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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.

Mark Strand

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

More quotes by Mark Strand

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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.
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I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.
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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
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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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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?
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The future is always beginning now.
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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.
Mark Strand
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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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Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.
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It's very hard to write humor.
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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.
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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.
Mark Strand
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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.
Mark Strand
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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.
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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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.
Mark Strand
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When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.
Mark Strand
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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
Mark Strand
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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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Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
Mark Strand