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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.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Give
Back
Sat
Giving
Carried
Long
Shoulders
Shadow
Told
Came
House

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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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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.
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These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing. I am the same boy my mother used to kiss.
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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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The future is always beginning now.
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...In another time, What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted To say that language is error, and all things are wronged By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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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 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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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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To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
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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 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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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
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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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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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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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Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
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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?
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