“If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we’d live in a much more humane and decent world.”
– Mark Strand
One of my earliest columns for the newspaper was about favourite poems. I found the perfect quote for the column in Mark Strand’s writing. “Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.” Indeed, there is happiness in reading, devouring poetry that cannot be replicated.
Trust the wonderful poet to know exactly what to say. His work is personal, thinking about identity and the understanding of who we are, as individuals. He also wrote about his relationship with the world around him — dealing with fame and success as he grew in stature as a profound and moving poet.
I was stunned to read that he didn’t write poetry for a decade after the publication of Selected Poems . The writer’s block I go through once in a way often leaves me anxious. And here’s a poet who does not force the craft. Who wrote only when he felt like it. How honest and non-pandering to a crowd. He was not just a poet, but also an art critic, a translator, editor and writer of short stories and work for children. His long list of accomplishments includes being named 1990’s Poet Laureate of USA, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
When you read Mark Strand’s poetry, you see the essential questions of life, spoken about in an incisive manner. In The Continuous Life , he asks parents to confess to their little ones of the drudgery of everyday living. “…Explain that you live between two great darks, the first/ With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest/ Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur/ Of hours and days, months and years, and believe / It has meaning, despite the occasional fear/ You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing/ To prove you existed.”
His words paint pictures that the mind immediately sees. In The Midnight Club , he speaks of the gifted who, “…work all night in rooms that are cold and webbed with the moon’s light” and who, “sit, hunched in the dark, feet on the floor, hands on the table, shirts with a bloodstain over the heart.”
My favourite piece of his writing is The New Poetry Handbook , with its 21 rules of poetry. Among them is rule number 5 — “If a man conceives of two poems, he shall have two children less.” I also understand the wisdom in rule number 14: “If a man craves attention because of his poems, he shall be like a jackass in moonlight.” You really should read the entire manifesto.
In the poem, 2002, Mark Strand wrote about Death thinking about him. It’s a comic poem, if one can call it that, of Death swinging its scythe and Strand appearing in “a jacket and tie” and both of them strolling “into the city of souls.” Here they will be met with joy by crowds that have waited for so long that even their tears have, “turned hard and cold as glass…” The poem ends with these words, “O let it be soon. Let it be soon.”
How I wish it hadn’t been so.
(Mark Strand died on November 29, 2014, aged 80)
Srividya is a poet. Read her work at www.rumwrapt.blogspot.com
