About Mark Strand

Author(s): Jonathan Aaron

Source: Ploughshares , Winter, 1995/1996, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Winter, 1995/1996), pp. 202-
205
Published by: Ploughshares

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40354688

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 ABOUT MARK STRAND

A Profile by Jonathan Aaron

in Summerside, Prince Edward Island,

Mark Strand spent much of his childhoo
treal, New York, Philadelphia, and Clevel
lived in Columbia, Peru, and Mexico. Up
Antioch College, he went to Yale to study
Albers. Turning from painting to poetr
thing," he says. "I woke up and found that t
I don't think these kinds of lifetime obsessions are arrived at
rationally." After spending 1960-61 in Italy on a Fulbright schol-
arship, 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 Har-
vard. 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,
unfiissy, and wry. When he talks about himself, it's always with a
sense of humor that underscores the absence of solemnity in his

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 ABOUT MARK STRAND

z
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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" satiriz-
ing 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

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 PLOUGHSHARES

contemporaries." In its playfully barbed irr

seemed out of keeping with Strand's oste
writing. It looked then to some like a wr
seems a brilliantly prescient entertainment.
After Selected Poems came out in 1980, Stra
a wall. "I gave up [writing poems] that year,"
"I didn't like what I was writing, I didn't be
graphical poems." He began to concentrate o
criticism. He wrote the sweetly freakish com
and Mrs. Baby and Other Stories (1985), which
Glover Bartlett, who reveals to his wife that
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 Arca-
dia 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 narra-
tives. 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," "Transla-
tion"). 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

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 ABOUT MARK STRAND

amusing myself." He's a little reluctant to am

how clear I can be on this matter, because I'm
lous in keeping track of myself. I think ther
of tone that I used to try to establish in my
try to disrupt. I try to fracture the poem, c
shifts or changes which I might have found
turbing in the past." After a pause, he adds,
spiratorial, "Verbal high-jinx - without that,
a difference between poetry and prose, is the
Strand aims to read all of Proust during th
Asked what poetry he reads, he replies,
friends - Joseph Brodsky, Charles Simic, Ch
Graham." He keeps returning to Wordsworth
the Victorians - I don't read Browning, but
not necessarily the best poems, but I love
number of Christina Rossetti's lyrics, which
to come off so well."
He's written a book on Edward Hopper. The
Bailey and Neil Welliver are especially close f
poems themselves are often pictures - he ma
ing through images that capture what Charle
Strand, calls "the amazement of the vivid mo
thing of a surprise to hear him say that l
doesn't help when he feels blocked or stuck
"No, when I can't write, I read John Ashb
John Ashbery? "There's a tremendous vitality
unpredictable. Ashbery befuddled me in t
I was always looking for the wrong kind of s
kept trying to paraphrase him. Not that y
him, but if you do, you miss the point of his
that I don't try to translate Ashbery anymore
sense." He laughs. " 'I'm Tense, Hortense.'
poem I'm writing. It's very Ashberyesque, don
Jonathan Aaron's most recent book of poems is Co
England). He teaches writing and literature at Emerso

205

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