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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 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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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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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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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Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
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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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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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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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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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To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
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