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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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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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I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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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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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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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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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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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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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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It's very hard to write humor.
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The future is always beginning now.
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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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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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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
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