Mark Wyatt biodata

After setting out as a Martian poet in North London in the 1980s, Mark Wyatt embarked on a teaching career that took him to schools and universities in Thailand, Nepal, Oman, and the UAE. Now based in the UK doing part-time consultancy work on English in education projects, such as recently in Mongolia, he has rediscovered poetry after a gap. Since 1992, all of his poems have been written in shapes or patterns, although his main writing focus during his university professor years was on academic research in language education, as detailed here in his ORCiD profile. His irregular pathway as a poet is discussed in recent interviews, including in Talking About Strawberries All Of The Time, and in Radon Journal. His technique in producing pattern poetry using a monospaced font is discussed in the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts.

Since he returned to the UK in 2023, Mark Wyatt has produced two long sequences of pattern poems, the first based on passages in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Poems from this sequence that are freely available online include ‘Callisto in confusion’, ‘Narcissus’, ‘Bacchanalian revels at sea’, ‘The daughters of Minyas’, and ‘Delos’ in Tupelo Quarterly, ‘Medusa’ in The Plentitudes, ‘Not a cat’ in Streetcake Magazine,  ‘How Ascaláphus Became An Owl’ in Osmosis, ‘Antigone’ in MacQueen’s Quinterly, ‘Pelops’ in Sontag Mag, ‘Elixir’ in Sontag Mag, ‘Daedalus’ in Ink Sweat and Tears, ‘Ancaeus’s axe (handle broken)’ in Tap Into Poetry , ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’ in Dust Poetry, ‘Atalanta’, and ‘Pythagoras’s teaching’ in Talking About Strawberries All Of The Time, ‘All that glitters’ in The Hyperbolic Review, ‘Achilles’s heel’, ‘The Cercópians’, and ‘Circe’s magic’ in The Greyhound Journal.

A second, more recent, and generally but not always politically-driven sequence of pattern poems has drawn on stories from the Old Testament, explored in the main for what it can tell us about some of the monstrous autocratic behaviour tragically ruining the lives of millions around the world. Poems from this sequence that are freely available online include ‘Garden’ in Ink Sweat and Tears, ‘Abel’s pain’ in Re-Mediate , ‘Confederate states’, and ‘Forked tongue’ in Genrepunk Magazine, ‘The top five commandments’, ‘Ra complaining of Joshua’, ‘Looters’, and ‘Rejecting the wisdom of Solomon’ in Synchronized Chaos, ‘Hangman’ in Streetcake Magazine, ‘Ruthie’s comfort’ in Full House Literary, ‘Elijah’, and ‘Elisha’ in Ballast.