About Mark Strand: A Profile

Born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1934, Mark Strand spent much of his childhood in Halifax, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. As a teenager he lived in Columbia, Peru, and Mexico. Upon graduating from Antioch College, he went to Yale to study painting with Joseph Albers. Turning from painting to poetry "wasn't a conscious thing," he says. "I woke up and found that that's what I was doing. I don't think these kinds of lifetime obsessions are arrived at rationally." After spending 1960-61 in Italy on a Fulbright scholarship, studying nineteenth-century Italian poetry, Strand attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop for a year, and then taught there until 1965, when he went to Brazil. A year later, he and his wife and small daughter moved to New York City. He taught at Mt. Holyoke College in 1967 and at Brooklyn College from 1970-72, then held visiting professorships at various places, among them Columbia, the University of Virginia, Yale, and Harvard. In 1981 he
accepted a full-time position at the University of Utah, Salt Lake, where he remained until 1993. Strand is now the Elliott Coleman Professor of Poetry at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches in the Writing Seminars.

Strand's many books include eight volumes of poetry. He has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1974 he was awarded the Edgar Allen Poe Award by the Academy of American Poets, and in 1979 the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. He received a MacArthur award in 1987. In 1990 he was chosen to succeed Howard Nemerov as Poet Laureate of the United States. In 1992 he won the Bobbitt Prize for Poetry, in 1993 Yale's Bollingen Prize for Poetry.

Mark Strand's attitude toward his own writing is frank, unfussy, and wry. When he talks about himself, it's always with a sense of humor that underscores the absence of solemnity in his seriousness.
Reasons for Moving (1968) and
Darker (1970) gained him a national reputation as a poet. The disturbing power of their dark conundrums stemmed from the vividness of their comically incongruous details. The tenor of his work shifted in
The Story of Our Lives (1973). Reflecting "an emotionally strenuous period," its poems "were more ambitious, longer, and involved than any I had written," as he said at the time. Highly rhetorical, they sought to express sorrow in elevated, passionate terms.
The Late Hour followed in 1978, its poems "shorter and more lively," containing "more of the world in them and less of myself."

The Monument, published that same year, showed that Strand had not lost his faith in the uses of self-mockery. A book of "notes, observations, instructions, rants, and revelations" satirizing the notion of literary immortality, it was Strand's answer to a question he'd heard asked at a translation conference: "How would you like to be translated in five hundred years?" Strand thought it a "fabulous question. It stumped everyone." The book was his answer. Harry Ford (Strand's editor then at Atheneum and now at Knopf, to whom Strand has always been devoted) turned
The Monument down, thinking "it would ruin my career. I think he meant that it was bad, tasteless, and would offend my contemporaries." In its playfully barbed irreverence, the book seemed out of keeping with Strand's ostensibly more serious writing. It looked then to some like a wrong move. Today it seems a brilliantly prescient entertainment.

After
Selected Poems came out in 1980, Strand hit something of a wall. "I gave up [writing poems] that year," he says, looking back. "I didn't like what I was writing, I didn't believe in my autobiographical poems." He began to concentrate on journalism and art criticism. He wrote the sweetly freakish comedies collected in
Mr. and Mrs. Baby and Other Stories (1985), which featured the likes of Glover Bartlett, who reveals to his wife that he used to be a collie, or the nameless narrator who's certain his father has returned to life as a fly, then as a horse, and finally as his girlfriend. In settings that ranged from contemporary Southern California to the Arcadia of Greek myth, Strand explored new approaches to parody and satire and, in doing so, began to work himself free of what he felt were the imaginative and stylistic limitations of dramatic self-regard. "And then," he says, "in 1985, I read Robert Fitzgerald's translation of
The Aeneid. I decided I'd try a poem, and I wrote 'Cento Virgilianus,' and I was off and running."

The Continuous Life, Strand's first book of poems in ten years, appeared in 1990, containing both poems and short prose narratives. More varied in dramatic scope and tone than his previous collections, its humor pointed yet ruminative,
The Continuous Life offered dryly poignant views of disappearing worlds ("The Idea," "Cento Virgilianus," "Luminism," "Life in the Valley"), its prose pieces piercingly funny send-ups of various aspects of the literary enterprise ("From a Lost Diary," "Narrative Poetry," "Translation"). It signaled Strand's complete recovery of poetic purpose and poise. His most recent collection,
Dark Harbor (1993), a long poem in forty-five parts, reads like a book of dreams and reports on dreams. An episodic journey full of both daily and mythical incident, it amounts to a fearful perception of the self as Dante -- like in a twilit world full of beauty and menace, pervaded, finally, by a deep sense of mortality.

When asked what his next book will be like, he replies, "I just can't predict. I suppose
Dark Harbor was a step toward what I'm doing now, which is completely cuckoo. But I don't care. I'm just amusing myself." He's a little reluctant to amplify. "I'm not sure how clear I can be on this matter, because I'm not very scrupulous in keeping track of myself. I think there's a certain evenness of tone that I used to try to establish in my poems, which I now try to disrupt. I try to fracture the poem, crowd the poem with shifts or changes which I might have found too crazy or too disturbing in the past." After a pause, he adds, his voice softer, conspiratorial, "Verbal high-jinx -- without that, there's not much of a difference between poetry and prose, is there?"

Strand aims to read all of Proust during the coming winter. Asked what poetry he reads, he replies, "I tend to read my friends -- Joseph Brodsky, Charles Simic, Charles Wright, Jorie Graham." He keeps returning to Wordsworth's
The Prelude. "And the Victorians -- I don't read Browning, but I do read Tennyson, not necessarily the best poems, but I love 'Marianna.' And any number of Christina Rossetti's lyrics, which are so dark and seem to come off so well."

He's written a book on Edward Hopper. The painters William Bailey and Neil Welliver are especially close friends. Moreover, his poems themselves are often pictures -- he makes a point of speaking through images that capture what Charles Simic, thinking of Strand, calls "the amazement of the vivid moment." So it's something of a surprise to hear him say that looking at paintings doesn't help when he feels blocked or stuck in his own writing. "No, when I can't write, I read John Ashbery, oddly enough." John Ashbery? "There's a tremendous vitality there, and he's very unpredictable. Ashbery befuddled me in the old days, because I was always looking for the wrong kind of sense in his poems. I kept trying to paraphrase him. Not that you can't paraphrase him, but if you do, you miss the point of his poems. Anyway, now that I don't try to translate Ashbery anymore, it all makes perfect sense." He laughs. " 'I'm Tense, Hortense.' That's the title of a poem I'm writing. It's very Ashberyesque, don't you think?"

Jonathan Aaron's most recent book of poems is Corridor (Wesleyan/New England). He teaches writing and literature at Emerson College.