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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.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Giving
Surrender
Real
Meat
Kind
Patience
Demand
Poet
Food
Give
Loaf
Must
Poems

More quotes by Mark Strand

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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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The future is always beginning now.
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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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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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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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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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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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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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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.
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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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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It's very hard to write humor.
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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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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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
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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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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
Mark Strand