Happy birthday, Mark Strand! Here are some quotes from his work.
“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.”
“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. Poetry is, first and last, language—the rest is filler.”
“I think a poet’s focus is…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’m putting together what I need to have this thing alive.”
“It wouldn’t be any fun to write the poems if we had absolute control. We have to be surprised by our poems. Surprised by things that come to mind and that, at least while you’re writing the poems, seem absolutely necessary for the life of the poem.”
“But if you’re a writer or an artist of any sort, you do depend on your imagination and to cultivate it is not like bodybuilding, it’s a kind of thinking, of daydreaming.”
“[W]riting poetry for me was a way of creating identity, one that I didn’t have.”
“I am interested in relinquishing my imagination to the possibilities that language offers up.”