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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
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More quotes by Mark Strand

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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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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 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 have been eating poetry.
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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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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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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.
Mark Strand
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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?
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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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 am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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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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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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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 haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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The future is always beginning now.
Mark Strand