Weekly Poem: Remembering Mark Strand

Prize-winning poet and former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand died Saturday. We remember him with his reading of “A Suite Of Appearances: 4,” given during an interview with the NewsHour in 1999. You can see the full interview and the text of the poem here.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand died Saturday from liposarcoma, a cancer in the fat cells, according to his daughter Jessica Strand. He was 80 years old.

Strand was born on April 11, 1934, on Prince Edward Island in Canada. He moved throughout his childhood, living in Nova Scotia, Montreal, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.

Before Strand was a poet, he was a visual artist. He graduated from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1959 with a degree in painting. It was during his time in New Haven, Connecticut, that he discovered poetry. He spent a year studying 19th century Italian poetry in Florence on a Fulbright grant. In 1962 he graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with a Masters of Fine Arts.

Two years later, Stand published his first collection of poetry, “Sleeping With One Eye Open.” His early poems, often quite short, displayed many of the characteristics for which the poet would become known: precision of language, surrealism and themes of absence and death.

Don Share, the editor of Poetry magazine, told senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown that Strand was a “quiet, meditative, thoughtful person” who “never took poetry for granted.”

“His tone over a long career was kind of remarkably consistent and intelligibly and yet always surprising,” said Share. “Always a surprise in every poem. That’s a hard thing to do over a long career, but it’s something that Mark Strand was brilliant at.”

Over the course of 50 years, Strand published over a dozen books of poetry. He took a hiatus in 1980, when he wrote children’s books, such as “The Planet of Lost Things,” as well as short stories. Fourteen of his stories were collected in the 1995 book “Mr. and Mrs. Baby.”

Listen to senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown conversation with Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine, about Mark Strand’s life and his poetic legacy. Share also reads one of the last poems Strand wrote, “The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter.” You can find the text here.

In 1987, Strand was honored with a MacArthur “genius grant” by the MacArthur Foundation. Three years later, he was named the U.S. poet laureate. That same year, he published “A Continue Life,” his first book of poetry in a decade. That collection reflected a new, longer direction for his work. Five years later, he published “Dark Harbor,” a book comprised of a single poem with 45 sections.

In 1999, Strand was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection, “Blizzard of One.” That same year, he spoke with the NewsHour about the way he reads and writes poetry.

“Some poets pay very close attention to the world and try to represent it verbally. Other poets try to create another world through which we see the so-called real world, and it’s hoped that through the imaginary world that they create that we see the real world more clearly,” said Strand. “I think what poetry finally does is to help us experience our world as intensely as possible.”

Over the years, Strand taught poetry at Johns Hopkins University, The University of Chicago and Columbia University. Throughout his career as a poet, he maintained his interest in visual art. He wrote books and critical essays about painters and he began making collages five years ago. Those works were exhibited in New York.

Though he stopped writing poetry in his later years, this September Knopf published “Collected Poems,” with works that span his five decades-long career. That collection earned the poet a National Book Award nomination this fall.

For Strand, reading poetry was a transformative experience.

“The reader has to sort of give himself over to the poem and allow the poem to inhabit him…” Strand said in that 1999 NewsHour interview.

“How does the poem do that? It does it by rearranging the world in such a way that it appears new. It does it by using language that is slightly different from the way language is used in the workday world, so that you’re forced to pay attention to it.”