Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf. — Mark Strand Copy Share Image
We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay… — Mark Strand Copy Share Image
If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and… — Mark Strand Copy Share Image
To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing. — Mark Strand Copy Share Image
I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the… — Mark Strand Copy Share Image
“The ultimate self-effacement is not the pretense of the minimal, but the jocular considerations of the maximal in the manner of Wallace Stevens.” — Mark Strand Copy Share Image
“Keeping Things Whole" In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is… — Mark Strand Copy Share Image
There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest. — Mark Strand Copy Share Image
Poetry is about slowing down. You sit and you read something, you read it again, and it reveals a little bit more, and things… — Mark Strand Copy Share Image
These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain,… — Mark Strand Copy Share Image
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure. — Mark Strand Copy Share Image
In a field I am the absence of field.That is always the case. Wherever I am, I am what is missing. When I walk… — Mark Strand Copy Share Image
