Mark Strand, whose
spare, deceptively simple investigations of rootlessness, alienation and the
ineffable strangeness of life made him one of America’s most hauntingly
meditative poets, died on Saturday at his daughter’s home in Brooklyn. He was
80.
His daughter, Jessica
Strand, said the cause was liposarcoma, a rare cancer of the fat cells.
Mr. Strand, who was
named poet laureate of the United States in 1990 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize
for Poetry in 1999 for his collection Blizzard
of One, made an early impression with short, often surreal lyric poems that
imparted an unsettling sense of personal dislocation — what the poet and critic
Richard Howard called “the working of the divided self.”
The
Wikipedia entry states that people confused Strand’s poetry with that of Robert Bly, another leading contemporary American poet,
and it’s true for me. As I went
researching for a Strand poem, what I thought was a Starnd poem turned out to
be a Bly poem. Still, as I read through
a number of Strand poems this evening, I do think they are quite distinct. More from the NY Times, this on Strand’s
style:
Echoes of Wallace
Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop could be heard in his compressed, highly specific
language and wintry cast of mind, as could painters like Giorgio de Chirico, René
Magritte and Edward Hopper, whose moody clarity and mysterious shadows
dovetailed with Mr. Strand’s own sensibility.
I’m
not sure how a poet compares to a painter, but I think Liam Grimes (the author
of the NYT Obit) has it quite right on comparing Strand to Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop. They share a metaphysical style, especially
in the way they jump from the abstract to the concrete and vice versa. Another poet that comes to mind for me that
recalls Strand’s style is Marianne Moore, but that’s a momentary gut reaction
without any side by side comparison.
A
couple of things stood out for me in his biographic details. Either I didn’t remember or I didn’t know
Strand was Canadian born. But apparently
because his father relocated a number of times for his work Strand spent his
defining years on American soil and in other nations. He definitely sounds American, as you can see by the poets listed above that are similar in voice and style, though I’m not
sure there is a distinction between American and Canadian voices. The other thing that I didn’t realize was
that he was Jewish, though I can’t find anything that says he was
observant. His emphasis on death does
push him to religious themes, though I have no idea if he was a believer of any
sort. The Obit highlights this poem,
titled “The Remains” because it seems to compose his own epitaph.
I
empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I
empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At
night I turn back the clocks;
I
open the family album and look at myself as a boy.
What
good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I
say my own name. I say goodbye.
The
words follow each other downwind.
I
love my wife but send her away.
My
parents rise out of their thrones
into
the milky rooms of clouds.
How
can I sing? Time tells me what I am.
I
change and I am the same.
I
empty myself of my life and my life remains.
I’ll
highlight this poem because I think it’s a better one and because it sounds so
much like Wallace Stevens, who I adore as a poet.
The Idea
by Mark Strand
For us, too, there was
a wish to possess
Something beyond the
world we knew, beyond ourselves,
Beyond our power to
imagine, something nevertheless
In which we might see
ourselves; and this desire
Came always in passing,
in waning light, and in such cold
That ice on the
valley's lakes cracked and rolled,
And blowing snow
covered what earth we saw,
And scenes from the
past, when they surfaced again,
Looked not as they had,
but ghostly and white
Among false curves and
hidden erasures;
And never once did we
feel we were close
Until the night wind
said, "Why do this,
Especially now? Go back
to the place you belong;"
And there appeared ,
with its windows glowing, small,
In the distance, in the
frozen reaches, a cabin;
And we stood before it,
amazed at its being there,
And would have gone
forward and opened the door,
And stepped into the
glow and warmed ourselves there,
But that it was ours by
not being ours,
And should remain
empty. That was the idea
Here's a reading of "The Idea" if you want to hear it before you. I don't know if the reader is Strand himself, but it's well read.
If
you want to read an adorable and funny poem by Mark Strand, go over to the
Poetry Foundation and read “Eating Poetry.”
Eternal
rest and peace for Mr. Strand. He seems
like a good soul.
