Quotes from Mark Strand

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.

If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

I feel that anything is possible in a poem.

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

I have been eating poetry.

There is no happiness like mine.I have been eating poetry.

I haven't met God and I haven't been to heaven, so I'm skeptical.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

We're only here for a short while. And I think it's such a lucky accident, having been born, that we're almost obliged to pay attention.

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

Each moment is a place you've never been.

Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

It's very hard to write humor.

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.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.