Mark Strand On Poetry And Poetics

–from Essays And Interviews Essay, Research Paper

On Donald Justice

From the very beginning Justice has fashioned his poems, honed them down, freed them of

rhetorical excess and the weight, however gracefully sustained, of an elaborate diction.

His self-indulgence, then, has been with the possibilities of the plain statement. His

refusal to adopt any other mode but that which his subject demands–minimal, narcissist,

negating–has nourished him. . . .

If absence and loss are inescapable conditions of fife, the poem for Justice is an act

of recovery. It synthesizes, for all its meagreness, what is with what is no longer; it

conjures up a life that persists by denial, gathering strength from its hopelessness, and

exists, finally and positively, as an emblem of survival.

From Contemporary Poets. Ed. James Vinson. (St. Martin’s, 1980)

On The Monument

I strated writing The Monument and it became less and less about the translator

of a particular text, and more about the translation of a self, and the text as self, the

self as book.

From an interview with Frank Graziano in Graziano, ed. Strand: A Profile (1979)

From The Monument (1978)

(#9)

It has been necessary to submit to vacancy in order to begin again, to clear ground, to

make space. I can allow nothing to be received. Therein lies my triumph and my

mediocrity. Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb. I am

passing it on. The monument is a void, artless and everlasting. What I was I am no longer.

I speak for nothing, the nothing that I am, the nothing that is this work. And you shall

perpetuate me not in the name of what I was, but in the name of what I am.

(#22)

This poor document does not have to do with a self, it dwells on the absence of a self.

I–and this pronoun will have to do–have not permitted anything worthwhile to be part of

this communication that strains even to exist in a language other than the one in which it

was written. So much is excluded that it could not be a document of self-centeredness. If

it is a mirror to anything, it is to the gap between the nothing that was and the nothing

that will be. It is a thread of longing that binds past and future. Again, it is

everything that history is not.

From "A Statement about Writing"

Ideally, it would be best to just write, to suppress the critical side of my nature and

indulge the expressive. Perhaps. But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as

rather tedious–never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving. And because it

has no power, let alone appetite, for self-scrutiny, it fits the reductive, dominating

needs of the critical side of me. The more I think about this, the more I think that not

writing is the best way to write.

Whether I admit it or not, I write to participate in the delusion of my own immortality

which is born every minute. And yet, I write to resist myself. I find resistance

irresistible. (317)

In William Heyen, ed. The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets (1984)

Introduction to the Poems in the Winter 1995-96

Issue of Ploughshares

I was very casual about the way I chose poems for this issue of Ploughshares.

I asked a few friends–those I happened to be in touch with–for recent unpublished work.

I picked what I wanted. Then I went through poems that had come directly to Ploughshares

and which the editors thought would interest me. I recall that most of the poems which I

chose came to me this way.

I have no method for picking poems. I simply pick what pleases me. I am

not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful. I tend to

like poems that engage me–that is to say, which do not bore me. I like elaboration, but I

am often taken by simplicity. Cadences move me, but flatness can also seduce. Sense, so

long as it’s not too familiar, is a pleasure, but so is nonsense when shrewdly exploited.

Clearly, I have no set notion about what a poem ought to be.

Editing a single issue of Ploughshares has not allowed me to

reach any conclusions about the state of American poetry. American poetry still seems to

be "out there," practiced by others in many different places and under many

different conditions. The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for

doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions. Whether or

not this is a healthy state of affairs I cannot say. I simply don’t know. 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. 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. This is probably because

it speaks for a level of experience unacco

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