Mark Strand Quotes
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The future is always beginning now.
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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.
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I don't know where it comes from. I think some of it comes from the unconscious. Sometimes it is more complete than other times.
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A poem releases itself, it does it with cadence.
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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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Each moment is a place you've never been.
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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.
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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.
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Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
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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.
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Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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In a fieldI am the absenceof field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing.When I walkI part the airand alwaysthe air moves into fill the spaceswhere my body's been.We all have reasonsfor moving.I moveto keep things whole.
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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.
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For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.
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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.
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.
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But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.
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I think a poet's focus is not quite what a prose writer's is, it's not entirely on the world outside. It's fixed on the area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet's sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people... that shadow land between self and reality.
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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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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.
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I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.