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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.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Fields
Missing
Cases
Always
Wherever
Absence
Field
Case

More quotes by Mark Strand

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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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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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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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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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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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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand
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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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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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Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
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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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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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The future is always beginning now.
Mark Strand
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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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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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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
Mark Strand
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I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
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It's very hard to write humor.
Mark Strand