Writers Write Is All About Writing
Writers Write Is All About Writing
Mark Strand

Literary Birthday – 11 April – Mark Strand

Mark Strand was born on 11 April 1934 and died on 29 November 2014.

Mark Strand Quotes

  1. The future is always beginning now.
  2. Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
  3. I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance—what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody’s mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they’ll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current.
  4. 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.
  5. A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
  6. From the reader’s view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
  7. Poetry is, first and last, language – the rest is filler.

Mark Strand was an award-winning Canadian-born American poet, essayist, and translator. In 1981, Strand was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. Strand received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Blizzard of One. He received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014. He is the author of Hopper.

Source for Image: S L O W K I N G4, GFDL 1.2, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Markstrand012.JPG


by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 11th April 2014
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