"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." -- Mark Strand
Mark Strand (born 11 April 1934) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. Since 2005, he has been a professor of English at Columbia University.
"A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.""And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.""And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.""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.""But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.""Each moment is a place you've never been.""For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.""From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.""I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.""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.""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.""I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.""I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.""I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.""It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.""It's very hard to write humor.""Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.""Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.""Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.""Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.""The future is always beginning now.""The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.""There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.""Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented."
Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada. His early years were spent in North America, while much of his teenage years were spent in South and Central America. In 1957, he earned his B.A. from Antioch College in Ohio. Strand then studied painting under Josef Albers at Yale University where he earned a B.F.A in 1959. On a Fulbright Scholarship, Strand studied nineteenth-century Italian poetry in Italy during 1960-1961.
He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa the following year and earned a Master of Arts in 1962. In 1965 he spent a year in Brazil as a Fulbright Lecturer. His academic career has taken him to numerous colleges and universities to teach. A partial list:
Teaching positions
University of Iowa, Iowa City, instructor in English, 1962-1965
University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Fulbright lecturer, 1965-1966
Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, assistant professor, 1967
Columbia University, New York City, adjunct associate professor, 1969-1972
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, New York City, associate professor, 1970-1972
Brandeis University, Hurst professor of poetry, 1974-1975
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, professor of English, 1981-1993
Johns Hopkins University, Elliot Coleman Professor of Poetry, 1994-c. 1998
University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, 1998...
Visiting professor at
University of Washington, 1968, 1970
Columbia University, 1980
Yale University, 1969-1970
University of Virginia, 1976, 1978
California State University at Fresno, 1977
University of California at Irvine, 1979
Wesleyan University, 1979
Harvard University, 1980
In 1997, he left Johns Hopkins University to accept the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professorship of Social Thought at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Since 2006, Strand has been teaching literature and creative writing at Columbia University, in New York City.
In 1981, Strand was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress during the 1990-1991 term. Strand has received numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999 for Blizzard of One.
Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" article for works of poetry or "[year] in literature" article for other works:
Poetry
1964: Sleeping with One Eye Open, Stone Wall Press
1968: Reasons for Moving: Poems, Atheneum
1970: Darker: Poems, including "The New Poetry Handbook", Atheneum
1973: The Story of Our Lives, Atheneum
1973: The Sargentville Notebook, Burning Deck
1978: Elegy for My Father, Windhover
1978: The Late Hour, Atheneum
1980: Selected Poems, including "Keeping Things Whole", Atheneum
1990: The Continuous Life, Knopf
1990: New Poems
1991: The Monument, Ecco Press (see also The Monument, 1978, prose)
1993: Dark Harbor: A Poem, long poem divided into 55 sections, Knopf
1998: Blizzard of One: Poems, Knopf winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for poetry
1999: Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More, with illustrations by the author
1999: "89 Clouds" a single poem, monotypes by Wendy Mark and introduction by Thomas Hoving, ACA Galleries (New York)
2006: Man and Camel, Knopf
2007: New Selected Poems
Prose
1978: The Monument, Ecco (see also The Monument, 1991, poetry)
1982: Contributor: Claims for Poetry, edited by Donald Hall, University of Michigan Press
1982: The Planet of Lost Things, for children
1983: The Art of the Real, art criticism, C. N. Potter
1985: The Night Book, for children
1985: Mr. and Mrs. Baby and Other Stories, short stories, Knopf
1986: Rembrandt Takes a Walk, for children
1987: William Bailey, art criticism, Abrams
1993: Contributor: Within This Garden: Photographs by Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, Columbia College Chicago/Aperture Foundation
1994: Hopper, art criticism, Ecco Press
2000: The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention, Knopf
2000: With Eavan Boland, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, Norton (New York)
Poetry translations
1971: 18 Poems from the Quechua, Halty Ferguson
1973: The Owl's Insomnia, poems by Rafael Alberti, Atheneum
1976: Souvenir of the Ancient World, poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Antaeus Editions
2002: Looking for Poetry: Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti, with Songs from the Quechua
1993: Contributor: "Canto IV", Dante's Inferno: Translations by Twenty Contemporary Poets edited by Daniel Halpern, Harper Perennial
1986, according to one source, or 1987, according to another source: Traveling in the Family, poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, with Thomas Colchie; translator with Elizabeth Bishop, Colchie, and Gregory Rabassa) Random House
Editor
1968: The Contemporary American Poets, New American Library
1970: New Poetry of Mexico, Dutton
1976: Another Republic: Seventeen European and South American Writers, with Charles Simic, Ecco
1991: The Best American Poetry 1991, Macmillan
1994: Golden Ecco Anthology, Ecco Press
1994: The Golden Ecco Anthology
2005: 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century, W. W. Norton
