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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
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Silence
Walks
Like
Barges
Shadows
Shadow
Sun
Walk

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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 have been eating poetry.
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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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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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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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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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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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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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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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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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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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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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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.
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There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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