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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
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Poet
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Writer
Silence
Walks
Like
Barges
Shadows
Shadow
Sun
Walk

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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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It's very hard to write humor.
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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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The future is always beginning now.
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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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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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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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...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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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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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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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.
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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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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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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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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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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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