Quotes by Mark Strand

• Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.
• From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.
• 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.
• 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.
• The future is always beginning now.
• Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.
• Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
• Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
• 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.
• I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.
• 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 tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.
• 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 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.
• It's very hard to write humor.
• 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.
• A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.
• 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.