Politics & Power Quote by Mark Strand

Strand’s line lands like a politely delivered indictment: not a jeremiad about “kids these days,” but a poet’s cool-eyed inventory of where the art actually sits in American life. The opening hedge - “I certainly can’t speak for all cultures or all societies” - isn’t mere humility. It’s a strategic narrowing of the target, stripping readers of the easy rebuttal (“But poetry matters somewhere!”) and forcing the uncomfortable focus onto the U.S., a culture that loves storytelling but distrusts the concentrated, difficult pleasures of verse.

The key phrase is “marginal purpose.” Strand doesn’t claim poetry is dead; he suggests it has been assigned to the margins as a kind of ornamental practice: prestigious in theory, optional in practice, quietly invoked at funerals, inaugurations, and graduation podiums like a ceremonial spice. The subtext is economic and institutional as much as aesthetic. “Not part of the cultural mainstream” points to how attention is distributed: market-driven media, entertainment industries, algorithmic feeds, and an education system that often teaches poems as puzzles to be solved rather than experiences to inhabit. Poetry becomes homework, not habit.

Context matters: Strand’s career straddled postwar literary prestige and the rise of mass media saturation. He’s speaking from inside the academy-and-awards ecosystem that can crown poets while still leaving them culturally inaudible. The sting is that the marginality isn’t accidental; it’s a national arrangement, one that prizes speed, utility, and brand clarity over the private, unruly ambiguity poetry insists on.