Mark Terrill

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 traveled 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. In 1982, he attended the School of Visual Arts Writing Workshop conducted by Paul Bowles in Tangier, Morocco, 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 (American Music Club, Mekons, etc.), cook, and postal worker. He currently lives on the grounds of a former boatyard near Hamburg.

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 one thousand 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 Taxi Review 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 (2006 and 2010) 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-edited 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. Terrill's papers are housed in the Special Collections of the University of Delaware Library.

Poet, author and art critic Lawrence Ferlinghetti says, “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.” “I’ve always liked your poetry; it has a steady, stripped-down rhythm to it. Little pings of microscopic truth.” - John Bennett