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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Firsts
First
Filler
Fillers
Poetry
Rest
Lasts
Last
Language

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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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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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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.
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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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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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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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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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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 haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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...In another time, What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted To say that language is error, and all things are wronged By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.
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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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 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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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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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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