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

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Late
Coming
Happens
Light
Even
Love

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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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It's very hard to write humor.
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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.
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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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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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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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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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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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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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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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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.
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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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.
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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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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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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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I have been eating poetry.
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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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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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