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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.
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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America
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Poetry
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Marginal
Purpose
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Societies
Speak
Cultures
Part
Mainstream
More quotes by Mark Strand
The future is always beginning now.
Mark Strand
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
I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
Mark Strand
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
In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.
Mark Strand
From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
Mark Strand
A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
Mark Strand
Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
Mark Strand
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.
Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
Mark Strand
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
Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
Mark Strand
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
It came to my house. It sat on my shoulders. Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours. I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.
Mark Strand
We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
Mark Strand
I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand
Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
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
Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
Mark Strand
