Top 61 Mark Strand Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
Mark Strand
#3. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.
Mark Strand
#4. I haven't met God and I haven't been to heaven, so I'm skeptical,
Mark Strand
#5. I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.
Mark Strand
#6. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. We are reading the story of our lives
As though we were in it
As though we had written it.
Mark Strand
#11. 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
#12. In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
Mark Strand
#13. Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
Mark Strand
#14. 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
#15. Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
Mark Strand
#16. 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
#17. I feel that anything is possible in a poem.
Mark Strand
#18. When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.
Mark Strand
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?
Can anyone die without even a little?
Mark Strand
#23. 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
#24. I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
Mark Strand
#25. Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time.
Mark Strand
#27. The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.
Mark Strand
#28. 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
#29. Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
Mark Strand
#30. I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.
Mark Strand
#31. 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
#32. Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
#33. This is the mirror
in which pain is asleep
this is the country
nobody visits
Mark Strand
#34. Each moment is a place
you've never been.
Mark Strand
#36. I grow into my death.
My life is small
and getting smaller. The world is green.
Nothing is all.
Mark Strand
#37. Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
Mark Strand
#38. 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
#39. Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand
#40. 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
#41. Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Mark Strand
#42. Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
Mark Strand
#43. What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves.
Mark Strand
#44. For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.
Mark Strand
#45. Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way.
Mark Strand
#46. 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
#47. From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
Mark Strand
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
Mark Strand
#54. Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. When we walk in the sun
our shadows are like barges of silence.
Mark Strand
#61. To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
Mark Strand
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