Mark Strand Quotes

“In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.”

“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.”

“We are reading the story of our lives
As though we were in it
As though we had written it.”

“Each moment is a place
you've never been.”

“When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.”

“These wrinkles are nothing
These gray hairs are nothing,
This stomach which sags
with old food, these bruised
and swollen ankles,
my darkening brain,
they are nothing.
I am the same boy
my mother used to kiss.”

“Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.”

“I think a poet's focus is not quite what a prose writer's is, it's not entirely on the world outside. It's fixed on the area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet's sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people… that shadow land between self and reality.”

“I delay typing as long as possible. When I read a poem in longhand I'm hearing it, when in typescript I'm reading it. A poem can appear finished just because of the cleanness of the typescript.”

“The elements I need to write are a place, a desk, a familiar room. I need some of my books there, I need quiet. … I'm picturing as I'm writing. I'm putting together what I need to have this thing alive.”

“I don't know where it comes from. I think some of it comes from the unconscious. Sometimes it is more complete than other times.”

“A poem releases itself, it does it with cadence.”