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
lasts firsts language
Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
writing want stuff
There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.
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.
dictionary
To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
writing attention prove
Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
writing creative program
Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
eating has-beens
I have been eating poetry.
true-life facts journalistic
And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.
feelings burial
The burial of feelings has begun.
engagement bores
I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.
fate destiny dumb
Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
reading government world
If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.
writing thinking people
A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.
beautiful notion concerned
I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.