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Mark has an unusual history. After losing his hearing as an eighteen-month-old infant, the next six years were silent as he honed his way of watching. Wandering Africa and Asia as a teenager and being adopted by nomadic tribes opened his eyes to the cultural nuances of different lands and peoples.
Mannership is an enquiry into origins of self-destruction which is uniquely human, focusing on 3 questions:
How does an individual mind become 'poisoned' by a self-destructive tendency?
How is the poison hidden, and harboured, in a part of the mind which is 'out of reach' so we cannot simply 'deal' with it?
How did our environment or culture develop in such a way that this 'poison' became thrust so deep into our children's minds?
From the teachings of indigenous Shamans to the lessons taught by animals, Mark connects observations from his journeys to read like magical adventures while seeking an elusive source of self-destruction.
About the author
Mark Goodwin is a balancer, walker, climber, and stroller who speaks and writes in various ways in various places - on paper, on-line, blended with photos, in film-poems, to live audience, or through mixing his voice with field-recordings & soundscapes ... and often through collaboration with other artists. He is also a ground-aslanter, his work being included in Shearsman Books' ground-tilting anthology 'The Ground Aslant - An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry' (2011). To date (June 2017), Mark has published a number of full-length poetry collections and several chapbooks with various English poetry houses. He continues to explore on foot or with feet-&-hands English, Welsh, Scottish mountains, urban-rimlands, crags, coastlands, individual trees of various species, riverbanks, derelict buildings, lakeshores, woodlands, various fence-rails, suspended-narrow-ways and ... moors ...Mark was born in 1969, and grew up on a farm in South Leicestershire. For the past twenty years or so he has lived on a narrow-boat, just off the river Soar, a little to the north of Leicester.
Summary
Mark has an unusual history. After losing his hearing as an eighteen-month-old infant, the next six years were silent as he honed his way of watching.
