Mark Strand
Mark Strand was a prominent American poet, born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, to Jewish intellectuals. His early life was marked by frequent relocations due to his father's career, which influenced his diverse cultural experiences across the United States and Latin America. Strand studied painting at Yale but transitioned to poetry after realizing his limitations as a visual artist. He gained recognition with his first poetry collection, "Sleeping with One Eye Open," published in 1964, and continued to explore themes of anxiety and imagination in his work.
Strand served as the poet laureate of the United States and received numerous prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for his collection "Blizzard of One." His body of work encompasses poetry, children's literature, art criticism, and translations, reflecting a deep engagement with the poetic process and the human experience. Strand's poems often create a sanctuary against the chaos of the world, inviting readers to join in the narrative exploration. He passed away in 2014 at the age of eighty, leaving behind a significant legacy in American literature.
Mark Strand
Poet
- Born: April 11, 1934
- Birthplace: Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada
- Died: November 29, 2014
Poet
Strand’s work demonstrates the power of the imagination over a chaotic and terrifying world and the ability of poetry to serve as a temporary sanctuary from nature.
Early Life
Mark Strand was born in the village of Summerside on Prince Edward Island. His parents were middle-class Jewish intellectuals. Despite being Jewish, his father, Robert, was raised in a Catholic orphanage and became a salesman. His mother, Sonia, studied art and became an archeologist when the family later moved to Latin America. Strand’s maternal grandfather was a linguist. Strand moved frequently because of his father’s business; he spent many of his early years in the United States and his teenage years in South and Central America. He returned to the United States for college, earning a BA from Antioch College in 1957. In 1959, he earned a BFA from Yale University, where he studied painting with Josef Albers. Upon realizing that he lacked vision as a painter, Strand turned to poetry.
Strand traveled to Italy in 1960 on a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Florence. The following year he married Antonia Ratensky, with whom he had a daughter, Jessica. He studied writing at the University of Iowa, earning an MA in 1962, and he stayed in the role of instructor until 1965.
Life’s Work
Sleeping with One Eye Open, Strand’s first volume of poetry, published in 1964, evoked a sense of anxiety toward the world, as indicated by its title. Similar to the children’s picture book by Mercer Mayer called There’s a Nightmare in My Closet (1968), but without the happy ending, the title poem is narrated by a speaker who lies awake at night, fearful of what might happen. This first volume included one of Strand’s frequently anthologized poems, “Keeping Things Whole.” The following year Strand traveled to Rio de Janeiro, where he served as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Brazil. Strand’s second volume, Reasons for Moving, published in 1968, included the frequently anthologized poem “Eating Poetry.” His third volume, Darker, was published in 1970.
Strand’s father died in 1968. The Story of Our Lives, published in 1973, considered Strand’s most autobiographical collection, included the long poem “Elegy for My Father.” Divorcing his first wife in 1973, Strand married in 1976 Julia Garretson, with whom he had a son, Thomas. Strand earned a living teaching at numerous institutions, including Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Utah, and University of Chicago. The Late Hour, published in 1978, included poems addressed to both his son and his daughter and the popular poem “Pot Roast.” In 1978, Strand published The Monument, an extended prose poem.
For much of the 1980s, Strand turned away from poetry. He published several children’s books, including The Planet of Lost Things (1982), The Night Book (1985), and Rembrandt Takes a Walk (1986). A collection of short stories, Mr. and Mrs. Baby, and Other Stories, was published in 1985. He also published works of art criticism, including William Bailey (1987) and Hopper (1994).
Strand returned to poetry, publishing The Continuous Life, a mixture of poetry and prose poetry with a dash of humor, in 1990. That same year he was appointed poet laureate of the United States. Dark Harbor, published in 1993, marked a transition in Strand’s career. The volume consisted of a long poem in forty-five parts. James Nicosia, author of Reading Mark Strand (2007), considers this collection Strand’s finest. Blizzard of One, published in 1998, earned Strand a Pulitzer Prize and included his poems on the artist Giorgio de Chirico. The cover of this collection was designed by Strand. Man and Camel, published in 2006, was dedicated to Charles Simic and Charles Wright and included the poem “Poem after the Last Seven Words,” which was based on the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. The Weather of Words, a collection of occasional prose pieces on poetics, was published in 2000.
In 2014, Alfred A. Knopf published the entire collection of Strand's poems as Collected Poems. The collection was longlisted for that year's National Book Award. Shortly after, however, on November 29, 2014, it was confirmed that Strand had passed away at his daughter's home in Brooklyn following a battle with liposarcoma, a cancer of the fat cells. He was eighty years old.
Significance
A former poet laureate of the United States, Strand earned numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He published poetry, fiction, children’s literature, art criticism, and translations of Latin American poetry and of the works of Dante. He is also known for his poetics. His poetry demonstrates the power of the imagination over a chaotic and terrifying world and the ability of poetry to serve as a temporary sanctuary from nature. Many of his poems concern the poetic process or the act of narration, involving and engaging readers.
Bibliography
Cavalieri, Grace. “Mark Strand: An Interview.” American Poetry Review 23.4 (1994): 39–41. Print.
Emmanuel, Lenny. “Mark Strand and Lenny Emmanuel at the Trestle.” Antioch Review 67.1 (2009): 44–66. Print.
Gregerson, Linda. “Negative Capability.” In Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. Print.
Grimes, William. "Mark Strand, 80, Dies; Pulitzer-Winning Poet Laureate." New York Times. New York Times, 29 Nov. 2014. Web. 28 Dec. 2015.
Kirby, David K. Mark Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary Culture. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1990. Print.
Nicosia, James F. Reading Mark Strand: His Collected Works, Career, and the Poetics of the Privative. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Print.