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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.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Autobiographical
Dishonest
Point
Stuff
Certain
Writing
Would
Misrepresent

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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.
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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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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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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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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
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It's very hard to write humor.
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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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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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.
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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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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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The future is always beginning now.
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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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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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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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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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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 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.
Mark Strand