Mark Strand - Poem Quotes

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A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

Mark Strand

If a man finishes a poem,
he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion and be kissed by white paper.

Mark Strand

I delay typing as long as possible. When I read a poem in longhand I'm hearing it, when in typescript I'm reading it. A poem can appear finished just because of the cleaness of the typescript.

Mark Strand

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

Mark Strand