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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
Came
House
Give
Back
Sat
Giving
Carried
Long
Shoulders
Shadow
Told

More quotes by Mark Strand

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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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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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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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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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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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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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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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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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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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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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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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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.
Mark Strand
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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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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.
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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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There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.
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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 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.
Mark Strand