Mark Strand
Mark Strand
Mark Strandwas a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth11 April 1934
CountryUnited States of America
believe limits language
I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.
real giving demand
Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.
art life-is made
A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
culture entertainment comfort
And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.
writing attention prove
Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
light littles slow-down
Poetry is about slowing down. You sit and you read something, you read it again, and it reveals a little bit more, and things come to light you never could have predicted.
dictionary
To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
heaven mets skeptical
I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical,
believe shapes worthwhile
It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.
eating has-beens
I have been eating poetry.
beautiful notion concerned
I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
writing numbers people
The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.
missing fields absence
In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.
dust wind voice
No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain.