Mark Strand Quotes & Sayings

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light. — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?
Can anyone die without even a little? — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

You don't read a poem to find the meaning of life. The opposite. I mean, you'd be foolish to. Now, some American poets present the reader with a slice of life, saying, I went to the store today, and I saw a man, and he looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both knew we were ... thieves. And aren't we all thieves? You know, this is extracting from everyday experience a statement about life, or a moral. — Mark Strand

We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole. — Mark Strand

Clarities of the Nonexistent"

To have loved the way it happens in the empty hours of late afternoon; to lean back and conceive of a journey leaving behind no trace of itself; to look out from the house and see a figure leaning forward as if into the wind although there is no wind; to see the hats of those in town, discarded in moments of passion, scattered over the ground although one cannot see the ground. All this in vague, yellowing light that lowers itself in the hour before dark; none of it of value except for the pleasure it gives, enlarging an instant and finally making it seem as if it were true. And years later to come upon the same scene- the figure leaning into the same wind, the same hats scattered over the same ground that one cannot see. — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

And yet Nothing here is certain; — Mark Strand

The Coming of Light
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. — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

Time tells me what I am.
I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains. — Mark Strand

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality. — Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry. — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

Lines for Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself -
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are. — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream. — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleep
We'll fall, and there in the faded light discover the bones,
The dust, the bitter remains of someone who might have been
Had we not taken his place. — Mark Strand

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure. — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

The ultimate self-effacement
is not the pretense of the minimal,
but the jocular considerations of the maximal
in the manner of Wallace Stevens. — Mark Strand

I haven't met God and I haven't been to heaven, so I'm skeptical, — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler. — Mark Strand

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony. — Mark Strand

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It") — Mark Strand

It's very hard to write humor. — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

This is the mirror
in which pain is asleep
this is the country
nobody visits — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing. — Mark Strand

One clear night while the others slept, I climbed
the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky
strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it,
the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming
like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long
whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach
of a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer,
the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea,
and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light.
The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stood
on that lonely height watching the slow swells of the sea
break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear ...
Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with all
that the world offers would you come only because I was here? — Mark Strand

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me. — Mark Strand

I feel that anything is possible in a poem. — Mark Strand

YOU CAN ALWAYS GET THERE FROM HERE A traveler returned to the country from which he had started many years before. When he stepped from the boat, he noticed how different everything was. There were once many buildings, but now there were few and each of them needed repair. In the park where he played as a child, dust-filled shafts of sunlight struck the tawny leaves of trees and withered hedges. Empty trash bags littered the grass. The air was heavy. He sat on one of the benches and explained to the woman next to him that he'd been away a long time, then asked her what season had he come back to. She replied that it was the only one left, the one they all had agreed on. — Mark Strand

Each moment is a place
you've never been. — Mark Strand

In another time,
What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted
To say that language is error, and all things are wronged
By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be
Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one. — Mark Strand

We are reading the story of our lives
As though we were in it
As though we had written it. — Mark Strand

Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness. — Mark Strand

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better. — Mark Strand

When we walk in the sun
our shadows are like barges of silence. — Mark Strand

These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing. I am the same boy my mother used to kiss. — Mark Strand

There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind. — Mark Strand

I grow into my death.
My life is small
and getting smaller. The world is green.
Nothing is all. — Mark Strand

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been. — Mark Strand

It came to my house.
It sat on my shoulders.
Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours.
I have carried it with me too long. I give it back. — Mark Strand

The graves grow deeper.
The dead are more dead each night.

Under the elms and the rain of leaves,
The graves grow deeper.

The dark folds of the wind
Cover the ground. The night is cold.

The leaves are swept against the stones.
The dead are more dead each night.

A starless dark embraces them.
Their faces dim.

We cannot remember them
Clearly enough. We never will. — Mark Strand

What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. — Mark Strand

My Name
Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go. — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

When I read poetry, I want to feel myself suddenly larger ... in touch with - or at least close to - what I deem magical, astonishing. I want to experience a kind of wonderment. And when you report back to your own daily world after experiencing the strangeness of a world sort of recombined and reordered in the depths of a poet's soul, the world looks fresher somehow. Your daily world has been taken out of context. It has the voice of the poet written all over it, for one thing, but it also seems suddenly more alive ... — Mark Strand

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all
There was to it. — Mark Strand

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving. — Mark Strand

The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again. — Mark Strand

ANYWHERE COULD BE SOMEWHERE I might have come from the high country, or maybe the low country, I don't recall which. I might have come from the city, but what city in what country is beyond me. I might have come from the outskirts of a city from which others have come or maybe a city from which only I have come. Who's to know? Who's to decide if it rained or the sun was out? Who's to remember? They say things are happening at the border, but nobody knows which border. They talk of a hotel there, where it doesn't matter if you forgot your suitcase, another will be waiting, big enough, and just for you. — Mark Strand

Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention. — Mark Strand

Then a man turned
And said to me: Although I love the past, the dark of it,
The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the all
Of it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more ... — Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing. — Mark Strand

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb. — Mark Strand

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments. — Mark Strand

The future is always beginning now. — Mark Strand

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. — Mark Strand

A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves. — Mark Strand

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. — Mark Strand

We're only here for a short while. And I think it's such a lucky accident, having been born, that we're almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are - as far as we know - the only part of the universe that's self-conscious. We could even be the universe's form of consciousness. We might have come along so that the universe could look at itself. I don't know that, but we're made of the same stuff that stars are made of, or that floats around in space. But we're combined in such a way that we can describe what it's like to be alive, to be witnesses. Most of our experience is that of being a witness. We see and hear and smell other things. I think being alive is responding. — Mark Strand

I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful. — Mark Strand

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose. — Mark Strand

There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest. — Mark Strand

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep. — Mark Strand

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time. — Mark Strand

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art. — Mark Strand

You want to get a good look at yourself. You stand before a mirror, you take off your jacket, unbutton your shirt, open your belt, unzip your fly. The outer clothing falls from you. You take off your shoes and socks, baring your feet. You remove your underwear. At a loss, you examine the mirror. There you are. You are not there. — Mark Strand

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented. — Mark Strand

And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name? — Mark Strand

What I had not realized then, but now know only too well, is that sparks carry within them the wish to be relieved of the burden of brightness. And that is why I no longer write, and why the dark is is my freedom and my happiness. — Mark Strand