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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.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Thinking
Next
Widely
People
Seems
Pays
Nothing
Worthwhile
Many
Poetry
Great
Pay
Writing
Seem
Even
Though
Think
Read

More quotes by Mark Strand

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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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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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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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The future is always beginning now.
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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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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.
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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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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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.
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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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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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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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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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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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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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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
Mark Strand
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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