Poetry of Mark Anderson > Woodland Pattern Book Center

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Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Milwaukee whose work as a monologuist, playwright, and interdisciplinary artist has been seen in over thirty cities

around the country. The range of his work includes theater, video, books, installation and performance art. Two monologues were published by Woodland Pattern in a chapbook entitled Making A Living; and another, The Big Inning, was made into a video piece by Dennis Darmek, which aired nationally on public television. In 1996, he began a long-term collaboration with Isabelle Kralj and Milwaukee Dance Theatre (MDT), for whom he now serves as husband and Associate Artistic Director (in that order). Projects with Kralj and MDT include IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, TEN MINUTES TILL BEDTIME, PETRUSHKA and PIAF—which premieres May 9, 2003.

"[Anderson] temperately talks us into a kind of low-key brain fever as he weaves philosophy, politics, and global ecology together with the equally grave and even more urgent problems of daily life."

— Burt Supree, The Village Voice

From

-Manual-

Mark Anderson

You start small and expand as much as you desire, in the course of your life, but language is something that is often taken for granted, and over time, expediency will replace curiosity, and of the thousands of words available to learn and use, you'll probably settle on a small handful that serves your needs.

At some point, perhaps, you will travel to a foreign country and if you are a standard American with nothing like a second language you will be reminded of that early stage in your life when the range of your vocabulary was really really narrow. It's probably something you won't think about too often, but in the beginning, you had one word—[gurgle, sounding like hi, why and I]. Then you split that into two, then a third came along, then more and so on, but eventually you may forget what it was like to have only as many words as you had teeth.

Eating is something that gets underway at the beginning, and it grows and changes as you do, into more advanced and particular behaviors which eventually relate to your response to hunger more as a metaphor than prime manifestation.

From the initial urge to suck—a desire that never really leaves you—the things you will do to appease your appetite as you step beyond the world of the crib multiply in manifold forms, dodging and weaving around your ability to control and understand them.

Confusion ensues when hunger leaves the realm of the stomach, and mashed peaches gives way to cigarettes, coffee, bigger toys, new clothes, ,more this, better that; better job, bigger hat; greater power, wealth, knowledge; more money, more time; more me.

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