Mark Terrill is a well-traveled American poet, translator and prose writer who has resided in Northern Germany since the mid-1980s.
Biography
Born on July 1, 1953, in Berkeley, California, Mark Terrill grew up in the unincorporated mountain community of Sky Londa in San Mateo County, south of San Francisco. After failing to complete high school, he travelled widely in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, working as a dishwasher, woodcutter, gardener, bartender, taxi driver, gravedigger, sawmill worker, deckhand and welder before finally obtaining his seaman’s papers and shipping out of San Francisco to the Far East and beyond. Back in San Francisco in the late 1970s, Terrill became involved in the local music scene, and was founding member and lead guitarist for post-punk, anti-rock band, Ugly Stick. He was executive producer of the Farmer’s debut EP, Packed in an Urban Area, which appeared on his own label, BFM Records. He also co-starred in the film Beer Story. In 1981, he attended a writing workshop in Tangier, Morocco, with Paul Bowles, and after extensive travels throughout Morocco and Europe, finally settled in Hamburg, Germany in 1984. Simultaneously with pursuing his literary activities, he has been employed as a shipyard welder, road manager for various rock bands, cook and postal worker. He currently lives on the grounds of a former boatyard with his wife, Uta, and several cats.
Writing
Inspired by Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers, Terrill began writing in the early 1970s. His first poems appeared in Vagabond, a small-press magazine published by John Bennett that featured the work of Charles Bukowski, Jack Micheline, D.A. Levy, Al Masarik and many others. Since then, Terrill’s writings and translations have appeared in over 700 journals and anthologies worldwide, including City Lights Review, Denver Quarterly, Bombay Gin, Skanky Possum, Zen Monster, Talisman, Partisan Review, Gargoyle, Rattle and others. He has published several full-length collections, chapbooks and broadsides of his poetry, prose and translations with numerous small-press publishers in the USA and Europe. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has been translated into Portuguese, French and German. For over ten years, he was a regular contributor to Rain TaxiReview of Books, and in 2009 he was invited to guest-edit a special German Poetry issue of the Atlanta Review, which also featured his own translations of Peter Handke, Günter Grass, Nicolas Born, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and many others. In addition, his translations of the poetry of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann have been assembled in two full-length book collections, along with appearing elsewhere. Terrill has read/performed his work in Paris at Shakespeare & Co., The Live Poets Society, Upstairs at Duroc and the American Library; in Berlin at the Poetry Hearings and the International Slam Revue; in Prague at Shakespeare & Sons and The Globe; in Amsterdam at the Sugar Factory, Boekie Woekie and the Fiery Tongues Literary Festival. Together with the poet Cralan Kelder, he co-edits the poetry journal Full Metal Poem, which has published work by Ron Padgett, John Wieners, Joanne Kyger, Cid Corman, Bob Arnold, F.A. Nettelbeck, Louise Landes Levi and others.
Quotes on Terrill
“Mark Terrill, the true poet and ‘forlorn observer’ of the world he sees as essentially forlorn, if not absurd, if not entirely hopeless, and nothing on the end of his fork to really wax ecstatic about… But his poetry is far from hopeless. It is a hard light to alleviate the situation of the world as he sees it.” - Lawrence Ferlinghetti “I’ve always liked your poetry; it has a steady, stripped down rhythm to it. Little pings of microscopic truth.” - John Bennett
