Quote

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

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Mark Strand
Age: 80 †
Born: 1934
Born: April 11
Died: 2014
Died: November 29
Editor
Poet
Translator
Writer
Something
Reveals
Things
Poetry
Never
Bits
Read
Light
Littles
Little
Predicted
Come
Slowing

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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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Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness.
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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 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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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
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The future is always beginning now.
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We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.
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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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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
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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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It's very hard to write humor.
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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
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Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
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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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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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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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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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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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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
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