Raised in the "hard fringe roughages” of Sydney’s South-West, Campbelltown, Mark Flood grew up in the "glory-grit of stark suburban becoming." His early life was shaped by an indomitable mother—"born blind in one eye and half the other"—and a father, "mood-struck and mysterious," who had been given up for adoption as a baby, "simply unwanted." When Mark was thirty-one, his father took his own life—one of many pivotal events that would shape his perspective and work.

Even as a child, Mark was "deeply observant, gripped by contemplative states," sensing something vast—either through "forces in the sheer rush toward the vacuum of non-meaning surrounds" or through "some switched-on anomaly of purpose by void-law, or perhaps, ancestral leapt selection."

Leaving school in Year 10, he began a trade at fifteen—"disenchanted and unseen." His creative development turned inward—"a mentorship of the inner minds, perhaps gnosis kind." His vision was strong, his hunger for words even stronger—a drive to read them, write them, and understand them. Yet, in an environment with "little attention given to opportunity or influence of such," much was left to its own slow unfolding.

His "creative bloom" took time. But that time, he says, was its own necessity—"a circumstantial purpose, a maturation suiting his kind."

The Llwyd in the Name

During the early development of the book he is now writing—"a book simultaneously writing and mentoring him"—Mark uncovered a defining link to his ancestry. Researching his DNA, he found his paternal grandfather, Henry Lloyd, traced directly to the Llwyds of Dolobran—poets, and further still, lines of bardic tradition.

This discovery became a "poetic legitimacy, an internal arm-around allied steady," reinforcing his "inner outletting poetic gnosis." It also offered something more—a "cultural literary byway" for someone who had often felt marooned, a cultural orphan.

Instating the Llwyd name, he says, is both a symbol of respect for ancestry and a statement of renewal—"that all births, the first and many after, stand up from the curled body-boned scaffolds of those before us, who baton a spirit, or tongues, from."

The Long Bloom

All of this—the hardship, the solitude, the gradual honing—has culminated in what Mark calls "an unstoppable belief," a "stalwart reservoir of egoic brash," even in the face of "the anxiety of influences"—as Harold Bloom coined it—which have only grown heavier, more inviting, "crowding his garden."

This challenge, instead of stifling, has sharpened him. It has invited out and refined a poetic style and stony capability "inimitably his."

Now, at forty-three, after what he calls "a chaotic, shamanic-like, possessed, till and toll of life," he finds himself in a "first true, intently backed, and impassioned poetic bloom." He is deep in the completion of his first official book—an epic poetic verse drama—"a challenge-flutter banner-page of brazen poiesis, onto what is a diminishing field of our sole-human creative ingenuity and genius."

Alongside this, Mark is devoted to the performance of poetry, integrating voice, presence, and embodiment into his work—"giving back the breath to the word, and the word to the breath." His artistic path is ambitious, growing, and reaching toward bold, relentless new ground.