Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Strand

There is a sly sting in Strand's line: it sounds like a definition, but it lands like an indictment. By locating poetry where it "happens" - universities, creative writing programs, English departments - he reduces an art form to an institutional event, a scheduled activity with a budget line and a seminar room. The verb choice matters. Poetry doesn't live, erupt, or haunt; it "happens", as if produced by the machinery of credentialing.

Strand is poking at a late-20th-century reality: in America especially, poetry migrated from salons and newspapers into academia, where it found patronage, stability, and a professional ladder. That move saved poets from the market's indifference, but it also narrowed the audience and shifted the incentives. When poems are written for workshop peers, judged by committees, and metabolized into criticism, the risk is a feedback loop: poetry becomes a conversation about poetry, not a voice speaking into the world.

The subtext isn't anti-intellectual; Strand himself taught for decades. It's self-aware skepticism from inside the cathedral. He's hinting that the institution can shelter the art while quietly domesticating it, training poets to write legible "poems" rather than necessary ones. There's also a faint comedy in the specificity of the venues, as if poetry has been assigned a campus address and office hours.

Read as cultural critique, the line asks an uncomfortable question: if poetry primarily "happens" in departments, what happens to it everywhere else - in public life, in grief, in politics, in love? It turns the romance of poetry into a problem of infrastructure.