I wrote the first sections of Zion Offramp in the late summer of 2015, thinking it was time for me to tackle a proper long poem. “Anarchy for the UK,” a medium-length serial poem, had formed the central part of my first collection Anarchy (2003), and I’d experimented with extended sequences of short stanzas in Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles (2011) and the title poem of Pressure Dressing (2016). But I craved a larger scope. While I didn’t—and still don’t—think of this long poem as open-ended, endlessly to-be-added-to, I wanted the sense of space, variousness, and possibility that I found in the canonical “big” poems—from the Homeric epics down through such modernist behemoths as The Cantos, Maximus, and “A”—and in the works of more recent poets, among them Ronald Johnson, Ron Silliman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Bruce Andrews, Anne Waldman, bpNichol, Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue.
Early sections were published under the impossibly pretentious title Capital; or, A Young Person’s Guide to the End Times, which had the dubious merit of pointing towards a particular Zeitgeist within which we’re very much still living. I thought better of that. The “Zion” of my title is neither a geographical location nor a geopolitical construct, but the Zion of the Psalms and Revelation, the Zion of the Protestant hymns I heard and sang in my childhood. It is something like Blake’s Jerusalem, Yeats’s Byzantium, or Larry Neal’s City of Zar (“right this side of far”)—a country of the mind, of plenitude and fulfillment and aesthetic balance. Always of course out of reach, just around the bend or dimly discerned in a fading distance. It is a Manhattan, a San Francisco, a Venice of the imagination. It is—in a pun borrowed from Ronald Johnson—Oz.
And then there’s the “offramp”: An American, growing up in a suburb in the South, I have spent probably a solid year of my life driving or riding on interstate highways, musing at times about what might lie beyond all those exotically-named exits I’ve never had occasion to take. The offramp is ambiguous: is it the exit that might lead to Zion, or is it a detour, a digression? Is there actually a principal highway to be traveled, a major artery, or is every road one pursues in some sense an offramp? Perhaps my primary mode in the sections of this poem is precisely digression, divagation, deferral.
Zion Offramp is governed by—or perhaps reft by, traversed by—various themes, some of which have become evident to me only on re-reading. “Something happened,” the poem’s first words, index the sense of dislocation that lies at the poem’s base, and in some sense is at the root of the incessant travel—by car, bus, subway, airplane, even foot—that runs throughout it. There is a girl—or a pair of girls—in adolescence, of the cusp of adulthood. There are the continual voices of violence, of command, of persuasion, and of consumer exchange that fill our ears. There is an archaeological impulse, to dig back beyond the layers of contemporary appearance to some bedrock, some origin—or at least to some stratum in which might be found the evidence of how it all went wrong.
Most of all, there is music. While I’ve been messing around with various stringed instruments since my middle teens, I don’t consider myself a “real” musician; but making music with others has been and continues to be one of the closest approaches to “Zion” that I have experienced. Music continually plays or is played throughout the poem, and music offers an experience emblematized at times as the “One”—evoking both Bootsy Collins’s admonition to “hit the root on the one,” and the singularity into which the members of a combo find themselves merging, as the music itself erases difference and division. (I’ve been tempted to dedicate the poem as a whole to all of the drummers with whom I’ve had the privilege to play; the guitar players, needless to say, don’t need the ego-boost.)
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The six sections of Zion Offramp published as Pest were composed, as I note at the end, in the spring of 2020, under the shade of the COVID-19 pandemic—the coldest, most terrifying months of lockdown. (Section 64, indeed, begins with an extended quotation from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year—a classic to which many of us were turning in those days.) I wasn’t trying by any means to “capture” the lockdown moment, or to provide a running commentary on it. But images of contagion and lockdown and the psychic pressures of isolation inevitably manifest themselves in these sections, as in earlier sections had registered the shock of the 2016 election and other events of the historical moment during which the poem was emerging.
I found myself in those cold and lonely days turning to various touchstones of my own language-being: the King James Bible; the words of diverse poets and writers who’ve impressed themselves on my imagination (some readers will recognize Auden, Bunting, Celan, Jonson, and others—though their words or cadences are present not as significant allusion, but as mere echo), and especially the works of Baruch Spinoza, whom I first read as an undergrad under the tutelage of the great early modern philosophy scholar Roger Ariew. (I remember showing Roger a perfectly dreadful poem I’d written called something like “Spinoza Dies in Delirium,” and his curt response: he doubted Spinoza indulged in the sort of drugs my verses evoked.) I first admired Spinoza, as I admired Blake, for the ingenuity of his systematic thought; as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to love him as an exemplar of one primary purpose of philosophy: to teach us how to live, and perhaps how to die.
Zion Offramp does not invite, much less insist upon, decoding or glossing. A series of footnotes as to what I had in mind at each point would be I think no more than distracting. The poem offers itself as a linguistic experience, a series of images and thoughts and shifting word-kaleidoscopes that with luck will take their readers along on a hejira from one point of dislocation and disorientation to another, amusing, appallling, and hopefully offering them ambiguous pleasures along the way.
Two brief notes: While the young people of the central portion of Section 68—Edmund, Peter, Lucy, and Susan—share given names with the Pevensie children of C. S. Lewis’s “Narnia” books, they are not to be identified with those characters, except perhaps to register my continuing disgust with Lewis’s cruel and sanctimonious allegory. “Gigi” in the final lines of Section 70, Disconnected Remarks, is neither the Canadian pop band nor the Indonesian rock group, but the Ethiopian singer Ejigyehu Shibabaw, whose recordings with bassist-producer Bill Laswell provided me with an ecstatic and mesmerizing example of the “One” towards which the poem as a whole strives.
Mark Scroggins lives in Montclair (New Jersey) and Manhattan. The publication of Pest (Zion Offramp 65-70) nearly coincides with the release of Zion Offramp 1-50 (MadHat Press) and his most recent collection of reviews and essays, Arcane Pleasures: On Poetry and Some Other Arts (Selva Oscura/Three Count Pour). His earlier poetry has been recently collected as Damage: Poems 1988-2022 (Dos Madres Press). His other books include a biography of American poet Louis Zukofsky and a monograph on British fantastist Michael Moorcock.
