Mark Svenvold is first and foremost a poet, working on his next collection. He has written recently about bicycle nomads for Orion Magazine; wildcat oil geology for Fortune/Small Business; and solar power and offshore wind power for The New York Times Magazine. Svenvold’s books include Big Weather (Henry Holt Co, 2005) about tornado chasers and the culture of catastrophilia and Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw, (Basic Books, 2002), which unravels the bizarre career of a Long Beach, California, fun house mummy. A 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Nonfiction, he covers renewable energy for AOL’s DailyFinance. Mark teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Seton Hall University and is actively engaged in the undergraduate literary and performance scene on campus.
Mark Svenvold
Feature
The New Commute
ON A CHILL MORNING in late January of 2007, Paul Minett, a mustachioed man with a clean pate, a notebook, and a pleasant if un-pin-pointable accent, spent the better part of Continue reading
Poetry
Austere Finale
Thinking back, your plenty was huge, massive, the size of a gorge, a regular canyon, so green and spectacular whole families on their last gallon, driving on fumes, everyone silent, sticky, Continue reading
Poetry
Transmission and Distribution
I’m tired of turning away from all this stuff that keeps everything up & running— all the prosaic pipes and conduit in the air that R. Crumb swore, once and for Continue reading
Feature
Send in the Clowns
I AWOKE TO BIRD SONG and slant January light cutting through the brush that surrounded our hut — a circular, thatched roof on poles, no walls, concrete floor, modeled after the Continue reading