mark strand

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 I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the space where my body has been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.

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Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

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But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

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I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

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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.

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I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.

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Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

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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.

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Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

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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.

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Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

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Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

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I have been eating poetry.

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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.

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A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

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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.

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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.

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I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

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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.

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There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.

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Each moment is a place you've never been.

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The future is always beginning now.

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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.

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For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.

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From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

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