Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Lesson 2: Favourite poet
Mark Strand (1934~)
"I seem to be a tourist on planet Earth!" With a salesman on the move as his father, Mark Strand spent his childhood in Halifax, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, and as a teenager he lived in Columbia, Peru, and Mexico. This most probably influenced him when writing poems. This entry will include his life story, three of his poems and my own opinion.Born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada on April 11, 1934, Mark Strand might have become an artist if his mother's prediction came true, though he only painted for a while. He earned his B.A. from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and then studied painting under Josef Albers at Yale University where he earned a B.F.A in 1959. However, his love for painting soon died out and he moved on to poetry to express his feelings. On a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Florence, he studied nineteenth-century Italian poetry in Italy during 1960 to 1961. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop the following year and earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1962. In 1965 he spent a year in Brazil as a Fulbright Lecturer. Currently, since 2006, he teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.
He has published eleven books of poetry, and some of them receive good response from the readers and media. He has received numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999 for Blizzard of One. His honors include the Bollingen Prize, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from The Academy of American Poets, and a Rockefeller Foundation award, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Not only does he write poems, he has also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation, several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children.
Strand admires fellow poet Robert Creely for his wonderful poems, but his poems head towards a different direction as compared to Creely's poems. "We tend to walk on different sides of the street. It may be the same street, but we notice different things." Most of his poems have sad themes, for example, The Dreadful Has Already Happened and Eating Poetry. Here are some of the poems that Strand has written:
Eating Poetry
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
A Piece Of The Storm
From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
That's all There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
"It's time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening."
Keeping Things Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This 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 spaces
where my body's been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
Bibliography
http://www.mipoesias.com/Volume19Issue2/strand.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=665138
http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/102