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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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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
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Poet
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Writer
Comfort
Immediate
Poetry
Surprising
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Entertainment
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Forms
Form
Material
Comforts
Much
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Addicted
Like
Materials
Gratification

More quotes by Mark Strand

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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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...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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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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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 have been eating poetry.
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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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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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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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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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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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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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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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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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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.
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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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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