(Ed note: When we received the sad news that Mark Strand had died, we invited readers to post their memories of him. You will find them below. I've also included an excerpt of David Lehman's review of Mark's Dark Harbor (1993, Knopf), which ran in the Chicago Tribune. sdh)
From Mark Strand's Farewells: Celebrating A Book-length Poem Of `Sustained Literary Grace' by David Lehman (Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1993)
In "Dark Harbor" we catch glimpses of the poet celebrating "how good life/ Has been and how it has culminated in this instant," lunching with his editor at Lutece, then striding along the pavement, well-fed, lanky, in his "new dark blue double-breasted suit." A poet of glamor for whom light is "the mascara of Eden," he also is a poet of romance who speaks of the ". . . feel of kisses blown out of heaven,/ Melting the moment they land."
As the nation's fourth poet laureate Strand took part in a number of panel discussions devoted to the problems of contemporary poetry. At one such, somebody raised German philosopher Theodor Adorno's famous question: "How can one write poems after Auschwitz?" Strand retorted: "How can one eat lunch after Auschwitz?"
Strand's point is that poetry may be as necessary as lunch, and that one "cannot" yet one does enjoy one's pleasures, despite the knowledge we have of the horrors that the human race has committed. Are poems about Orpheus or angels-Strand writes about both, as did Rilke-necessarily evasions of death and evil? And if they are, should that damn them? Poetry does have a moral dimension, but it is not a moral instrument exclusively. Nor is what Auschwitz represents the whole of our morality.
Strand's poetry is a vehicle of the moral imagination simply because it amply accommodates the world of material things as well as the impulses of the spirit. Like one of the resuscitated poets described on the last page of "Dark Harbor," Strand is now "ready to say the words (he) had been unable to say-/ Words whose absence had been the silence of love."
Mortality as a fact and as the name of our chief fear is the base condition of his new work. Continuous is the need to say farewell to the things that require, and requite, a poet's attention. Death is the mother of beauty; poetry is a valediction forbidding mourning.
The book's penultimate poem is a remarkable example of a "moralized landscape," in which the sea and the mountains embody different aspects of the human condition. The noise of the breaking waves had once frightened him, writes Strand, "But in those days what did I know of the pleasures of loss,/ Of the edge of the abyss coming close with its hisses/ And storms, a great watery animal breaking itself on the rocks./ Sending up stars of salt, loud clouds of spume." (Read the full review here.)
Kateri Lanthier said...
He was a brilliant and inspiring poet and a generous, kind man. I met him years ago in Toronto, when he came to read at IFOA: International Festival of Authors. We chatted afterwards (we talked about Elizabeth Bishop and the Maritimes), he signed his book and I asked if I could send him some of my poetry. He gave me his address. I summoned the courage to send him some work. In reply, he sent me the kindest letter I've ever received. I cherished it for years, although I stopped writing poetry for over a decade. When my first collection, Reporting from Night, was finally being published in 2011, I realized that the poems I'd sent to him were in the manuscript and wondered if he would permit me to use an excerpt from his letter as a blurb. I sent an e-mail to him at Columbia and got a reply back within an hour! He said yes. This is what he had written about my poems: "Their intensity and limpidity, their invention--all wonderful. And their narrative arc--always implicit--gives them a lovely delicacy." I will always be extremely grateful to him.
When I was in the NJ Governor's School for the Arts program, one of our instructors shared this with the group. We were the combination of awkward and unruly you'd expect of seventeen-year-olds who'd worked themselves into a program that involved going to class for a month during their last summer of high school. "Keeping Things Whole" was put in front of us, and as we all read and reread the poem, our usual smart remarks and clumsy attempts at scholarship failed us; our breathing slowed, we sat quietly for a long time, looking up to each other, then back at the page. Even now that poem puts me in a place of feeling both great and small that few other things can, and I owe Mark Strand a true debt for such a gift--one he didn't even know he gave.
Mark Strand caused a sensation when he visited Ohio University in 1972. Already enthralled with his poems, we could hardly believe his handsomeness. The one detail that charmed me most--the small rip near the elbow in his sky-blue oxford-cloth shirt. In 1983 he visited the Center for Writers in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to give a reading. He was a cordial and gracious guest, even advising me on my (ill-conceived) romance. He gave me his best wishes that things would work out. I believe that the next time I talked to him was in 2006, in NYC. "Did things work out?" Mark asked me. "Yes, we lived together for a long time--ten years unmarried, 6 years married. Then he left me for one of my graduate students." "Men are pigs," he said.
MARK STRAND
“The Remains,” from his 1970 collection “Darker.”
Translated into Russian by Andrey Gritsman
Я расстаюсь с чужими именами. Опустошаю карманы.
Снимаю обувь и оставляю на обочине.
Ночью перевожу часы назад.
Открываю семейный альбом и смотрю на свои детские фото.
Ну и что это дает? Время делает свое дело.
Я называю свое имя. Говорю до свидания.
Все слова улетают по ветру.
Я люблю свою жену но покидаю ее.
Родители встают со своих тронов
в молочных залах облаков.
Как мне запеть? Время говорит мне кто я.
Я меняюсь но остаюсь все тем же.
Расстаюсь с жизнью но она все живет.
He told me that he wrote his poems formally, and then un-formed them. I think he was being mischievous...
Mark Strand taught me the secret to poetry. But I can't tell you. It's a secret. I have been lucky in my life to spend several nights over the past decade chatting with Mark Strand on a porch in Tennessee. One night I asked him to sign a copy of his children's book, The Night Book. He asked, "Where did you find this?" and then wrote this inscription, "Stay up late. Everything is better at night."
How many times can you actually remember the first poem you ever read by someone? "My Life by Somebody Else" was my first Mark Strand poem--I'm pretty sure it was in The New York Review of Books. What a startling and unforgettable new voice. He became the most imitated poet in America. A few years later, he felt he had reached a dead end. He said at a poetry reading, at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge, that we were listening to someone whose star had fallen. But how wrong he was.
I loved his reading style, but I couldn't afford his book, so I asked him to sign the book I had with me - Bevington's complete Shakespeare, the fourth edition - and he eyeballed me for a second, then bent over the textbook. When he passed it back, I found a speech bubble extending from the Bard's mouth on the frontispiece: "Mark Strand is a nice guy and not a bad poet. I say so. Wm. Shakespeare."
Also:
Remembering Mark Strand by Brenda Shaunessy
L'uomo che cammina un passo avanti al buio (Mark Strand, 1934-2014) [by Moira Egan]
I Am What Is Missing: Mark Strand, Forgive me; I Get It Now -- by Amy Glynn
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