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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

Mark Strand

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Prove
Poetry
Attention
Makes
Writing
Really
Life
Paying
Necessary

More quotes by Mark Strand

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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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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 am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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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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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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I have been eating poetry.
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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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The future is always beginning now.
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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.
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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.
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
Mark Strand
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
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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
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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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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Even this late it happens the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
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.
Mark Strand
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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 haven’t met God and I haven’t been to heaven, so I’m skeptical.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand