Over time, Worku becomes more than a collection of daily poems. Each writer leaves behind a body of work: recurring images, humor, tenderness, surprises, and distinctive ways of handling constraint.
This series looks back at those bodies of work, one poet at a time.
A Year of Mark
Worku began, in part, because of Mark.
He was doing something with Wordle words that caught my attention: taking the leftover guesses and making a poem out of them. That small idea became the seed of Worku, and Mark has been there ever since — friend, poet, provocateur, and reliable supplier of poems that make me wonder how his mind got from one word to the next.
I really enjoy Mark’s poetry.
It is sneakily erudite and exquisitely juvenile.
Sometimes those qualities occupy the same three lines.
A CRATE of pure hate
RAIDS the MORAL AGORA
Yup, the dude ABHORs
There is AGORA, casually dropped into the middle of a poem that ends with “Yup, the dude ABHORs.” That collision is very Mark. The vocabulary can reach toward history, philosophy, science or something half-remembered from a book — and then the poem suddenly sounds like somebody leaning across the table with a Schlitz.
Elsewhere:
STARE at conjecture
A subatomic CHARM PEARL
BOARD the QUARK express
Particle physics becomes public transportation.
Why not?
That is part of the pleasure of Mark’s Worku. The poem often seems to operate according to its own form of dad logic: each step makes just enough sense that by the time you arrive at the final line, you realize you have been led somewhere completely unreasonable.
And then there is baseball.
Dust off, RAISE the bat
GLARE down the pitcher, spit, splat
High cheese strike, tips cap
Mark doesn’t explain baseball. He assumes baseball.
The pitcher, the glare, the spit, the high cheese, the tiny ritual of tipping the cap — the poem arrives already knowing the language of the game. His baseball poems often feel less like poems about baseball than baseball thinking compressed into seventeen syllables.
Sports in general wander through his work:
RAISE your game dawg pound
TONED and WOKEN for the game
The Lambeau COVEN weeps
Somehow Wordle has led us to Cleveland, Green Bay and a coven.
This is also completely normal in a Mark poem.
His non sequiturs are not interruptions to the poem. Very often, they are the method. A constraint arrives that appears to have absolutely no business being in the story, and Mark does the difficult Worku work of finding the story anyway.
That is one of the things I most appreciate about his writing. Worku eventually hands every poet a word like USURY and says: Okay. Now what? Well, Mark did this:
Steely eye STARE down
He POURS another whiskey
Pay the USURY
USURY is not an accommodating final word. It arrives carrying economics, debt and a slightly medieval smell. Mark gives it a guy, a stare, a whiskey and a debt that apparently needs settling. Suddenly there is a scene.
Mark looks for the story.
Sometimes the solution is elegant. Sometimes it is ridiculous. Sometimes it seems to rely on a chain of associations accessible only to Mark. But he keeps pulling the stray words into some kind of world.
Even failure can become material:
RAISE OUTED MONEY
a LOVEY POKEY process
three mil phase one BOGEY
That came from a 0/6 Wordle.
There is something fitting about that. The Wordle may have gone completely off the rails, but the words still get put to work.
And underneath the jokes, sports references, odd learning and linguistic ricochets, Mark can also become unexpectedly simple and a lovely scene emerges:
So ALIVE, so LIGHT
UNTIL the last TULIP dies
Summer shines life bright
The voice is still recognizably his, but the machinery quiets down for a moment.
Looking across Mark’s Worku, what I see most is appetite. For words, for references, for jokes, for baseball, for argument, for silliness, for whatever improbable connection might get a handful of stubborn constraint words across the finish line.
He helped inspire the game because he was already doing the thing at its heart:
Taking the words he was given and finding out where they might go.
I’m very glad he did.