Quote

In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.

Mark Strand

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Mark Strand

Image
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
Image
We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
The future is always beginning now.
Mark Strand
Image
Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
Mark Strand
Image
Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
Mark Strand
Image
A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
Mark Strand
Image
I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
Mark Strand
Image
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
Image
Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
Image
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand