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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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Writer
Clear
Marginal
Purpose
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Societies
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Mainstream
America
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Poetry

More quotes by Mark Strand

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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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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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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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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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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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It's very hard to write humor.
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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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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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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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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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.
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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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.
Mark Strand
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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.
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We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Mark Strand
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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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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
Mark Strand
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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
Mark Strand