Mark S. Sanders is a poet. He’s also a sculptor and painter. A multi-faceted artist and wordsmith who’s passionate about his craft. He’s also unapologetic about his core beliefs. He tells it like it is. That’s the way of all good poets and artists. He navigates the city alongside the rabble, and rubble of the downtrodden underdog class.
Tom DiVenti: When did you start writing poetry?
Mark S. Sanders: I first seriously began writing poetry in high school. And it was very terrible Gothic, overblown stuff, but at least I was writing and practicing and getting into the art form.
TD: At the same time with your painting?
MS: That came much later. I didn't start serious sculpting and painting until 2014.
TD: I didn’t know that. Because I remembered a while back, around that time, you gave me a little Ziplock baggie of stickers and little handmade booklets.
MS: I had a little company, where I made t-shirts, toys, and stickers with the original artwork on it. And I’d sell those, but it wasn't very artistic. More like fun graphics.
TD: Did you do silkscreens or hand painted t-shirts?
MS: No, I was printing them out on a computer and ironing them up.
TD: Those iron-on stickers. I've never tried them. Are they durable and do they last?
MS: Put them in a dryer. Also wash them inside out in cool water. I don't know how long ago that was, 20 years, more, and I still have some of those t-shirts. I still wear them. It's a way to do things cheap and easy.
TD: I’ve never told you this because I thought you’d been making art for years. I mean, before 2014. I just started making art again after 40 years and you were partly the inspiration for that. It looks like you’re having a lot of fun. It’s not always a job. It’s more of a lifestyle. You interact with the public, I'm sure you get all kinds of smartass questions. Like, what do for a living? You know, when you're showing your art. Yeah, that's nice. But what do you for a living?
MS: I always say I am a sculptor, painter, and poet. They don't get it. And that is what I do. I quit my last job over two years ago. I just said, that's it. I'm just going to do art full time.
TD: That’s cool. And have you been able to survive with your art?
MS: Yes. It's challenging, but I did have some commissions, that kept me going for a while. One of them was a commission to make an outdoor sculpture garden for these folks in Davidsonville MD. I was making large outdoor metal sculptures.
TD: I remember photos of those. Those were nice. But that is a lot of work. That's big heavy-metal stuff. Were you welding, arc welding?
MS: No, I bolt them together, because that way, if somebody backs their car into it or a storm tears it apart, or if the client even changes their mind or they start getting tired of it, I can remove objects, put new objects on, and change the structure of the piece.
TD: That’s a great idea. I'd like to know how you flow with different disciplines. How do you deal with it? Moving from painting, sculpture, and poetry?
MS: I find that being able to do different disciplines keeps me from getting blocked. So, if I am trying to write and I get blocked, then instead of beating my head against the wall, I’ll switch and do a different medium. I’ll make a sculpture, or if blocked with that, then I switch to painting. It allows me to stay productive, and it allows me to not pigeonhole my creativity to the point where if I can't seem to work my way out of this tight little tunnel. I can just switch tracks and do something else.
TD: Like, the new photography series you're doing, Urban Portents.
MS: Yes, recently I started doing photography as well.
TD: Are you going to stick with black and white photos?
MS: I have no idea. I try not to plan what I'm going to do with regards to my art. I don't really plan my poems. I allow them to work themselves out of their own accord.
TD: Do you find it becomes easy, or do you really have to strain your brain?
MS: For me, with regards to poetry, that is the easiest. I can sit and write. I've gotten into the habit; I will write directly onto my phone and post it immediately. And this kind of writing without a net, sort of either pushes me or allows me to work without second-guessing myself.
TD: So, you're with the “first thought, best thought” school?
MS: I suppose. I just find that as it comes more naturally, it becomes better. And with time restraints that pushes me to make the work better in the moment. This way I can write four to five poems in a sitting and get them done. Now the only thing that I do to kind of rein myself in is nowadays I just write short poems, and this pushes me to kind of boil down the meaning, get rid of extraneous phrasing and words and get to it within16 lines or 18 lines.
TD: Early in your poetry career, when you were hanging with the late poet Gary Blankenberg, was he a mentor?
MS: I've never really had a mentor or anyone who I followed. The only people that were very inspirational for me during the early-1990s were the Baltimore poets, Jenny Keith, and Rupert Wondolowski, but they weren’t people that I spent time together with a lot. I was living in the county during that time. I’d come into the city, go to the readings, do shows, and then I’d go back home. I wasn't really hanging out with a crew or a crowd. I was doing my own thing, which I think worked out better for me because when I first entered the scene, what I was doing was vastly different.
People liked it because it wasn’t simply about writing, but very much into the performance of the work. I had a performance style at that time, which I likened to a cross between a used car salesman, a televangelist, and a game show host. I was doing work that was, because I shifted at some point, I think right after high school, where instead of trying to write serious work, I started writing very strange, surreal, comedic work, that as Jenny Keith described it once was “just break dancing with words.” I was trying to communicate to where the wording and the language sounded as though I was talking about something profoundly serious, but the words, it was nonsense. It made no sense. And that type of tension created a humor. For those who try to understand what that might be like, I would say read Lewis Carroll’s poem, “Jabberwocky.”
TD: It’s like some people can read the phone book and make it sound funny. I guess it all has to do with your performance, your interaction with the audience. How you project your words into it.
MS: It was part of it, but the language itself was important because it was a lot of $10 words. That added to this sense of, oh, well, this is something important. And sometimes they had some strict rhyming patterns. Other times they didn’t, and they were just prose, but that’s what led to the interest in my work at that time. And people wanted to book me for shows and performances because it was something different, something entertaining. And I wasn’t trying to beat people over the head with social commentary or aggrandized diary entries of my love life.
TD: I know you did Edgar Allan Poe performances for a while.
MS: I briefly did that. That was fun. I did a one-man play that made up of things that Poe had written, or letters sent to him by others. So, little of the play was something that I wrote. It was mostly just his own words, or people's own words talking to him, or talking of him. Events in his life that were significant or just casual conversations. Well, he was in a room that had a portrait of his dead wife. And I don't know whether people know this or not, but that portrait, like a lot of portraits during that time of loved ones was her post-mortem that an artist came in and painted. He’s talking to this painting and trying to reconcile her death, his own shortcomings and his feelings of grief and his feelings of anger, which is a very natural part of grief.
TD: I've seen photographs of you in Poe’s costume and makeup, and visually you were a convincing lookalike.
MS: Size-wise, we were about the same, although he was in better shape than me.
TD: Do you feel like you're screaming into the void, or do you feel like it's making a difference?
MS: In March I started writing on the social political climate in the United States in various categories. There’s poems from the underground, speeches from the underground, advice to the underground or the Urban Portent series and that was a difficult shift for me because I've never written anything called political or activist. I felt it was my duty as an artist to use my talents to contribute and hopefully inspire the public and other artists to use their talents to create some type of political and social change.
TD: Do you have any upcoming readings in town soon?
MS: I don't have anything planned for the next month and a half. I’m too busy moving and working on an art show for a gallery at Baltimore’s Blue Door in December. (833 Park Ave.)
TD: Do you see poetry making any kind of significant impact in today's nonsensical world?
MS: The impact is always possible. It's always there, but it's difficult to trace, a person reads a poem and it will change them in some way and it may change their actions and their ways of thinking. How that impacts them and their immediate community is difficult to track.
TD: The reason I asked is that at Biden’s inauguration a young black woman poet, Amanda Gorman read, and she got a lot of criticism and opposition from all sides about her poem. It was good because people read it and that got people to hear it or watch the video and see for themselves. I don't know how much effect it had in terms of changing anybody's feelings because look at where we are today.
MS: Whenever art evokes strong emotion, negative or positive it’s successful. We’re in a very polarized nation, but I can’t say that the contribution of a piece of artwork viewed online and on television had any negative impact on the world. The fact that it was front and center even for a brief time is a positive.
TD: I’ll wind up with one more question. What’s your personal take, or feelings about the nature of life, death, heaven, hell, and is there an afterlife
MS: I’m not really concerned about the afterlife. My concerns are the here and now. I don’t ascribe to any religion that deals with reward and punishment. Any religion that has dogma set up that the afterlife is going to be your reward or your punishment is trying to manipulate your behaviors. Rather than you as a person leading a self-examined life doing what’s right because it’s right. Doing what’s good because it is. There’s plenty of middle-class white people who’ll sit there and try to talk to you about how heaven and hell are here on earth and I say bullshit on that. Try to enjoy life as much as you can, try to be good to people and be good to yourself.