Robert Toombs of Georgia stands as one of the most fiery and influential politicians of the nineteenth century. Sarcastic, charming, egotistical, and gracious, he rose quickly from state office to congressman to senator in the decades before the Civil War. Though he sought sectional reconciliation throughout the 1840s and 1850s, he eventually became one of the South's most ardent secessionists. This thorough biography chronicles his days as a student and young lawyer in Georgia, his boisterous political career, his appointment as the Confederacy's first Secretary of State, his unsuccessful stint as a Confederate General, and his role as a proud, unreconstructed rebel after the war. A thorough exploration of Toombs' career reveals the political forces and political missteps that drove him--and men like him--to secede from the United States and form the Confederacy.

Robert Toombs: The Civil Wars of a United States Senator and Confederate General

Biographies & Memoirs

Scroggins, Mark

Historical

McFarland Company

Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Scroggins provides a provocative and advanced introduction to the thought and writing of Louis Zukofsky, aptly described as one of the "first postmodernists."
Poet, translator, and editor, Louis Zukofsky was born in New York City in 1904. Raised to speak first Yiddish and then English, he was fascinated by language from an early age. This deep preoccupation with language--its musicality, complex constructions, and fluid meaning--later became a key component in the development of his poetry. Friend to William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, mentor to Robert Creeley and influence on many of the Language Movement poets, Zukofsky and his work stand squarely at the center of American poetry's transition from modernism to postmodernism.
Mark Scroggins advances thoughtful readings of Zukofsky's key critical essays, a wide variety of his shorter poems, and his "poem of a life," "A". He carefully situates Zukofsky within his literary and historical contexts, examining his relationship to Pound, his 1930s Marxist politics, and his sense of himself as a Jewish modernist poet. Scroggins also places Zukofsky within an ongoing tradition of American poetry, including the work of Wallace Stevens, Charles Bernstein, Ronald Johnson, Michael Palmer, and John Taggart.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University Alabama Press

Literary Criticism. New from SPD. Part of the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series from the University of Alabama Press, Mark Scroggins offers an essential work on the poetry of Louis Zukofsky. In this book Scroggins provides a provocative and advanced introduction to the thought and writing of Zukofsky, aptly described as one of the first postmodernists.

In Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries, Mark Scroggins writes with wit and dash about a fascinating range of key twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets and writers. In nineteen lively and accessible essays, he persuasively argues that the innovations of modernist verse were not replaced by postmodernism, but rather those innovations continue to infuse contemporary writing and poetry with intellectual and aesthetic richness.   In these essays, Scroggins reviews the legacy of Louis Zukofsky, delineates the exceptional influence of the Black Mountain poets, and provides close readings of a wealth of examples of poetic works from poets who have carried the modernist legacy into contemporary poetry. He traces with an insider’s keen observation the careers of many of the most dynamic, innovative, and celebrated poets of the past half-century, among them Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ronald Johnson, Rae Armantrout, Harryette Mullen, and Anne Carson.   In a concluding pair of essays, Scroggins situates his own practice within the broad currents he has described. He reflects on his own aesthetics as a contemporary poet and, drawing on his extensive study and writing about Louis Zukofsky, examines the practical and theoretical challenges of literary biography.   While the core of these essays is the interpretation of poetry, Scroggins also offers clear aesthetic evaluations of the successes and failures of the poetries he examines. Scroggins engages with complex and challenging works, and yet his highly accessible descriptions and criticisms avoid theoretical entanglements and specialized jargon. Intricate Thicket yields subtle and multifaceted insights to experts and newcomers alike.

Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

This book describes the life of Abraham Lincoln's first vice-president, Hannibal Hamlin. The author describes Hamlin's ancestors and boyhood before tracing his career through the Maine legislature, U.S. House of Representatives, and his course as one of the most powerful senators in the country during the 1850s. Hamlin is most widely known for being the first vice-president to Abraham Lincoln, yet, ironically this position was his most powerless in his sixty years of public service.

Hannibal

University Press of America

Poetry. Taking formal and methodological inspiration from the speedcore, thrash-jazz "miniatures" of John Zorn's Naked City, the poems of TORTURE GARDEN: NAKED CITY PASTORELLES are dense, impacted crystals of reference and insinuation: Hegel to Hüsker Dü; Milton to Moorcock; a high-style restaurant on Edinburgh's Royal Mile to the Meadowlands; Ruskin to webcam S&M. These concentrated bursts of cynicism, rancor, and frustrated lyricism are not minima moralia for an electronic age, but literate squawks thrown at the screen of contemporaneity's faceless spectacle.

Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles

Poetry

The Cultural Society

The Poem of a Life is the first critical biography of Louis Zukofsky, a fascinating and crucially important American modernist poet. It details the curve of his career, from the early Waste Land-parody Poem beginning 'The'” (1926) to the dense and tantalizing beauties of his last poems, 80 Flowers(1978), paying special attention to the monumental, complex, and formally various epic poem A”, on which Zukofsky labored for almost fifty years, and which he called a poem of a life.” Zukofsky was a protégé of Ezra Pound's, an artistic collaborator and close friend of William Carlos Williams's, and the leader of a whole school of 1930s avant-garde poets, the Objectivists. Later in life he was close friends with such younger writers as Robert Creeley, Paul Metcalf, Robert Duncan, Jonathan Williams, and Guy Davenport. His work spans the divide from modernism to postmodernism, and his later writings have proved an inspiration to whole new generations of innovative poets. Zukofsky's poetry is oblique, condensed, and as fantastically detailed as the late writings of James Joyce, yet it bears at every point the marks of the poet's life and times.

The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky

Arts & Literature

Counterpoint

Scroggins is the best known critic, and now also the biographer, of Louis Zukofsky. While this first volume of poems shows some affinities with Zukofsky, its attention to Cromwell, Ruskin, and Charles I's apocryphal "Eikon Basilike" also locates it somewhere between Susan Howe in The Noncomfomist's Memorial and the recent work of Geoffrey Hill, if one can imagine either one of these poets also taking an interest in Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols.  Notre Dame Review

Anarchy

Spuyten Duyvil

Pressure Dressing leaves us wondering where and how deeply are we wounded. In these poems, most especially in the extraordinary title suite, we are kept distracted from our own pain by the poet’s talk, his brilliant counterpoint of realities, his interleaving of lives, lived or glimpsed, his words alert to humiliation, to hurt, to beauty, to ideas, to others, and above all, to the transfiguring detail. With virtuosic turns of tone Mark Scroggins sounds out a complex affection for the flesh, telling with no slight elegance the ways we are bound to it, in it, and by it, and the grief we feel at the last farewell.
—Joseph Donahue

Pressure Dressing

MadHat, Inc.

Damage - Poems 1988-2022

Dos Madres Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Scroggins, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Scroggins, Mark

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Scroggins, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Robert Toombs: The Civil Wars of a United States Senator and Confederate General

Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Intricate Thicket: Reading Late Modernist Poetries (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Hannibal

Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles

The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky

Anarchy

Pressure Dressing

Damage - Poems 1988-2022