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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
Long
Shoulders
Shadow
Told
Came
House
Give
Back
Sat
Giving
Carried

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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 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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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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It's very hard to write humor.
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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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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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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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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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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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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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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The future is always beginning now.
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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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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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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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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
Mark Strand
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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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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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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand