Mark Kirschen
Mark Kirschen was born in Brooklyn, New York City on August 1, 1948. He grew up in Nassau County on Long Island, living in Rockville Centre until he left home in 1966 to study poetry and literature at Stony Brook University. During the 60s and 70s, Stony Brook's English department included several poets of distinction including Louis Simpson, Jim Harrison, and Kofi Awoonor and was a training ground for young poets like Kirschen. Kirschen's friendships with fellow Stony Brook students Geoffrey O’Brien and Eliot Weinberger, both poets, helped shape his all-too short career ending in 1980.
Kirschen’s poetic inspirations included Ezra Pound, George Oppen, and Basil Bunting. Kirschen started publishing his poems in little magazines including Pony Tail, Panjandrum, Sumac, and Montemora during the 1970s. Kirschen's first and only book of poetry, Pier’s End, was issued as a special supplement to Montemora, edited by Eliot Weinberger, at the start of 1980.
In Kenyon Review’s blog series “Poetry Today,” which features interviews with poets, Tom Snarsky says of Pier’s End:
I sometimes forget how much of a thrill it is, encountering a new poet for the first time and getting a sense of their work, the unique mystery of/in that feeling—currently I’m undergoing that immersion with the poems of the late Mark Kirschen, whose Pier’s End is an almost mythical book published as a magazine supplement and whose bio, save for a line in a David Rattray poem, is completely unfindable online.
The poem Snarsky mentions, Rattray’s “The Spirit of Saint Louis” first published in Bomb in 1989, mentions Kirschen and his poetry in brief: “On the chair were poems of Mark Kirschen published in 1980 just before his suicide, a first and last book that I would like to read on the air.”
Pier’s End demonstrates Kirschen’s firm command of language and its music together with his ability to transform colloquial speech into poetry. After his death, Kirschen also left for Weinberger a manuscript of sixteen poems written during his last six months. These poems were published in issue 7 of Montemora (1980) followed by a short memoir of Kirschen by Geoffrey O’Brien, titled “Some Notes.” O’Brien opens:
There is very little I can contribute to a biography of Mark Kirschen, although I knew him for twelve years and for one of those years shared a house with him [while students at Stony Brook]. For most of his adult life his only real activity was the writing of poetry, and the roots of that can be looked for only in the poems themselves.
Concerning Kirschen’s poetic method, O’Brien offers this observation:
As far as I know his method of composition never wavered. He worked on the same antique typewriter, writing each poem whole from beginning to end, then typing it over and over, each time changing, transposing, until over the years the original poem might become unrecognizable: lines would move from one poem to another, poems would change titles, images would expand, contract, turn into their negation. In the six years between the first draft of the poem "Pier’s End" and its publication in 1979 [in Montemora], he revised it continually.
Tragically, suffering from chronic depression, Kirschen took his life and died in New York City on February 27, 1980, at the age of 31—soon after publishing Pier’s End. Kirschen ended his last letter, as Eliot Weinberger notes, with these lines: “Back to start over now / In the universe—”. He is buried in Elmont, New York, close to his childhood home on Long Island.
This biography was written by Jonathan Cohen and published on June 2nd, 2022