Quote

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

Mark Strand

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Unless
Courses
Course
Art
Made
Life
Elevated
Sufficiently
Poetry

More quotes by Mark Strand

Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.
Mark Strand
Image
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
Image
I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
Image
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand
Image
We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
Mark Strand
Image
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
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
Mark Strand
Image
Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
Mark Strand