Quote

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

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Comes
Meant
Carpets
Tell
Wind
Folds
Happens
Knew
Carpet
Long
Happen
Outer
Way
Space
Complain
Never
Lasts
Ruins
Would
Last
Complaining
Voice
Dust

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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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The future is always beginning now.
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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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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.
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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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.
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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.
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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.
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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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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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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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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.
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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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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.
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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
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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.
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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.
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