Mark Strand Quotations

Each moment is a place you've never been.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The burial of feelings has begun.

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.

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

It's very hard to write humor.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical,

I have been eating poetry.

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

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.

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.

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.

I don't really think it will make much difference to me when I'm dead whether I'm read or not . . . just as whether I'm dead or not won't mean much to me when I'm dead.

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

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

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")

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

...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.

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.

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?

In a field I am the absence of field.That is always the case. Wherever I am, I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the space where my body has been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.

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.

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

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

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.

Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.

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

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.

I feel that anything is possible in a poem.

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.

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.

The future is always beginning now.