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
years afterlife tree
She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.
reality
The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.
running poetry mouths
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
summer strong passion
Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind- loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies in the perfumed heat of summer night.
lying imagination want
And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
book views reader
From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
way said
For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.
ends describing nothingness
Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
pain poetry pleasure
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
moving space air
When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been.
dream stars air
Even this late it happens the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
thinking expression self
But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.
poetry feels anything-is-possible
I feel that anything is possible in a poem.
busy imagine permit
A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.