window, mountain
passes of snow, asphalt-dark
inlets. Already the week-old
storm has shifted through several
geological eras, upheaval then
erosion along the curbs, until
now the shoveled drifts show all
that remains in the successions
of time and exposure. If we could
see our histories in X-ray, the sweet
dissembling now turned half-clear
in the mildly harmful radiation
of our gnosis, they might resemble
the flawed geometries forming these
scaled-down sierras and exhaust-
washed arroyos. I think we'd be
metaphor rather than memory,
some sheer promise of a knowing
that would shatter and stay like
nighttime waters. On our drive to visit
my wife's mother in her nursing
home, there's a stretch of parkway
where vines and trees tangle for
every inch of light and air.
The landscape they make looks as manic
as a preschooler's crayon coloring,
no space untouched. Her mother's
almost all space now, the voids
becoming ever more solid, and
I don't know where the details
go as synapses misfire, the network
unknots. Language no longer an
element you live by, involuntary
as breath, but the wild bird
amazed inside the house, stunned
for sky. In the Yuan Dynasty the great
master Huang Gongwang roughed out
the unfinished handscroll of his mountain
dwelling in one sitting, the whole
composition, then carried it with him
the rest of his days, long horizon
rolled in its silk sleeve. In the evening,
as if drawing down a shade, he would
spread it out to add the dragon
veins to each crevice, pour shadows
through the pines. Tea cooling in
his cup, the lamp flame low. Finding
more room everywhere he looked, wind
on the roof like a barely wet brush.