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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
Cases
Always
Wherever
Absence
Field
Case
Fields
Missing

More quotes by Mark Strand

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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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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.
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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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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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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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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
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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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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
Mark Strand
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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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To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
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Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
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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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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.
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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.
Mark Strand
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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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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
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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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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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.
Mark Strand