Mark Strand Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

It's very hard to write humor.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

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

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

The burial of feelings has begun.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I feel that anything is possible in a poem.

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

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

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

Each moment is a place you've never been.

The future is always beginning now.