Quote

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.

Mark Strand

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Clear
Marginal
Purpose
Serves
Culture
Societies
Speak
Cultures
Part
Mainstream
America
Cultural
Certainly
Poetry

More quotes by Mark Strand

Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
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?
Mark Strand
Image
Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
Mark Strand
Image
Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain.
Mark Strand
Image
I haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
The future is always beginning now.
Mark Strand
Image
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
Image
A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
Mark Strand
Image
I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
Image
I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.
Mark Strand
Image
In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.
Mark Strand
Image
Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand
Image
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.
Mark Strand