Mark Spitzer (poet, novelist, literary translator, essayist and muckraker) grew up in Minnesota and lit out for the University of Colorado, where he earned his MA in1992.  He then ended up as Writer in Residence at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, where he translated manuscripts by French criminals and misanthropes.  After a few years being Bohemian, Spitzer went back to America and the big old ugly fish he loves (ie, eely bottom feeders, primitive gar and monster cats) and got a job as the Assistant Editor of the legendary lit journal Exquisite Corpse (which, ironically, had created him into the bastard child of American avant-garde letters just a few years before).  He then goofed his way through an MFA at LSU, got a professor job up in Missouri, and taught creative writing at Truman State University for five years.  He is currently a professor of writing at the University of Central Arkansas in Toad Suck, AR.  His books include The Pigs Drink from Infinity (poetry, Spuyten Duyvil), Riding the Unit (creative nonfiction, Six Gallery Press), Chum (novel, Zoland Books), Bottom Feeder (novel, Creative Arts), From Absinthe to Abyssinia (Rimbaud translations, Creative Arts), The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille (Dufour Editions), Divine Filth (Bataille translation, Creation Books), The Church (Céline translation, Green Integer) and Films without Images (Cendrars translation, Green Integer).  See his website at www.sptzr.net for more up-to-the-minute groundbreaking info.

What Others Say

You have to slow down, and absorb calmly, the procession of gritty, pointillist gnarls of poesy that Mark Spitzer wittily weaves into his book. Just the title, Age of the Demon Tools, is so appropriate in this horrid age of inappropriate technology—you know, corruptly programmed voting machines, drones with missiles hovering above huts, and mind reading machines looming just a few years into the demon-tool future. When you do slow down, and tarry within Spitzer's neologism-packed litanies, you will find the footprints of bards such as Allen Ginsberg, whose tradition of embedding current events into the flow of poesy is one of the great beacons of the new century. This book is worth reading if only for the poem "Unholy Millenial Litany" and its blastsome truths.
    —Ed Sanders, literary icon

Only dumbfucks will not read this book and exult. Spitzer's furious epic is a supremely satisfying blasphemous gorgeous cantankerous yowl for a generation of hep-infected-cats neutered by American supremidiocy. He has managed—quite un-nicely, thank you!—to tweeze every bloody splinter from our polluted and polluting culture. His Missouri misery odyssey ra[n]ges from big bass to big brass, from celebrity bodies to celestial bodies, from a micro-war between the blustering hero-narrator and local developers bent on greed and eco-genocide to a macro-war between the US government and practically everybody else, including its own soldiers. Most rewarding is Spitzer's renovated language that, read and screamed aloud, bends and twists and curls the tongue so erotically that orgasm is a valid conclusion. Really.
    — Debra Di Blasi, author of The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions

Triage of daily life and text, mines in the headlines, flat faced mutancy in the details of man's folly and avarice, rapacity and ballsack confusion, set against an individual pastorale amid the cowpies, text addled by brush, "angry vines," and "channel cats with mongo backs," sluiced with wind and wave, in turn set against the maw of what increasingly seems to no longer exist, green world of birdsong, face of simple intention, word strong as bough, and so forth (and yet . . .). Text with an edge like a serial killer's holiday in a target rich environment, the monkeyward of Washington, or the plains of Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate board rooms and city council meetings clotted with preening inanities in the form of the human, etc., the text's language slick as a lineman's clit, doffing a nod to the warbled wordexitry of Burgess and the wee ones who sleep in eaves, all woven with the witchery of electronic missives, condensing words to mush. Spitzer in battle-rut (Moloch panting beneath.)
    —Skip Fox, author of At That

"Mark Spitzer is the pseudonym of a writerly fury unleashed on earth by the Great God Perspiration."
    —Andrei Codrescu.

"Mark is on a campaign to rule the world... [he] is the definition of the mad scribe."
    —Luis Alberto Urrea.

"Mark Spitzer has worked on these [Genet] translations with a monastic patience and a martyr's zeal, and they require both ardor and dedication, since they are dense, heavily coded, daringly pornographic at times, and at other times for more lushly over-the-top than English comfortably tolerates.  To my ear, at least, he has invented eloquent, viable English poems... His versions are far more accurate than the other attempts at Englishing I have read."
    —Edmund White.

"Shades of Bataille!  The first genuinely French novel has just burst upon the AmLit Scene.  It's a hyper-Célinian beyond-Sade journey to the end of everybody's night—a Symbolistic Surrealistic Genre-Busting manifesto of toilet prose as unapologetic as an environmental disaster waiting to happen!  I couldn't put it down."
    —David Gessner.

"If Ingmar Bergman were still making movies, he would be the perfect director for a film based on Mark Spitzer's Chum.  This book reminds me of the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Johan Bojer's The Last of the Vikings, and any Tom Robbins novel.  The Rasputin-like Mother Kralik would scare the pants off of Kafka.
    —Barry Gifford.

"Great Leaps of Language!  These are not simply translations of Rimbaud, they're resurrections of the poet's provocatively brilliant spirit, as it might, as it must, live among us now.  Mark Spitzer makes us feel the poet afresh, through a gutsy freshness of his own.  Essential reading."
    —Jack Hirschman.

"It took me a few weeks to read both [his] novels which I found lively and entertaining."
    —John Martin, founder and publisher of Black Sparrow.

"'No more poetry!' cops order wild poet revelers in a Paris café at the beginning of The Pigs Drink from Infinity.  Mark Spitzer courageously responds with poem after poem of 'perpetual insouciance.'  Three highpoints for me were 'Message Concerning the State of Poetry,' a hilarious fantasy in which poetry is forced into a straitjacket of bully poetics; 'à mon amie de la Quiche fantastique,' a rhapsodic erotic ode to his girlfriend's 'quiche,' and 'Junkyard,' a major poem capturing junkyards from Colorado to Washington.  Behind the swashbuckling desperado aura of Spitzer's bemused muse is an incisive awareness of and pity for the human world gone insane."
    —Antler.

"Mark Spitzer's Chum is a side-splittingly funny, ultra-raunchy ride through the Alaska nobody wants to believe exists.  Read it and weep, this Moby Dick of the millennium."
    —Jo-Ann Mapson.

"Mark Spitzer's piece, 'Dinner with Slinger'... is one sick piece... he may find gainful employment in the swelling ranks of political media Philistines—provided that he gives up those 'ounces of shwagg' and joins the Church of Rushing Newts."
    —Anselm Hollo.

"I think [he's] more dangerous than me."
    —Marc Becker (one of the most dangerous professors in the USA, according to David Horowitz' The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America).                                                                             

"This man is angry at our world because as a society we lack morals and manners and a God, and because the worst and the most deceitful folks among us are vociferous in proclaiming themselves in possession of those very items, as if those items might be finagled from the cosmic eye.  This man gives not a sou about writing well, and prefers to write angrily and rapidly."
    —John Pierce, Dusty Dog Review.

"[T]he writing of Mark Spitzer is like a healthy penis:  usually hard, occasionally soft, it offends some while giving pleasure to others, and despite its penetrating destructiveness it is always life-affirming, life-generating—and it always seeks the truth."
    —John Berbrich, Barbaric Yawp.

Links

• Spitzer Reads Poetry Class Manifesto
• Spitzer Profile
• Spitzer Takes on DNR
• Spitzer Shuts Down City Hall
• Pollution/Corruption Video Pt. 1
• Pollution/Corruption Video Pt. 2