When the light poured down through a hole in the clouds,
We knew the great poet was going to show. And he did.
A limousine with all white tires and stained-glass windows
Dropped him off. And then, with a clear and soundless fluency,
He strode into the hall. There was a hush. His wings were big.
The cut of his suit, the width of his tie, were out of date.
When he spoke, the air seemed whitened by imagined cries.
The worm of desire bore into the heart of everyone there.
There were tears in their eyes. The great one was better than ever.
“No need to rush,” he said at the close of the reading, “the end
Of the world is only the end of the world as you know it.”
How like him, everyone thought. Then he was gone,
And the world was a blank. It was cold and the air was still.
Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?
Can anyone die without even a little?
“The Great Poet Returns” is excerpted from Blizzard of One, by Mark Strand. Copyright © 1998 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf. All rights reserved.
COULD YOU SHARE THE ADVICE THAT’S HELPED MOST WITH YOUR OWN WRITING?
“Well, I was once told years ago to keep my mouth shut and to keep my eyes and ears open. And for a long time I heeded that advice. But for a poet to keep his mouth shut, over the long haul, I think is death.
What’s most helpful to me is…
Well, reading has always been the most important thing and certain books have been very key in my development as a writer.
The Prelude by William Wordsworth is a stupendous work and it’s incredibly large in my sort of biography as a writer.
And then after years of not writing poetry…after a hiatus of 5 years of not writing poetry, I read the Fitzgerald translation of The Aeneid and that got me started again. I just think, well, well I mean it was…I thought my life as a poet was over and when I read that, it began again. And I think when I say ‘books have been important,’ that’s the sort of thing I mean. I will, even in the short term when I’m stuck, when I’m writing rough drafts of poems and unable to finish them, I’ll go back and read Lorca or Machado; poems not necessarily in English because I don’t want too much of the English to carry over to my own English.
And, well you never know, I mean sometimes the reading of Kafka’s…well fiction helps a great deal. The reading of Kafka’s short fiction, his tiny prose pieces, or parables and paradoxes, and the diaries. And some of the early poems of Wallace Stevens – he’s the poet in most recent American poetry who’s been the biggest influence on me. And I do read him. But not as much as I used to. I find him too seductive. When I read Stevens, I want to write like Stevens, and alas sometimes I sort of do, but what I write is not as good as Stevens, so it’s usually kind of sad to see myself influenced by Stevens and yet come up so short. But reading Kafka is tremendous. I read him all the time. And I reread him. And I read, read, read, read, read, read without ever fathoming what it is that I’m reading, which is great.
Other writers I favor are Calvino and Beckett, Borges, and Landolfi, These are prose writers that are key for me.
I’ve left out Shakespeare. Every year I read a couple of plays of Shakespeare but I don’t know how that figures into my work. I think that figures into my spirit, or being, which later feeds my work. I mean there’s a great deal that one reads whose influence is hard to find in one’s work. But you know, all this reading sort of fills up the soup of my inner life; this dark soup that I ladle into little dishes and work on ‘til they become poems. Well, something like that. I mean that’s rather too culinary an image.
I also read my contemporaries.
The gorgeous poems of Charles Wright. I wish I could write like that but I can’t.
The tight, dark wit of Charles Simic
Those astringent lines of Louise Glück’s
The great energy of Jorie Graham, her power.
These are contemporaries that I admire. They feed me, but I’m not sure that they influence me. There’s a difference. You can go out to a restaurant and eat, but what you eat there is not necessarily what you cook for yourself. Maybe that’s not a very good image.
Anyway, I guess my advice is, to you and to myself, is to read. Read as much as you can.”
Merit O.
JAINISM
reserve your greatest sympathy
for the spider, she said--his life a comma,
a space for breath
when the day wears thin; in eulogy
we will offer orange rinds, oriole
feathers
which still remember the cadence of flight.
after the scarlet song
of august, and while curling away like
a memory
left on the palm of a window ledge to fade
I cradled the afterlife, a copper coin
on the roof of my mouth--
sought sanctuary in lockets
with faces smooth as worry stones
and separated from my skeleton
waiting for silk to flower from my
footprints
like nimbus,
slips of cloud carried close.
the seasons stuck together,
wet leaves with their fingers laced;
I traced spider nerves,
spider eyelashes, spider
syndesmoses forming faults
on the earth spread open like a
birthmark,
pale and static under the skin.
after he dies, she said, we will
resolve him
into things we have forgotten--
the branches and leaves
stretching for sunlight
in our lungs. the breaking of grief
onto a shore without sound.
“Jainism” is by Merit O. Copyright © 2008 by Merit O. Used by permission of author. All rights reserved.
MARK STRAND was born on April 14, 1934, in the village of Summerside on Prince Edward Island in Canada. He was educated at Antioch College in Ohio and then went on to Yale where he first studied painting under Josef Albers before deciding to study writing. By the time he graduated he had already won two highly acclaimed awards, the Cook and Bergin prizes, for his collection of poetry. In 1960 he went to the University of Florence in Italy with a Fulbright scholarship.
His collections of poems include New Selected Poems (2007), Man and Camel (2006), Blizzard of One (1998), (Dark Harbor (1993), The Continuous Life (1990), Selected Poems (1980), The Late Hour (1978), The Story of our Lives (1973), The Sargentville Notebook (1973), Darker (1970), Reasons For Moving (1968), and Sleeping With One Eye Open (1964). He has also published a book of prose, entitled The Monument (1978). His books on artists include William Bailey (1987) and Hopper (1994). His translations include two volumes of the poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. He has also published three books for children.
Mark Strand has taught in over a dozen prestigious colleges and universities and earned numerous honors and awards for his poetry and fiction. He has been the recipient of Fellowships from the Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also been awarded Fellowships from the Fulbright Program (1960) and the Academy of American Poets (1979), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (1987), the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry (1992), the Bollingen Prize (1993), the Pulitzer Prize (1999), the Wallace Stevens Award (2004), and has served as Poet Laureate of the United States (1990-1991).
Strand's poems occupy a place that exists between abstraction and the sensuous particulars of experience. It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking," but they are also unexpectedly funny. The erasure of self and the depredations of time are seen as sources of sorrow, but also as grounds for celebration. This is one of the difficult truths these poems dramatize with stoicism and wit. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Blizzard of One is an extraordinary book--the summation of the work of a lifetime by one of our very few true masters of the art of poetry.
A luminous new collection from this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet--his first since 1998--is a toast to life's transience, strangeness, and abiding beauty.
by Mark Strand
by Mark Strand
by Mark Strand
by Mark Strand
© 2008 Borders, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
