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Mark Strand quotes - page 2
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
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.
Mark Strand
I delay typing as long as possible. When I read a poem in longhand I'm hearing it, when in typescript I'm reading it. A poem can appear finished just because of the cleanness of the typescript.
Mark Strand
The elements I need to write are a place, a desk, a familiar room. I need some of my books there, I need quiet. ... I'm picturing as I'm writing. I'm putting together what I need to have this thing alive.
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
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand
Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
Mark Strand
Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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 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.
Mark Strand
I feel that anything is possible in a poem.
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
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
I haven't met God and I haven't been to heaven, so I'm skeptical.
Mark Strand
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