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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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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Least
Imagination
Imagine
Lying
Free
Poem
Feel
Direction
Feels
Follow
Poetry

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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.
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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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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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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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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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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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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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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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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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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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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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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 are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
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I have been eating poetry.
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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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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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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
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