Mark Sargent, Spetses, July 2001    Photo by John Psaropoulos

Born in Olympia, Washington in 1950, living there till 1969; received a B. A. in Art from Mt. Angel College, Mt. Angel, Oregon in 1973; briefly lived in California, then Porltand, Oregon; founded in 1975 with musicmaster The Impossibilists, a dada performance/publication group (15 years of publication & performance issued forth-all materials now archived at the University of Oregon and the University of Washington); studied Buddhist poetics with Trungpa, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, Philip Whalen, Ed Sanders, Ed Dorn, etc at the Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado in 1975 & 1977; Mexico in 1980; worked as carpenter, snake oil salesman, street saxophone & combo honk, bartender, founded and lead jazz/poetry band Defenestration in 1983; published chapbooks The Modern Relationship in 1983 and Room Enough in 1985; met Melita, fathered Alekos, and in 1990 we packed it in, flew to London, bought beater and made our way south, eventually arriving in Sparti, Greece. For the past ll years we have lived in Agia Eirini, a small village in the mountains to the West of Sparti where I tend the olive and fruit trees, the dogs, my family-the villagers would call this taking care of the living things. My day is divided between country chores, writing & reading, and managing, by phone, fax, post and internet, an estate portfolio in the United States.

I have performed my work throughout the Western United States and in Greece.

Publications include:

Paint the Goat, published by Susan Howard in San Francisco in 1994. A beautiful handmade artbook with 80 pages of my poetry, all written in Greece and very much concerned with my Greek experience. The artist, Susan Howard, visited Greece four times while compiling the images she later used to great effect.
The Body Prays, 1996, Alaina Lara in Portland, Oregon, a sonnet sequence.

Forthcoming:

Stelae Stories, 2001/02, Buncombe Hollow Press, Portland, Oregon. A sequence of letter poems.
Call Waiting, a full length play that will be produced in Olympia, Washington in 2002.

Unpublished manuscripts include:

Still on the Mountain, Poems 1996-1999, a 90 page poetry manuscript.
Trailing Clouds, full-length coming of age novel
Right and Wrong, a one-act play

Works in progress include:

Ova the Moon, a novel set in Greece
Stelae Stories Vol. 2

My poetry and prose has appeared in many U.S. publications including: NRG; Rain City Review; Mr. Cogito; The Atlanta Review; The Temple; and The Committee of Correspondence. I am currently a contributing editor for The Raven Chronicles, an arts and literature magazine published in Seattle, Washington.

Geoglossa, Listening to Greece (from the The Raven Chronicles)

Contact details:

e-mail: sargent@poetic.com

Excerpts from my work:

[poems]

In a deep blue funk...
What I am listening to
The Market
When You Think Pneumonic
Heathen And Plastic Spaceships