Mark Strand Biography Quotes 25 Report mistakes

Early Life
Mark Strand was born on April 11, 1934, in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and grew up moving frequently across North and South America because of his father's work. The shifting geography of his childhood, which included time in the United States and in Latin America, left a lasting imprint on his imagination. In later poems and essays he would return to landscapes that feel both familiar and estranging, places where identity seems at once clear and elusive. He would come to be known as a Canadian-born American poet, embracing the cultural crossings that shaped him from the start.

Education and Formation
Strand studied at Antioch College, receiving a B.A. in 1957. He then trained as a painter at the Yale School of Art, where the rigorous instruction of Josef Albers sharpened his attention to clarity, structure, and restraint. A Fulbright year in Italy further exposed him to European art and letters, and he soon shifted his primary allegiance from painting to poetry. At the Iowa Writers' Workshop he completed an M.F.A., working in the atmosphere created by the program's head, Paul Engle, and learning from the measured craft and musical intelligence of Donald Justice. Close reading of Wallace Stevens and of modern European and Latin American poets deepened his sense of the poem as a site of luminous mystery.

Emergence as a Poet
Strand's first small-press collection, Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), announced a sensibility at once cool and uncanny. National attention followed with Reasons for Moving (1968) and Darker (1970), whose plainspoken surfaces and dreamlike turns made poems such as Eating Poetry and Keeping Things Whole enduring fixtures in American anthologies. The Story of Our Lives (1973) and The Late Hour (1978) refined his signature minimalism into meditations on absence, desire, and the self's vanishing act. He often devised scenarios in which a speaker appears and recedes within a spare, luminous frame, dramatizing how identity is constituted by what it touches and what it cannot hold.

Translations, Editing, and Critical Prose
Strand approached poetry as a reader, translator, editor, and critic as passionately as he did as a maker. With Charles Simic he co-edited Another Republic, an influential anthology that brought European and South American voices to American readers. He translated and adapted poems by Eugenio Montale, Rafael Alberti, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, treating translation as a creative apprenticeship that honed his own economy of language. His collection of essays The Weather of Words explored the workings of metaphor, narrative presence, and poetic invention. He also wrote prolifically on the visual arts; his book on Edward Hopper probed the painter's radiant loneliness and clarified Strand's own affinity for images emptied of chatter and saturated with light. Prose experiments like The Monument and the short-story collection Mr. and Mrs. Baby revealed a comic and parabolic imagination behind the laconic voice of the poems.

Teaching and Public Role
A devoted teacher, Strand held appointments at several universities, among them the University of Utah, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University. In classrooms and workshops he cultivated attention to cadence and image, urging clarity without banishing mystery. His influence radiated through generations of students who carried forward his lessons in precision and imaginative daring. In 1990, 1991 he served as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a national role that highlighted his commitment to public literary life. He also guest-edited prominent anthologies, contributing to a broader conversation about contemporary poetry.

Recognition
Over the course of five decades Strand became one of the central figures in American letters. He received a MacArthur Fellowship, an affirmation of the originality of his voice and his contributions across genres. In 1999 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Blizzard of One, a late collection that distilled his longstanding themes into lucid, haunting lyrics. Other volumes from this period include The Continuous Life (1990), with its title poem's wry counsel to parents and children, Man and Camel (2006), whose fables widen into metaphysical speculation, and Almost Invisible (2012), a suite of crystalline prose-poems. His Collected Poems appeared in 2014, gathering a lifetime's work in a single arc.

Style, Themes, and Influences
Strand's vocabulary is famously spare, his syntax elegant, his tone cool but not detached. The poems pivot on apparitions and disappearances: a field defined by the shape of what is missing, a voice that recedes even as it names itself. He used plain diction to stage moments of startling metaphysical shift, a method indebted to Stevens's meditative architectures and to the surreal delicacy he admired in writers like Montale. At the same time he drew energy from art and photography, translating the logic of composition and negative space into verbal equivalents. His frequent returns to night, shadow, and the sea were less symbols than atmospheres in which identity could be tested and released.

Colleagues and Community
Strand's career unfolded within a constellation of artists and poets who helped define late twentieth-century literature. The friendship and dialogue with Charles Simic shaped his sense of international modernism and the art of the parable. Joseph Brodsky's fierce devotion to poetic authority and exile sharpened Strand's own understanding of estrangement and belonging, and the two shared readings and conversations that became part of New York's literary lore. Earlier, the discipline of Josef Albers and the mentorship of Donald Justice framed his practice, while Paul Engle's vision of the Iowa Writers' Workshop gave him a proving ground. As a translator and editor, Strand connected American readers to Montale, Alberti, and Drummond de Andrade, extending his circle beyond national borders and across languages.

Personal Life and Final Years
Strand married several times and was the father of Jessica Strand, a writer who has carried forward his devotion to the written word. He lived for long stretches in the American West and in New York City, often balancing university commitments with periods of focused writing and travel. In his later years he returned ever more intently to the relation between seeing and saying, dividing his energies between poetry, essays on artists he loved, and the mentoring of younger writers. He died on November 29, 2014, in New York, at the age of 80.

Legacy
Mark Strand left a body of work that made silence legible and absence palpable. His poems remain fixtures in classrooms and in the memory of readers who find in his clarity a permission to feel the complexities beneath ordinary speech. As Poet Laureate, translator, essayist, editor, and teacher, he broadened the American lyric tradition without ornamenting it unduly, proving that austerity can be hospitable and that a quiet voice can carry across great distances. His example endures in the work of poets he taught, in the international poetries he championed, and in the austere radiance of poems that continue to make a home for strangeness and wonder.

Our collection contains 25 quotes who is written by Mark, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Funny - Live in the Moment - Deep - Poetry.

• 2014 Collected Poems (Book)
• 2000 The Weather of Words (Book)
• 1993 Dark Harbor (Book)
• 1990 The Continuous Life (Book)
• 1985 Mr. and Mrs. Baby (Book)
• 1973 The Story of Our Lives (Book)
• 1964 Sleeping with One Eye Open (Book)

• Wikipedia