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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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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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I have been eating poetry.
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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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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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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It's very hard to write humor.
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The future is always beginning now.
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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
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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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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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