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And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Children
Eye
Opening
Wish
Room
Mother
Rooms
Cannot
Name
Light
Sleep
Sleeps
Doe
Eyes
Enters
Anything
Names
Wishes
Matter
Child
Waking

More quotes by Mark Strand

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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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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.
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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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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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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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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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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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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
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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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