Mark Strand (1934–2014)

One night, I found myself reading a lot of Mark Strand poetry—though I still wasn’t even halfway through his 500-page Collected Poems. I was dead tired, my eyes were shot, my back ached, but I was absolutely driven to read more. Though I had recently read Louise Glück’s huge book of poetry (Poems 1962-2012) and it had been a great experience, Mark Strand’s poetry is more up my street with his oddness and style. My appreciation for poetry has always been strong, but it is sky-high show more recently. Reading and wandering around in these huge books by Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning poets is simply surreal and otherworldly at times. Last night, I was already feeling rather emotional, and I was shaken, amused, and drawn in so many directions, from so many poems.

Some of Mark Strand poems go on for pages and pages, but they were working for me in the dark of night. Sometimes, I was stunned and amazed with just a single line, a stanza, or a complete poem. It was one of my favorite and most intense experiences reading poetry by myself ever. Though I was marking the outstanding parts, I still had such a desire to read them to, and share them with my late wife. We were constantly sharing what impressed us in the books we were reading—that was our life together.

Strand wrote a beautiful long poem that was about life being a book, “The Story of Our Lives.” It’s about reading that book, but the line between what’s on the page and what’s actual living is intriguingly unexplained and unexplainable. I was rereading parts over and over for some time. I certainly applied the poem’s premise to my own life, as a vast amount of my life is absorbed by reading and writing the word, and sharing that life. The question of whether we’re living or reading, and of whether we can control any or all of our existence was a great place to be left pondering in the night.

All his thoughts got me to thinking in so many directions that I could never have remembered or recorded half of them. Mark Strand’s poetry is mostly very tight to my own feelings and I’m very grateful for experiencing such a strong connection there … and I can return there again whenever I pick this volume up again.
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“Something nameless hums us into sleep … We feel dreamed by someone else, a sleeping counterpart…”

"Qualcosa senza nome ci borbotta in sonno ... Siamo sognati da qualcun altro, una controparte che dorme ..."

I sogni sono sempre stati un mistero nella vita degli uomini, indipendentemente dalla loro razza, colore, lingua, cultura o età. Una mia amica virtuale, Marzia Marni Mazzavillani, li studia da anni, non so con quali risultati. Sollecitano da millenni le arti, le scienze e le show more filosofie in egual misura. Ma essi restano un mistero nonostante tutto. Per quanto staccati e indipendenti dalla vita reale, i sogni continuano ad influire sui nostri momenti in cui siamo svegli, così come la vita reale continua ad influenzare la vita notturna.

Ci illudiamo di tenerli a bada, magari cercando di sognare a occhi aperti, ma continuiamo a non sapere nulla di loro nel momento in cui diventiamo prigionieri del sonno. Sembra che solo i poeti siano in grado di "leggerli". Solo i veri poeti, però, come Mark Strand con la poesia che vi propongo qui di seguito e che ho liberamente tradotto.

In uno dei suoi diversi libri di poesie, il vincitore del prestigioso premio Pulitzer Mark Strand esplora in versi il mistero dei sogni. La poesia è anche una specie di testamento artistico che il poeta assegna all'artista: essere testimone di fronte all'universo, sia dentro che fuori se stesso. Inutile dire che la poesia, ogni poesia, tutta la poesia va letta e gustata nella lingua originale in cui il poeta l'ha concepita, dialetto o lingua che sia.

Dreams
Sogni


Trying to recall the plot
And characters we dreamed,
What life was like
Before the morning came,
We are seldom satisfied,
And even then
There is no way of knowing
If what we know is true.


Cercando di ricordare la trama
e i personaggi sognati,
com’era la vita
prima che fosse giorno,
siamo raramente soddisfatti,
ed anche allora
non c’è modo di sapere
se quello che sappiamo è vero.


Something nameless
Hums us into sleep,
Withdraws, and leaves us in
A place that seems
Always vaguely familiar.


Qualcosa senza nome
ci borbotta in sonno,
si ritira e ci lascia
in un posto che sembra
sempre vagamente familiare.


Perhaps it is because
We take the props
And fixtures of our days
With us into the dark,
Assuring ourselves
We are still alive. And yet
Nothing here is certain;


Forse perché
portiamo con noi nel buio
le frattaglie delle nostre giornate,
per sentirci vivi
eppure qui nulla c’è di certo;

Landscapes merge
With one another, houses
Are never where they should be,
Doors and windows
Sometimes open out
To other doors and windows,
Even the person
Who seems most like ourselves
Cannot be counted on,
For there have been
Too many times when he,
Like everything else, has done
The unexpected.


I paesaggi si mescolano
l’uno con l’altro, le case
non sono mai dove dovrebbero essere,
porte e finestre
a volte si aprono verso
altre porte e finestre,
persino le persone che
sembrano come noi
non sono come sono,
ci sono state troppe volte
quando lui, come ogni altra cosa,
ha fatto quello che non ci si aspettava.


And as the night wears on,
The dim allegory of ourselves
Unfolds, and we
Feel dreamed by someone else,
A sleeping counterpart,
Who gathers in
The darkness of his person
Shades of the real world.


E man mano che la notte avanza,
la debole allegoria di noi stessi
si svela e siamo sognati
da qualche altro,
una controparte che dorme,
che raccoglie nel buio
della sua persona
ombre del mondo reale.


Nothing is clear;
We are not ever sure
If the life we live there
Belongs to us.
Each night it is the same;
Just when we’re on the verge
Of catching on,
A sense of our remoteness
Closes in, and the world
So lately seen
Gradually fades from sight.


Nulla è chiaro;
non siamo mai certi
se la vita che viviamo lì
ci appartiene.
Ogni notte è lo stesso:
proprio quando siamo sul punto
di agganciarci,
un senso di lontananza
ci attanaglia, e il mondo
visto poco prima
a poco a poco svanisce.


We wake to find the sleeper
Is ourselves
And the dreamt-of is someone who did
Something we can’t quite put
Our finger on,
But which involved a life
We are always, we feel,
About to discover.


Ci destiamo per scoprire che
chi dorme siamo noi
e il sognato è qualcuno
che ha fatto qualcosa su cui
non possiamo mettere le mani,
ma che coinvolge una vita
che ci accorgiamo di stare sempre
sul punto di scoprire. show less

There are good things about this anthology. The explanations of the forms are clear and concise. For the most part, the examples chosen serve the book well in illustrating each form, and the attempt at including diverse voices, which Strand and Boland discuss in their Introductory Statement, is laudable. The prose is readable and poetic.

Those positives were balanced out, however, by a pretty large flaw: for an anthology of English language poetic forms, there are a lot of forms not found in show more The Making of a Poem.

This book omits not just obscure forms, forms only recently introduced into the accepted canon of English poetry at the time of publication (such as the ghazal), or variations on included forms, but also widely used, popular forms that one would expect in a book of this type, such as the limerick, any of the variations of the cinquain, or the rondeau (of In Flanders Field fame).

Ultimately, the omission of multiple important forms felt like a lack of follow through on the premise of the book. show less

Mark Strand writes oblique poetry. Though he would probably resent the term, he is one of the most academic of the “academic” poets of the 20th century. These are poets subsidized by colleges and universities—the academe—and published, appreciated, and recognized primarily by other poets, scholars, and critics subsidized and recognized in the academe.

In his lecture, “Poetry in the World,” he describes himself attempting to write a lecture on “Poetry in the World” and show more ultimately being unable to do so. In it, a “fictional” Mark Strand prepares meat loaf and a pot roast and interacts with “fictional” students, Dick and Jane. He makes clear his rejection of the “accessible” poetry recently touted by US Poet Laureate Billy Collins:

“Such poems . . . ,” he insists, talking to Dick while looking over Fritos at a grocery store, “Such poems say what they mean right away. And the poets who write that sort of poem . . . are usually talking about their own experiences. What happens when you read such poems is that they put you back in the world you know. . . . When they are read in front of an audience they often elicit a lot of head-nodding. They make the world seem friendlier, more comfortable, because they almost always imply that here is someone else who had an experience like yours. . . . I must admit I am not a fan of such poems. There is so much in our own experience that we take for granted, we don't need to read poems that help us to take those things even more for granted.”

So what DO we find in poems then, Dick asks. The rest of Strand’s non-lecture consists of alternative answers to that question. “I do know there's another kind of poetry from the kind I've described.”

He explores a number of ways of talking about poetry: poetry and experience (especially deep, unspeakable experience), the unique language of each poet, the alternate worlds (or other-worldliness) of poetry, poetry and the sense of loss, and the like. Along the way, he comments on what I have called the oblique nature of poetry—the kind of poetry most often produced and appreciated by academic poets of the 20th century..

“I do feel that people's expectations are misdirected when all they want is to understand a poem,” he asserts. “It is one of the exasperating things about the way poetry is taught. It is assumed that an understanding of the poem is the same as the experience of the poem. Often the experience of a poem—a good poem—will elude understanding. Not totally, of course, but enough, enough to have us be close to what lies just out of reach. . . . In my case . . . I trust the implication of what I am saying, even though I am not absolutely sure of what it is that I am saying.”

Obviously, Strand was having fun in his non-lecture, moving from Fritos to broccoli and yams to a “small meat loaf,” then ultimately to a filling meal of pot roast, potatoes, and an elegant salad. He is being playful with language, and with himself. Curiously, in his poetic alternatives, he does not talk about simple playfulness with language as one approach to poetry.

But it is this poet, the playful one, who right around the time of the non-lecture had come out with Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More (Turtle Point Press, 2000). Not quite nonsense poems, not at all, they are delightful ventures in playfulness. Oh, there are still elements of the oblique, lines to be experienced but not understood, at least not completely understood. After all, this is Mark Strand, and as he says of Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost, he must write in his own language, speak in his own identifiable voice. Here, for instance, is the first of “Shadow”:

The shadow of Naples
The shadow of stanzas waiting
The shadow of daylight is absence
The shadow of a mother includes another
The shadow of chaos is order

Asked to describe the book, he is quoted on the flap of the dust jacket as saying, “This book is comprised of lists. Each list is built upon the repeated use of a single word. Each can be read in part or in its entirety. . . . These lists are as easy to read upon falling asleep as they are upon waking.”

Asked to be more specific, he simply refuses. Each of his “lists” consists of twenty five lines (or so) of about the same length. The topics go all the way from shadow and paradise through sun and moon, hand and foot, dog and chicken, to lake and paintings, twenty-four of them in all. Some lines are sentences, others phrases. Some are playful: “The cosmic chicken is a lesson to us all.” Some are quite down to earth, perhaps alliterative: “What a comfort a chair in the kitchen can be.” Some are metaphorical: “Sorrow is the soul’s candy.” Occasionally, but not often, lines are in a definite sequence: “An actual journey is into the future / A reflective journey is into the past / A journey to Rome is both / A journey to Pittsburgh is probably neither.”

At the end of his non-lecture on “Poetry in the World,” the “fictional” Strand says to Dick, "I don't think I'll be giving the talk. I'm convinced that the best thing I could do would be to end it now, before I begin."

The last “list” in this book, “Paintings,” has twenty-six lines, one more than most. In it he plays around with one of his other roles, that of art critic: “The paintings of A were of rock piles / The paintings of B were influenced by A.” It ends, “The paintings of Z died of neglect the minute they were shown.” I suspect one line in the list is a bit of subtle self-criticism: “The paintings of S seemed to shrink as they were looked at.”

Give this little book a look. You’ll have fun. Like Fritos, you can't stop with just one.

And I’ll be willing to bet you can’t resist writing a few lists of your own.

One of mine is called, “Lists (after Mark Strand).” Here’s how it ends:

A pack of lies; a confusion of lists
Christopher Columbus? let me count the lists
The Spruce Goose carrying a cargo of lists
Heaven consists of lists you can’t see
The imagination is a sunrise of lists
The stars in December: lists without number. show less