[Harold Bloom] Mark Strand
Content
Mark
Strand
C U R R E N T LY AVA I L A B L E
BLOOM’S MAJOR POETS
Maya Angelou
Elizabeth Bishop
William Blake
Gwendolyn Brooks
Robert Browning
Geoffrey Chaucer
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Hart Crane
E.E. Cummings
Dante
Emily Dickinson
John Donne
H.D.
T.S. Eliot
Robert Frost
Seamus Heaney
Homer
A.E. Housman
Langston Hughes
John Keats
John Milton
Sylvia Plath
Edgar Allan Poe
Poets of World War I
Shakespeare’s Poems & Sonnets
Percy Shelley
Wallace Stevens
Mark Strand
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Walt Whitman
William Carlos Williams
William Wordsworth
William Butler Yeats
Mark
Strand
© 2003 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
Haights Cross Communications.
Introduction © 2003 by Harold Bloom.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written
permission of the publisher.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
First Printing
135798642
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mark Strand / Harold Bloom, ed..
p. cm. — (Bloom’s major poets)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-7393-9
1. Strand, Mark, 1934——Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom,
Harold. II. Series.
PS3569.T69 Z78 2002
811’.54—dc21
Chelsea House Publishers
1974 Sproul Road, Suite 400
Broomall, PA 19008-0914
http://www.chelseahouse.com
Contributing Editor: Camille-Yvette Welsch
Cover design by Keith Trego
Layout by EJB Publishing Services
CONTENTS
User’s Guide
7
About the Editor
8
Editor’s Note
9
Introduction
10
Biography of Mark Strand
14
Critical Analysis of “The Story of Our Lives”
Critical Views on “The Story of Our Lives”
Linda Gregerson on Narrative Structure in the Poem
Thomas McClanahan on the Act of Creation within
the Poem
Peter Stitt on the Transubstantiation of Thought to
Word to Reality
John Bensko on the Agency of Art in Reflexive Narration
David Kirby on Dealing with the Ideal State
Sven Birkerts on the Lack of Telos in Strand’s Poetry
17
21
21
23
24
25
28
32
Critical Analysis of “The Way It Is”
Critical Views on “The Way It Is”
Richard Howard on the Poet’s Movement from Interior
Dreamscape to Public Place
Harold Bloom on the Poem as Representative of a Shift
in Strand’s Poetics
Peter Stitt on the Poem as an Attempt to Define
the World
33
37
Critical Analysis of “Elegy for My Father”
Critical Views on “Elegy for My Father”
Laurence Lieberman on the Use of Litany
Richard Howard on the Poem as an Affirmation of Life
David Kirby on the Poem as Loss of Self
Sven Birkerts on the Poem’s Influences
Edward Byrne on the Poem as a Precursor to
A Blizzard of One
42
46
46
48
50
53
37
38
40
55
Critical Analysis of “Dark Harbor”
Critical Views on “Dark Harbor”
Christopher Benfey on the Poem as a Kind of Ars
Poetica
David St. John on the Use of Dream and Memory
David Lehman on the Thematic Influence of
Wallace Stevens
Jeffrey Donaldson on the Use of the Orpheus Myth
Richard Tillinghast on Strand’s Use of and Place
Within the Western Canon
Christopher R. Miller on the Comparison between
Dark Harbor and Stevens’ “Waving Adieu, Adieu,
Adieu”
James F. Nicosia: Marsyas in Dark Harbor
57
62
Works By Mark Strand
85
Works About Mark Strand
87
Acknowledgments
91
Index of Themes and Ideas
93
62
64
65
68
72
73
76
USER’S GUIDE
This volume is designed to present biographical, critical, and
bibliographical information on the author and the author’s bestknown or most important poems. Following Harold Bloom’s
editor’s note and introduction is a concise biography of the
author that discusses major life events and important literary
accomplishments. A critical analysis of each poem follows,
tracing significant themes, patterns, and motifs in the work. As
with any study guide, it is recommended that the reader read the
poem beforehand, and have a copy of the poem being discussed
available for quick reference.
A selection of critical extracts, derived from previously
published material, follows each thematic analysis. In most cases,
these extracts represent the best analysis available from a number
of leading critics. Because these extracts are derived from
previously published material, they will include the original
notations and references when available. Each extract is cited,
and readers are encouraged to check the original publication as
they continue their research. A bibliography of the author’s
writings, a list of additional books and articles on the author and
their work, and an index of themes and ideas conclude the
volume.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale
University and Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of
English at the New York University Graduate School. He is the
author of over 20 books, and the editor of more than 30 anthologies of literary criticism.
Professor Bloom’s works include Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959),
The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats
(1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism
(1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American
Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of
Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996).
The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s
provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great
writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a 1998 National Book
Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), and Genius: A Mosiac
of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002).
Professor Bloom earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in
1955 and has served on the Yale faculty since then. He is a 1985
MacArthur Foundation Award recipient and served as the
Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University
in 1987–88. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious American
Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism.
Professor Bloom is the editor of several other Chelsea House
series in literary criticism, including BLOOM’S MAJOR SHORT
STORY WRITERS, BLOOM’S MAJOR NOVELISTS, BLOOM’S MAJOR
DRAMATISTS, BLOOM’S MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS,
BLOOM’S MODERN CRITICAL VIEWS, and BLOOM’S BIOCRITIQUES.
8
EDITOR’S NOTE
This volume offers critical views on four major poems by Mark
Strand: The Story of Our Lives, The Way It Is, Elegy for my Father
and Dark Harbor.
My Introduction comments upon Dark Harbor, and attempts
to unravel the intricate relations between Strand and Wallace
Stevens.
There is so high a quality of commentary throughout that it is
invidious to single out individual critics.
On The Story of Our Lives I find Linda Gregerson and Sven
Birkerts most illuminating.
Richard Howard comments brilliantly on Strand’s exteriorization in The Way it Is.
On the dark Elegy for My Father, I am particularly moved by
Richard Howard and Sven Birkerts again.
Dark Harbor is most searchingly explored by James Nicosia in
his adumbrations of the figure of Marysas.
9
INTRODUCTION
Harold Bloom
I have known Mark Strand, as person and as poet, for more than
half a century. His gift is harbored rather than sparse: that is my
interpretation of his major work to date, Dark Harbor: A Poem
(1993). The poem constitutes a “Proem” and forty-five cantos or
sections.
Dark Harbor, like some earlier poems by Strand, is an overt
homage to Wallace Stevens. It is as though casting aside anxieties of influences Strand wishes reconcilement with his crucial
precursor. The “Proem” sets forth vigorously: “The burning/Will
of weather, blowing overhead, would be his muse.” But, by Canto
IV, we are in the world of Stevens:
There is a certain triviality in living here,
A lightness, a comic monotony that one tries
To undermine with shows of energy, a devotion
To the vagaries of desire, whereas over there
Is a seriousness, a stiff, inflexible gloom
That shrouds the disappearing soul, a weight
That shames our lightness. Just look
Across the river and you will discover
How unworthy you are as you describe what you see,
Which is bound by what is available.
On the other side, no one is looking this way.
They are committed to obstacles,
To the textures and levels of darkness,
To the tedious enactment of duration.
And they labor not for bread or love
But to perpetuate the balance between the past
And the future. They are the future as it
Extends itself, just as we are the past
10
Coming to terms with itself. Which is why
The napkins are pressed, and the cookies have come
On time, and why the glass of milk, looking so chic
In its whiteness, begs us to sip. None of this happens
Over there. Relief from anything is seen
As timid, a sign of shallowness or worse.
This is the voice of the master, particularly in An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven. Strand shrewdly undoes Stevens to the glass
of milk, setting aside any more metaphysical concerns. An effort is
made, for fifteen cantos, to domesticate Stevens, but the great voice,
of Stevens and Strand fused together, returns in Canto XVI:
It is true, as someone has said, that in
A world without heaven all is farewell.
Whether you wave your hand or not,
It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes
It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,
Hating what passes, it is still farewell.
Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean
Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans
Diving, and the listening bodies of bathers resting,
Are stages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement
Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body
Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being
Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion
Worth celebrating, for what else does one do,
Feeling the weight of the pelicans’ wings,
The density of the palms’ shadows, the cells that darken
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions
Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end
Is enacted again and again. And we feel it
In the temptations of sleep, in the moon’s ripening,
In the wine as it waits in the glass.
11
It is Stevens who tells us that, without heaven, all farewells are
final. What enchants me here are the Strandian variations on
farewell. Waves and tears yield to very Stevensian palms, and to
the pelicans of Florida, venereal soil. A greater meditation, suitable to Strand and Stevens as seers of the weather, arrives in
Canto XXIV:
Now think of the weather and how it is rarely the same
For any two people, how when it is small, precision is needed
To say when it is really an aura or odor or even an air
Of certainty, or how, as the hours go by, it could be thought of
As large because of the number of people it touches.
Its strength is something else: tornados are small
But strong and cloudless summer days seem infinite
But tend to be weak since we don’t mind being out in them.
Excuse me, is this the story of another exciting day,
The sort of thing that accompanies preparations for dinner?
Then what say we talk about the inaudible-the shape it assumes,
And what social implications it holds,
Or the somber flourishes of autumn-the bright
Or blighted leaves falling, the clicking of cold branches,
The new color of the sky, its random blue.
Is that final tercet Strand or Stevens? As the sequence
strengthens, deliberate echoes of Josh Ashbery, Octavio Paz and
Wordworth are evoked by Strand, until he achieves a grand
apotheosis in his final canto:
I am sure you would find it misty here,
With lots of stone cottages badly needing repair.
Groups of souls, wrapped in cloaks, sit in the fields
Or stroll the winding unpaved roads. They are polite,
And oblivious to their bodies, which the wind passes through,
Making a shushing sound. Not long ago,
I stopped to rest in a place where an especially
Thick mist swirled up from the river. Someone,
Who claimed to have known me years before,
12
Approached, saying there were many poets
Wandering around who wished to be alive again.
They were ready to say the words they had been unable to sayWords whose absence had been the silence of love,
Of pain, and even of pleasure. Then he joined a small group,
Gathered beside a fire. I believe I recognized
Some of the faces, but as I approached they tucked
Their heads under their wings. I looked away to the hills
Above the river, where the golden lights of sunset
And sunrise are one and the same, and saw something flying
Back and forth, fluttering its wings. Then it stopped in mid-air.
It was an angel, one of the good ones, about to sing.
The aura is Dante’s, and we are in a spooky place, paradise of
poets or purgatory of poets. If one line above all others in Dark
Harbor reverberates within me, it is: “They were ready to say the
words they had been unable to say-” The accent remains late
Stevens, but with a difference is altogether Mark Strand’s.
13
BIOGRAPHY OF
Mark Strand
Mark Strand published his first book in 1964, the year he turned
thirty. In the years following, he tackled poetry as a translator,
critic, and poet influenced by writers like Borges, Stevens,
Bishop, Kafka, and Donald Justice. As an editor and translator,
he exposed American readers to South American poets, the
intricacies of form, and his notions on the essential aspects of
poetry in translation. Always amiable, Strand is sought after for
interviews, bringing the unique perspective of an artist who has
experimented in different genres, dabbling in fiction, nonfiction, scholarly critique, children’s books and painting as well as
poetry.
Born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, on April
11, 1934, Mark Strand spent much of his youth relocating across
North and South America due to his father’s job as a salesman.
The family lived in Cuba, Columbia, Peru, Mexico, Philadelphia,
Halifax, and Montreal, affording the young boy exposure to a
number of languages, although at the time his primary interest
was not poetry, but painting. The dream of being an artist lasted
until he was twenty.
Strand attended Antioch College and completed his BA in
1957. By 1959, he had completed a BFA at Yale, studying under
Joseph Albers. During his course of study, he also took English
classes and excelled in them, and perhaps most formatively, he
kept returning to the poems of Wallace Stevens. While at Yale,
Strand received the Cook Prize and the Bergin Prize, and came
to the realization that he was not to be a painter, rather, he would
become a poet. In 1960, he received a Fulbright scholarship to
Italy to study nineteenth century poetry. Upon Strand’s return to
the United States, he married a fellow Fulbright scholar whom
he had met in Italy, Antonia Ratensky, in 1961 and began to be
published in The New Yorker. That same year, he began his study
at the University of Iowa, under the guidance of Donald Justice
with whom he studied for one year, earning his MA. After
completing his degree, he began a three-year teaching stint at the
14
University of Iowa. In 1964, he published his first book of poetry,
Sleeping with One Eye Open, and though it received little to no
critical fanfare, it does provide the symbolic apparatus for
reading Strand’s work. The book foreshadows his darkness, the
tension in his characters, the search for self and identity, the
grotesque detail, the morbid humor, the dream-like, elegant
tone. It also introduced a certain cavalier cleverness and empty,
formal ease for which some critics have chastised him.
After the publication of his book, Strand left Iowa to teach as
a Fulbright Lecturer in Brazil. During his time there, he
occasionally saw Elizabeth Bishop and began gathering
information for translating Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a
Brazilian poet whose poetry shares a keen feeling of isolation
with Strand’s. Funded by an Ingram-Merrill grant, Strand
returned to the United States and took up residence in New York
City. He began taking a series of teaching jobs at various colleges
and universities, Mt. Holyoke, the University of Washington,
Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Brandeis, University of Virginia,
Wesleyan, and Harvard. In 1967, he was awarded an NEA grant
and, in 1968, editor Harry Ford accepted and published Strand’s
second book, Reasons for Moving: Poems. Strand claims Ford as the
reason he has a career in poetry, and when Ford left Atheneum
in favor of Knopf, Strand went with him.
Reasons for Moving continued to have a feeling of barely
contained fear, an intense questioning of what constitutes the
self, and a sense of self-negation. In these poems, Strand’s
speakers often move between a world of their own making and
the world-at-large, each with its own uneasy atmosphere often
told in images juxtaposing frantic activity with absolute stillness.
After receiving a Rockefeller Foundation Grant in 1968, Strand
continued working, and by 1970, he published another
collection, Darker, that met with critical acceptance. Many
believed the book to be the start of a more life affirming oeuvre
for Strand, although the book retains his fascination with the
divided self. In 1973, he published The Story of Our Lives, his
most critically praised book at that time, which marked a turning
point. The poems were longer, more narrative and more
autobiographical than his earlier poems, although they are still
15
driven by Strand’s obsession with the interior and the way in
which the imagination figures reality. He received the first Edgar
Allan Poe award from the Academy of American Poets in 1974.
The honors kept coming: he received awards from the National
Institute for Arts and Letters and an American Academy Award
in Literature as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975. His
fifth major collection appeared in 1978, The Late Hour.
Strand also found the 1970s to be intensely productive as a
translator and editor, working with Charles Simic and Octavio
Paz on two of his projects. The work brought much of Strand’s
idiosyncratic taste to the market, exposing more people to the
influence of European and South American poets. In 1980,
Strand published his Selected Poems, his only volume of poetry
during the decade. Instead of poetry, he focused his energies on
children’s books, fiction, prose, and art criticism—publishing six
volumes collectively. He received critical praise for his prose
although the response to his children’s books was mixed. In the
1990’s, Strand made a triumphant return to poetry, serving as the
United States Poet Laureate from 1990-1991, and publishing
The Continuous Life in 1990, a book length poem and winner of
Yale University’s Bollingen Prize, Dark Harbor in 1993, and his
Boston Book Review Bingham Poetry Prize and Pulitzer Prize
winning volume, Blizzard of One in 1993. Critical praise was
overwhelming. Writers and scholars claimed that this was Strand
writing at his best, with a fully developed voice and balance they
had not seen before.
In the year 2000, success continued. Strand co-edited The
Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms and a book
of essays The Weather of Words: Poetic Inventions. He currently
teaches on the Committee for Social Thought at the University
of Chicago as the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service
Professor of Social Thought. Ultimately, his contribution to
American poetry has been vast. As an essayist, his writing is
insightful, funny and informative. In translating, his ear is keen
and his taste impeccable. But, it is as a poet that he is most
influential, attacking throughout his poetry the question of the
self and its divisions and tensions, and the place of the poet and
poetry in the contemporary world.
16
C R I T I C A L A N A LY S I S O F
“The Story of Our Lives”
This title poem from Strand’s fourth book reveals a structural
shift in his poetry, marking a book of lengthier narrative poems.
As with much of Strand’s work, the struggle of the poem is both
internal and external. The characters cannot help themselves,
trapped by their own inertia and inability to walk away from
expectations both societal and personal. The poem questions the
notion of self and how it is created through story and action.
The poem begins with a couple who are “reading the story of
our lives / which takes place in a room.” Immediately, Strand
gives his major plot point and suggests the kind of lives these two
are leading: small and self-contained, fitting neatly into one
room. And though the room has a view of the street, as in many
of Strand’s poems, no one is there; nothing stirs. Instead, a
dream-like, or death-like, hush prevails, the furniture never
moves and everything becomes slowly darker. It seems as if the
poem happens underwater with its slow pace, muffled sounds and
ever-falling darkness. Indeed, the moment when all is quiet,
where the leaves are full, is reminiscent of Keats’s urn, a
momentary, inalterable beauty and ripeness. Still, even this
moment, which the speaker claims as ideal, is flawed. The
speaker admits “We keep turning the pages, / hoping for
something, / something like mercy or change, /” Both the
husband/speaker and his wife desire something more than the set
life the book has given them, but with a sad irony that is typical
of Strand, that desire is thwarted. They are unable, either
separately or together, to ruin this perceived ideal story and state,
and so they become what they fear, stagnant and over-ripe,
spoiled and painfully aware of themselves, their story, their
failures, their future.
In the second section, they are still reading the story of their
lives. Strand uses the first person point of view throughout the
poem to suggest that, as readers, we are in some small way
mirroring the actions of the couple, particularly the speaker. The
story unfolds while we read it, as it unfolds for the narrator. The
17
repetition of the phrase “We are reading the story of our lives”
suggests that the action is cyclical and constant. The speaker
claims they read “as though we were in it, / as though we had
written it.” Here, the idea of the speaker and his wife feeling
distanced from the book is integral. They still believe themselves
to be more than the story the book suggests. They still believe
they have choices, that they might escape the pull of this
knowledge. In many ways, the story suggests a reverse Tree of
Knowledge; the fruit consumed does not provide knowledge of
mortality, instead it offers the speaker his life and all of his
choices. The knowledge is paralyzing. The speaker wonders
again and again who is writing the story; he knows only that he
is not the primary mover in this story. He tries briefly to turn
from the book. He tries to create causality based on his own
decisions; he chooses to try and write the story himself believing
that the act of writing will give him some autonomy. Before he
can get very far, the book tells him he put his pen down. This
preternatural accuracy unsettles the speaker and defeats him. He
turns to watch his wife read the book, knowing that she has come
to the section where she falls in love with the neighbor. He tells
her “You fell in love with him / because you knew that he would
never visit you, / would never know you were waiting.” After
reading the story of her life with the speaker, the woman chooses
ignorance. She chooses a man who will never know what she
wants. She prefers the anonymity and the free will it affords her.
As she reads, the narrator watches her, allegedly imagining his
life without her. She looks up from the book with this
knowledge. It rends the already growing rift between them. The
speaker writes, “The book describes much more than it should. /
It wants to divide us.” In writing this, the speaker bestows power
upon the book; it is a power neither he nor his wife possesses.
With a life already described, and in such unforgiving detail, the
characters lose their motivation to live that life and stagnate in
their room.
The third section begins with the husband waking and
internalizing the notion that he has no life, only the story of it.
When the wife disagrees, he points to the book, showing her
where she disagreed. She turns back to sleep, her last refuge for
18
the unexpected and the speaker continues to read, reliving the
moments that the wife used to find exciting, the moments before
she had all the knowledge that the book provided. The husband
turns to the early part of their relationship and relishes the sense
of uncertainty that was there. In response the book claims, “In
those moments it was his book. / A bleak crown rested uneasily on his
head. / He was the brief ruler of inner and outer discord, / anxious in
his own kingdom.” The book intimates that this man could never
actually rule his own life. His anxiety would overwhelm him, as
it overwhelms him now when all of the events are written before
him. He is paralyzed by his own fears; he both fears and desires
the idea that something unexpected might happen, for the good
or the bad.
He continues reading, despite these fears, or perhaps because
of them. He finds that his wife sleeps to slip back in time, and for
a moment, he wants to inhabit that sleep with her, to escape the
all-knowing book. The book chronicles this desire, stealing from
it all of his tenderness:
He wanted to see her naked and vulnerable,
To see her in the refuse, the costumes and masks
Of unattainable state.
It was as if he were drawn
Irresistibly to failure.
After reading this devastating portrayal of himself, the speaker
finds it hard to continue reading. He tries to move away from the
prescribed action, relying instead on his old form of knowledge
and story telling. He watches his wife’s face and breathing and
tries to read her that way, to understand and read signs of his own
volition, to attribute her actions and thoughts to a motivation
that cannot be recognized by the book.
The speaker cannot keep it up though. He goes back to the
book, searching for a perfect moment to live in, all the time
knowing that it is an impossible feat. Throughout, he knows that
his only chance at a perfect moment is to destroy the book, but
he cannot do it; he needs to have its corrupting power. The
section ends with one of the poem’s most devastating lines: “It
never explains. It only reveals.” And, the revelation is ugly and
19
sordid, inconsiderate of motivation and history. Instead, it runs
as a relentless, shallow newsreel, images devoid of context. The
lack of context ultimately becomes dehumanizing.
In prolonged agony, the couple continues to view the book.
They stare at themselves in the mirror, as if reading the book,
watching themselves in reverse to keep from being lonely. They
need to begin speaking to each other, to rectify the wrongs. The
book says so. It even acknowledges its own complicity in
destroying this relationship. Instead of speaking, they turn to the
book and more stagnation. In the book and in the room that is
their world, everything becomes make-believe and their own
pain is suspect because nothing has actually happened. There is
nothing to reconcile save imagined wrongs told by the book.
The last section affirms all the hopelessness that has come
before. “The book will not survive.” Of course not—it is a
representation of two mortal people. The tale necessarily ends.
The room continues to darken, adding to the mood of
desperation. The speaker cannot put the book aside; he wants to
and does not want to. His indecision binds him ultimately to a
life of nothing. Bound with him is his wife. They live inside the
book and learn to accept the truth of their lives: “They are the
book and they are / nothing else.” Here, Strand’s careful line
break supports the struggle of the poem. He acknowledges that
they exist, i.e. “they are” but that their existence means nothing.
They remain caught in a limbo of indecision. Should they break
from expectation and this prescribed notion of their lives and this
very dangerous book that tells them how to live and warns them
of what is to come, or should they make their own decisions, live
without its corrupting power and fear living without knowing
what will happen, without being able to prepare? It underscores
one of the pervasive fears in Strand’s work, a notion of
nothingness and how we help to create for ourselves through our
own fears, indecision and inaction.
20
CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“The Story of Our Lives”
LINDA GREGERSON
POEM
ON
NARRATIVE STRUCTURE
IN THE
[Linda Gregerson is a Professor at the University of
Michigan and a poet. She has three books of poems, the
most recent entitled, Waterborne. In this essay, she
examines the notion of negation in Strand’s work and its
evolution through the structuring of his poems.]
As the poet moves further away from his earliest poems, the
tension between line break and phrasing softens, enjambment
nearly disappears. The simplest of syntactical patterns simply
repeat; the eddies and stills of imagery even out. The poems
encounter less and less resistance as they move down the page,
until their progress becomes as frictionless as that of a kite or a
ghost ship:
We are reading the story of our lives
which takes place in a room.
The room looks out on a street.
There is no one there,
no sound of anything.
(“The Story of Our Lives”)
“The Story of Our Lives” and “The Untelling,” centerpieces of
Strand’s fourth major collection, pursue the formal discoveries
made in “The Kite.” Each poem contains a story that contains a
poem that steadily dismantles containment. As “The Story of
Our Lives” proceeds, a man and a woman, side by side, consult
the course of love in a book. Though love unfolds and doubles
back, no point of origin or terminus appears, no point, that is,
beyond which the mind might firmly declare itself to be outside
the story:
21
The book never discusses the causes of love.
It claims confusion is a necessary good.
It never explains. It only reveals.
In this way the book preserves the reasons for moving:
It describes your dependence on desire,
how the momentary disclosures
of purpose make you afraid.
Books have promulgated desire before. When Paolo and
Francesca, side by side, read the story of Lancelot and
Guinevere, adulterous love renewed its kingdom: “A Gallehault
was the book and he who wrote it; that day we read no farther in
it” (Inferno V, 137–38). Gallehault served as a go-between for
Lancelot and Guinevere. Boccaccio subtitled The Decameron
“Prince Gallehault” and dedicated his book to otiose donne, idle
ladies. The pattern for seduction is perfectly explicit, and
perfectly vicarious. Strand’s own poems mediate a vast inherited
culture by appearing to build in a clearing. Their faithlessness is
part of their pedigree, its faithlessness is the cement of love.
Paolo and Francesca owed their fealty and their desire to
Gianciotto, Lancelot and Guinevere to Arthur. The man and the
woman on the couch must interpolate a breach of faith in order
to perfect desire:
I lean back and watch you read
about the man across the street.
..................................................
You fell in love with him
because you knew that he would never visit you,
Would never know you were waiting.
Night after night you would say
that he was like me.
—Linda Gregerson. “Negative Capability.” Negative Capability:
Contemporary American Poetry (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan
Press, 2001.): pp. 5–29. Originally appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in
Review 9:2 (1981): 90–114.
22
THOMAS MCCLANAHAN ON THE ACT OF
CREATION WITHIN THE POEM
[Dr. Thomas McClanahan serves as the Associate Vice
President for Grants and Research for the South
Carolina Arts Council. Here, he discusses the way in
which Strand uses poetry/the act of creation as a mode
for understanding his reality.]
In The Story of Our Lives (1973), Strand attempts to come to terms
with reality through the imagination. Much like the woman in
Wallace Steven’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” who must
“order words of the sea,” Strand’s persona in “To Begin” creates a
world out of emptiness. It is an effort at imagining a world into
existence: “He stared at the ceiling / and imagined his breath
shaping itself into words.” The poet figure forces himself to say
words that, in turn, will prefigure a real world. The process is
slow and uncertain. It is ephemeral and unordered, but it is an
essential step in the direction of poetic and metaphysical order:
In the dark he would still be uncertain about how to begin.
He would mumble to himself; he would follow
his words to learn where he was.
He would begin.
And the room, the house, the field,
the woods beyond the field, would also begin,
and in the sound of his own voice beginning
he would hear them.
But even this successful creation is short-lived because Strand
understands that we must create and recreate endlessly if we are
to maintain this reality. In “The Story of Our Lives,” Strand
clearly points to this need for continual creation. In the second
part of the poem, he reinforces the notion that we fashion our
own existences through our imaginations:
We are reading the story of our lives
as though we were in it,
as though we had written it.
23
But all must face the pessimistic knowledge that “The book will
not survive. / We are the living proof of that. / It is dark outside,
/ in the room it is darker.”
“The Untelling” picks up where “The Story of Our Lives”
concludes. The poet figure’s attempt to give relatives an account
of a day he has recently spent with them illustrates the pain and
inherent inaccuracy of any effort to chronicle truth. The more
the man tries to describe what he believes has taken place, the
more paralyzed he becomes:
His pursuit was a form of evasion:
the more he tried to uncover
the more there was to conceal
the less he understood.
If he kept it up,
he would lose everything.
His attempts to “uncover” meet with failure, and the poem
concludes with the poet beginning once again to write it. Unlike
the situation in “To Begin,” where the poet has no objective
experience from which to fashion his story, the poet figure in
“The Untelling” has all the objective reality he can stand. His
problem is that of selectivity, not creation from nothing, and it
becomes apparent that the anguish of fashioning truth from
reality is as real for Strand as the pain of making a poem out of
the raw material of subjective consciousness.
—Thomas McClanahan, “Mark Strand.” Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Volume 5: American Poets Since World War II, First Series.
Ed. Donald J. Greiner. Gale, 1980.
PETER STITT ON THE TRANSUBSTANTIATION OF
THOUGHT TO WORD TO REALITY
[Peter Stitt is the Editor of The Gettysburg Review and a
full professor of English at Gettysburg College. He is a
prolific reviewer and the author of Uncertainty and
Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets and The World’s
Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets. In this review, he
24
articulates Strand’s method of internalizing the world to
the point where it becomes a separate written reality for
the speaker in the poem.]
The point of such poems as this is to strip away the outer world
so as to make the subject of poetry the act of perception in the
mind, the creation of the poem on the page. At a slightly later
stage in the development of this type of poetry (in which the
theme is the method, the method the theme) the version of
reality created on the page can come back and determine the
course of reality in the world. Which is precisely what happens
in “The Story of Our Lives,” where the action of the poem is
defined early: “We are reading the story of our lives / which takes
place in a room.” Mark Strand is, in many ways, a latter-day
symbolist, though his system is neither elaborate nor especially
consistent. Of the significance of one image, however, we can be
relatively sure—when he sets a poem in “a room,” he means that
room to stand for the mental world, as becomes clear later in this
poem: “It is almost as if the room were the world. / We sit beside
each other on the couch, / reading about the couch. / We say it
is ideal. / It is ideal.” To think something in this poem is to write
it; and to think it or to write it is to make it part of reality, an
event in the world or the room. Thus, “We are reading the story
of our lives / as though we were in it, / as though we had written
it.” Precisely. And in the final stage: “This morning I woke and
believed / there was no more to our lives / than the story of our
lives. / When you disagreed, I pointed / to the place in the book
where you disagreed.”
—Peter Stitt. “Stages of Reality: The Mind/Body Problem in
Contemporary Poetry.” The Georgia Review 37: 1 (Spring 1983):
201–210.
JOHN BENSKO ON THE AGENCY OF ART IN
REFLEXIVE NARRATION
[ J ohn Bensko is an Assistant Professor of English at the
University of Memphis. He is the author of three books
25
of poetry and his fiction has appeared in Quarterly West
and The Georgia Review, among other journals. Here, he
examines the way in which reflexive narration creates for
art the power of agency of the lives of the characters in
the poem.]
The structure of narrative, therefore, has within it an
unsynthesizable analog of the relationship between man and his
experience. But narrative realism tries to give the illusion of the
unchangeable primacy of the fabula, and this limits the poet and
the reader not just artistically, but philosophically and
psychologically as well. Reflexivity, on the other hand, allows the
poet to maintain the unsynthesizable quality of the relation
between art and reality and to explore the interchange. In Mark
Strand’s title poem from The Story of Our Lives (25–31), for
example, the narrator reads from a book which tells the story of
him and his wife:
In one of the chapters
I lean back and push the book aside
because the book says
it is what I am doing.
I lean back and begin to write about the book.
I write that I wish to move beyond the book,
beyond my life into another life.
I put the pen down.
The book says: He put the pen down
and turned and watched her reading
the part about herself falling in love.
The book is more accurate than we can imagine.
The title, “The Story of Our Lives,” suggests an autobiography,
but Strand inverts the common relationship of fabula to sjuzhet,
making the plot of the book control what is supposed to be the
preeminent reality of their lives. The “book” becomes the
embodiment of a truthfulness which exposes more of the reality
than the narrator wishes to know, and we wonder: is the art of the
book true to reality; or is it the result of an overly intense
confessional compulsion which has a mind of its own and is
creating the aesthetic pleasures of painful emotions? Has art, in
26
other words, become an agent on its own, transforming our lives,
mediating between the reality of our feelings and our awareness
of them in order to create forms and significances which are its
own, determined as much by the necessities of art as by those of
the human truth. One might say that such questions are farfetched, and that Strand is indulging needlessly in a fantasy; but
his poem confronts serious questions about the confessional
poetry of the recent decades: how often do the needs of art
dictate that the poet develop some area of suffering, and how
often does actual suffering result in art? Does writing about one’s
own life restrict that life or become a way of exploring and
broadening it? Speaking to his wife, the narrator says of the
book:
It describes your dependence on desire,
how the momentary disclosures
of purpose make you afraid.
The book describes more than it should.
It wants to divide us.
Strand projects a kind of aesthetic determinism which rules their
lives. At the end of the poem, the book’s narration takes over
from the human narrator, narrating its own story as well:
They sat beside each other on the couch.
They were determined to accept the truth.
Whatever it was they would accept it.
The book would have to be written
and would have to be read.
They are the book and they are
nothing else.
By merging the protagonists and the story of the protagonists,
the poem multiplies our perspectives on the experience, creating
aesthetic distance and also destroying that distance. The
reflexivity allows Strand to objectify psychological processes
which are artistic but also are intimately connected with our
lives. Because the reflexive narration breaks up the experience
and reflects the perspectives of subject and subject-as-artifice on
each other, it expands the poetic space of the narrational surface.
27
The fabula-sjuzhet division becomes much more than a structural
device for critics; it is the embodiment of the complex, diverging,
and yet inseparable elements of the determinism of natural
events, the human will, and the imagination.
—John Bensko. “Reflexive Narration in Contemporary American
Poetry.” The Journal of Narrative Theory 16:2 (Spring 1986): pp.
81–96.
DAVID KIRBY ON DEALING WITH THE IDEAL STATE
[David Kirby, author or co-author of over twenty books,
is the W. Guy McKenzie Professor of English at Florida
State University. Recipient of five Florida State Teaching
Awards, he has had work appear in the Best American
Poetry and the Pushcart Prize series. Here, Kirby
discusses Strand’s discomfort with the ideal state and the
way in which it ultimately helps to prefigure his work in
The Monument.]
Strand’s speakers’ desire for self-effacement reaches a peak of
seriousness in The Story of Our Lives, and that seriousness is
announced by a change in style. In the words of the dust jacket,
the poems collected here are “longer [in fact, there are only
seven of them], more mysterious, more engrossing” than Strand’s
earlier work. One might add “more strenuous” to that list of
adjectives; the reader of these poems really gets a sense of Jacob
wrestling with the angel. The title work, for example, is in seven
parts and deals almost claustrophobically with two people
struggling both to live their lives and to read about them in a
putative book that already seems to have been completed.
For example, in part 1 of “The Story of Our Lives” it is
observed that “we sit beside each other on the couch, / reading
about the couch,” and not only do “we say it is ideal” but in fact
“it is ideal” in the book the couple is reading. The ideal state is
not necessarily a comfortable one in Strand’s poetry, though; it is
perhaps too substantive in a world in which the material is
downplayed. As in earlier work, the atmosphere of the poem is
28
soundless, almost motionless (except for the turning of the
pages), and progressively darker. The room in which the action
takes place is almost a world unto itself, and indeed “it is almost
as if the room were the world” (97). The word room will have
greater significance in other poems in this collection, but for the
moment it is enough to say that it delimits the action by
providing a barrier between the couple and a noisy world outside
and also, on the strength of its soothing quietness, encourages
the couple to keep their own egos in check.
In part 2 of “The Story of Our Lives,” the man tries to push
past the ideal state not only by living his life and reading about it
but also by writing:
I lean back and begin to write about the book.
I write that I wish to move beyond the book,
beyond my life into another life.
This makes sense: it turns out that the book the couple is reading
is a bad book because it looks too far ahead and tells too much.
For example, it says that the woman will fall in love with the man
across the street and that the speaker will grow old without her.
Glimmerings of Strand’s early theme of the divided self are
present here. When the speaker says, “The book describes much
more than it should. / It wants to divide us,” the reader knows
not only that the couple may be separated but also that their
individual selves are in danger (98).
These feelings turn out to be prophetic. Part 3 has the speaker
rereading the “mysterious parts” of the book, especially the early
ones that leave him feeling as though he’s “dreaming of
childhood.” Having lost his focus on the here and now, the
speaker feels (and reads that he’s feeling) a sensation similar to
that described in “Sleeping with One Eye Open” for example, or
in “The Accident” and “The Man in the Mirror” (Reasons). The
book-within-the-poem says:
A bleak crown rested uneasily on his head.
He was the brief ruler of inner and outer discord,
anxious in his own kingdom.
(99)
29
As he confirms the horrible news of his own anxiety, the speaker
is waiting for the woman to awake. In part 4, she seems to him to
be secure, protected rather than vulnerable, and he is “moved by
a desire to offer myself / to the house of your sleep.” (As an
objectification of things solid and unchanging as opposed to
things ephemeral and unreliable, house is used here as room will
be used in several other poems.) The more he watches her and
the less he reads, the more it seems as though there will be a
breakthrough into a higher state of happy calm. If he knows this,
of course, then so will the book; so that when the speaker
confesses, “I was tired and wanted to give up,” he also says, “the
book seemed aware of this. / It hinted at changing the subject”
(100).
And that is the problem: the couple are followed everywhere
by the book, and they will never lose their self-consciousness as
long as the book masters their lives. It is worse than a mirror,
which merely reflects, as the images in the book preexist and
cause anxiety by announcing limits that cannot be transcended.
Part 5 deals with the paradox of longing for perfection, which
of course cannot exist, since the anxiety of longing prevents the
attainment of any perfect state. We know from earlier Strand
poems that the perfect state is immaterial, unselfconscious,
transcendent, but how can that state be reflected in the book,
which is material, self-conscious to the extreme, and imminently
mundane? No wonder the speaker observes ruefully, “if there
were a perfect moment in the book, / it would be the last” (101).
If the story of their lives ends, then so will their lives, and no
Strand speaker to date, regardless of the depth of his despair, has
expressed an interest in so ultimate a solution.
Clearly, it is lives that are important, not stories of lives. The
book is the story of the couple’s lives, and that is what is wrong:
in part 6 they read, “it was words that created divisions in the first
place, / that created loneliness.” The couple need to stop
narrating—more precisely, they need to stop being narrated to—
and start living. As it is, all they are doing is proving that
consciousness is a terrible thing.
30
The escape that seemed possible for this unlucky pair in part
4 of “The Story of Our Lives” never takes place. Struggle as they
may, they cannot get away from the Möbius strip of selfconsciousness that seems an inescapable aspect of the modern
condition:
You are asking me if I am tired,
if I want to keep reading.
Yes, I am tired.
Yes, I want to keep reading.
I say yes to everything.
In the final part of the poem, the people end as simulacra of
themselves, “the copies, the tired phantoms / of something they had
been before.” The book has the last word about the people and
about itself: “They are the book and they are nothing else” (102–3).
Thomas Jefferson described himself as having a canine
appetite for reading; here is a poem that turns that eighteenthcentury notion on its head and has a book eating people. Perhaps
this is the revenge of the written word: a Strand speaker was able
to devour some poems in “Eating Poetry” (Reasons), but an entire
book is too much for this couple to fend off, no matter how
strenuously they resist. From librarians to advertisers, everyone
offers us books as an unqualified good. But this poem seems to
be saying that the wrong book can be, not merely deadly boring,
but deadly.
If it is so dangerous for us to tell ourselves our own stories,
perhaps a more healthful activity is suggested in the title of a
poem called “The Untelling.” Indeed, if “The Story of Our
Lives” is an account of a long, losing battle against fatal selfconsciousness, “The Untelling” is an account of an equally long
but successful struggle. First, though, it will be helpful to look at
three shorter poems that provide some vocabulary important to
a reading of “The Untelling.”
—David Kirby. “And Then I Thought of The Monument.” Mark
Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary Culture. (Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press. 1990): pp. 28–31.
31
SVEN BIRKERTS ON THE LACK OF TELOS IN
STRAND’S POETRY
[Sven Birkerts is the director of students and core faculty
writing instructor in Bennington College’s MFA
Program and an instructor in Emerson College’s MFA
Program. He is a prolific and respected critic/reviewer
and the author of The Gutenberg Elegies. He received a
National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in
Reviewing, among other awards. In this review, he
discusses the lack of a telos and the tension that absence
creates within the collection. ]
...[W]e also find the long tour-de-force narratives “The Story of
Our Lives” and “The Untelling,” both of which pit narration
against itself, showing how the memory tape can be played
backward, undoing the causal chain until, as Eliot wrote, “What
might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is
always present.” In Strand’s version, the real and the possible
commingle in the perpetual present of art. He ends “The
Untelling,” a sequence in which the speaker is a writer wrestling
with what might be either a memory or an imagined event, by
putting the tail inside the snake’s mouth; the writer begins the
poem that we have, presumably, been reading. We read:
He turned and walked to the house.
He went to the room
that looked out on the lawn.
He sat and began to write:
THE UNTELLING
To the Woman in the Yellow Dress
While the conceit of these longer poems is interesting, the lineby-line progress is often tedious, without much to savor in the
poetry itself.
—Sven Birkerts. “The Art of Absence” The New Republic 3, 961
(December 17, 1990): pp. 37.
32
C R I T I C A L A N A LY S I S O F
“The Way It Is”
Wallace Stevens epigraph “The world is ugly. / And the people
are sad.” perfectly begins the very dark view of Strand’s fear
ravaged speaker. In this poem, suburbia becomes a nightmarish
hell where neighbors act as birds of prey and the potential for
violence sleeps one house over. Strand chose the poem to end his
third book of poems. With its longer narrative structure and
broadened concern with the public domain, it marks a change in
Strand from the self-referential to the socially aware. The
nightmare is no longer solely in the poet’s head. It has come to
the neighborhood to roost.
The title suggests a proclamation—a definitive fact that will
clearly define life for the reader. The definition disheartens. The
poem begins with the speaker spending a sleepless night. In stark
contrast to the speaker, the things around him are “cold
unruffled” as he stews through the evening. Immediately, despite
the neatness of the couplets that end the first stanza, we know
that something is awry. In the next apartment, the speaker’s
neighbor becomes a menace. Strand keeps the words and the
image militaristic and threatening:
My neighbor marches in his room,
wearing the sleek
mask of a hawk with a large beak.
He stands by the window. A violet plume
rises from his helmet’s dome.
The neighbor marches, dons a helmet, and wears a mask of a
hawk—symbols of ferocity, war and hunting. In the light of the
open window, the neighbor is bathed in a white light from the
moon, and his plume is violet, a traditional color of power. This
threat lives next door to the speaker, creating an atmosphere of
continual pending warfare.
That sense of danger is strangely intensified in the next stanza.
33
The neighbor sits in the park with his helmet, ready to go into
battle, to begin his hunt. In his hand, he waves a little American
flag as if to suggest that his aggression is for country, is the way
of the country, a national pastime of warmongering, perpetual
suburban defense. The neighbor is stealthy, according to the
speaker, who cannot contain his fear. At any moment, the speaker
expects violence to be enacted upon him. To protect himself, the
speaker sinks into denial, pretending to be a dog under the table,
convincing himself that were he a dog, and not a human, he
would not be killed. In his America, people are killed before
animals, focusing on the perversion of values in America.
As the speaker rests, delusional beneath the table, his
neighbor’s wife comes home. She controls her husband through
sex. All descriptions of her are dark, suggesting some sort of
complicity, “She seems to wade / through long flat rivers of
shade. / The soles of her feet are black. / She kisses her husband’s
neck / and puts her hand inside his pants. //” She too may be as
predatory as her husband, but her conquest is not death, it is
sexual submission. The speaker seems to fear her as well. After
the woman’s sexual invitation, the couple has sexual relations,
and she becomes the devil, the act, evil. He describes it “They
roll on the floor, his tongue / is in her ear, his lungs reek with the
swill and weather of hell.”
But the evil is happening not only within the apartment
building. It surrounds the speaker on every side. The scene on
the streets is apocalyptic, harkening back to the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse and images of the Holocaust. People lie on
their backs in the street, weeping as ash settles around them.
“Their clothes are torn from their backs. Their faces are worn. /
Horsemen are riding around them, telling them why / they
should die.” The scene is unutterable despair, articulated simply,
with the sort of psychic distance reminiscent of dreams.
In the next stanza, Strand returns to his speaker, who is still
tossing restlessly in his imperturbable bed. The wife tells him
that her husband is dead. The ambiguity here is devastating.
Perhaps the wife killed the husband. Perhaps she did it for the
speaker. Perhaps she is the carrier of the strange, “sleek” bird
mask. As to whether she is more or less evil, we never know. The
34
speaker accepts all the possibilities with little interest, glad only
that the immediate threat is gone. He prays she is telling the
truth, that he may be released from his paralyzing fear and
insomnia. Around him the room is gray from the light of the
moon and he drifts into a restless sleep with strange, portentous
dreams.
As the speaker sleeps, he dreams that he is floating, then
falling and incapable of calling for help. Even his scream is
“vague.” The speaker cannot even collect himself for that. In the
next dream, he envisions himself in a park, “on horseback,
surrounded by dark, / leading the armies of peace.” This dream
speaks to Robert Lowell’s poem, “For the Union Dead.” Union
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts
Volunteer Regiment lead the first black regiment gathered in the
North into battle, and as Lowell imagines it “…He rejoices in
man’s lovely, / peculiar power to choose life and die— / when he
leads his black soldiers to death, / he cannot bend his back.”
When he died with his men in battle, Southern officers ordered
his body to be thrown into a ditch with his men, and never
marked to show how disgraceful they thought his actions. In
Strand’s poem, though the speaker tries to lead the armies of
peace, his horse’s legs will not bend; this horse and this man are
monuments that represent little in actual lives. The horse is
merely a facsimile of a horse as the speaker’s courage is merely a
facsimile of Shaw’s courage. Unlike Shaw, the speaker drops the
reigns, defeated as if to suggest that heroes can no longer exist in
this nightmarish America.
All around the speaker, the normal sounds of the night
continue. “Taxis stall / in the fog, passengers fall / asleep. Gas
pours // from a tri-colored stack.” Strand breaks his lines to
emphasize the action: falling, stalling, pouring. The negativity
pervades the entire scene, as things seem to happen
uncontrollably. To combat the helplessness, people tell
themselves stories again and again, trying to recreate their lives
into something acceptable that is lived and chosen. Thematically,
the poem speaks strongly to the couple in “The Story of Our
Lives,” who lose even the ability to tell their own story. The
population is soulless. According to the speaker, “Everyone who
35
has sold himself wants to buy himself back.” Again, the feeling
here is resignation. Too much has happened for these people to
return to the lives they once envisioned for themselves. They
have been corrupted, and the corruption is marked by starkly
desperate imagery: “The night / eats into their limbs / like a
blight.”
The final stanza reaches a peak of despair and Strand expresses
it quietly. “Everything dims. / The future is not what it used to
be. / The graves are ready. The dead / shall inherit the dead.” As
the world darkens, and it is uncertain as to why it is so dark,
Strand does not try to account for causality specifically, he
merely claims that “the future is not what it used to be.” Instead,
the future leaves the people within it to become deadened or
predatory or terribly afraid. They are among the emotionally
dead, the untouchables who would kill a human before a dog,
who would circle people, tearing at them and telling them why
they are not worthy of life, or even those that huddle in their
rooms and dream of fighting this vague evil but are defeated by
their own thoughts before they even begin the battle. Ultimately,
the meek shall not inherit the earth. The picture is much
bleaker—hell on earth, where the dead inherit the already
emotionally dead.
36
CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“The Way It Is”
RICHARD HOWARD ON THE POET’S MOVEMENT FROM
INTERIOR DREAMSCAPE TO PUBLIC PLACE
[Richard Howard teaches in the Writing Division of the
School of the Arts, Columbia University. He is the
author of eleven books of poetry, a gifted translator and
a respected essayist on contemporary poetry. In this
essay, Howard examines Strand’s shift from an interior,
self reflective, mirror-like landscape to the dramatic
broadening of perspective in “The Way It Is.”]
Strand’s work since Reasons for Moving widens his scope, even as
it sharpens his focus; just as he had divided his body against itself
in order to discover an identity, he now identifies the body politic
with his own In order to recover a division; in a series of political
prospects, “Our Death,” “From a Litany,” “General,” and finest
of all, “The Way It Is,” the poet conjugates the nightmares of
Fortress America with his own stunned mortality to produce an
apocalypse of disordered devotion:
Everyone who has sold himself wants to buy himself back.
Nothing is done. The night
eats into their limbs
like a blight.
Everything dims.
The future is not what it used to be.
The graves are ready. The dead
shall inherit the dead.
But what gives these public accents of Strand’s their apprehensive
relevance is not just a shrewd selection of details (“My neighbor
marches in his room, / wearing the sleek / mask of a hawk with a
large beak ... His helmet in a shopping bag, / he sits in the park,
waving a small American flag”), nor any cosy contrast of the
poet’s intimeries against a gaining outer darkness (“Slowly I dance
out of the burning house of my head. / And who isn’t borne again
37
and again into heaven?”). Rather it is the sense that public and
private degradation, outer and inner weather, tropic and glacial
decors (Saint Thomas and Prince Edward Islands, in fact) are all
versions and visions of what Coleridge called the One Life, and
that the whole of nature and society are no more than the
churning content of a single and limitless human body—the
poet’s own. Such a sense—and in Strand it occupies all the senses
(“the flesh of clouds burns / in the long corridors of sunlight. / I
have changed. No one’s death surprises me”)—enables the poet
to include much more life in these later poems of his; to invoke
the wars of filiation, marriage and paternity; to explore the ennui
of mere survival:
Must we settle for a routine happiness?
Tell me something rotten about yourself.
Tell me you’ve been to the doctor and he says
I am going to die. Save me!
and to endure the depredations of the past, the claims of merely
having been:
Time tells me what I am. I change and am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.
—Richard Howard. “Mark Strand: ‘The Mirror Was Nothing
Without You.’ ” Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the
United States Since 1950, Enlarged Edition (New York, Atheneum:
1980): pp. 596–597.
HAROLD BLOOM ON THE POEM AS REPRESENTATIVE OF
A SHIFT IN STRAND’S POETICS
[Harold Bloom is the Sterling Professor of Humanities
at Yale University. He is a prolific and influential critic
and the author of the renowned Anxiety of Influence and
The Western Canon. In this essay, Bloom engages Strand’s
shift from his peripheral private phantasmagoria to a
public phantasmagoria.]
38
Strand’s unique achievement is to raise this mode to an aesthetic
dignity that astonishes me, for I would not have believed, before
reading him, that it could be made to touch upon a sublimity.
Darker moves upon the heights in its final poems, “Not Dying”
and the longer “The Way It Is,” the first work in which Strand
ventures out from his eye’s first circle, toward a larger art. “Not
Dying” opens in narcist desperation, and reaches no resolution,
but its passion for survival is prodigiously convincing. “I am
driven by innocence,” the poet protests, even as like a Beckett
creature he crawls from bed to chair and back again, until he
finds the obduracy to proclaim a grotesque version of natural
supernaturalism:
I shall not die.
The grave result
and token of birth, my body
remembers and holds fast.
“The Way It Is” takes its tone from Stevens at his darkest
(“The world is ugly / And the people are sad”) and quietly edges
out a private phantasmagoria until this merges with the public
phantasmagoria we all of us now inhabit. The consequence is a
poem more surprising and profound than Lowell’s justly
celebrated “For the Union Dead,” a juxtaposition made
unavoidable by Strand’s audacity in appropriating the same
visionary area:
I see myself in the park
on horseback, surrounded by dark,
leading the armies of peace.
The iron legs of the horse do not bend.
I drop the reins. Where will the turmoil end?
Fleets of taxis stall in the fog, passengers fall
asleep. Gas pours
from a tri-colored stack.
Locking their doors,
people from offices huddle together,
telling the same story over and over.
39
Everyone who has sold himself wants to buy himself back.
Nothing is done. The night
eats into their limbs
like a blight.
Everything dims.
The future is not what it used to be.
The graves are ready. The dead
shall inherit the dead.
Self-trained to a private universe of irreality, where he has
learned the gnomic wisdom of the deep tautology, Strand peers
out into the anxieties of the public world, to show again what can
be shown, the shallow tautologies of a universal hysteria, as much
a hysteria of protest as of societal repression. Wherever his
poetry will go after Darker, we can be confident it goes as a
perfected instrument, able to render an image not of any created
thing whatsoever, but of every nightmare we live these days,
separately or together.
—Harold Bloom. “Dark and Radiant Peripheries: Mark Strand
and A. R. Ammons,” Southern Review (Winter 1972): pp. 133–41.
PETER STITT ON THE POEM AS AN ATTEMPT TO
DEFINE THE WORLD
[Peter Stitt is the Editor of The Gettysburg Review and a
full Professor of English at Gettysburg College. He is a
prolific reviewer and the author of Uncertainty and
Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets and The World’s
Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets. In this review, he
examines the alienation of early Strand speakers based
on their perceptions of reality.]
A partial explanation for this intense sense of alienation may be
found in how this early speaker characterizes reality. It is perhaps
his paranoia that makes him emphasize so strongly the dangers
that lurk there. Injury and illness are among these but most
important is the fact of death, the ultimate assault of nature
40
against the self. The poem “Violent Storm” expresses much of
this feeling by talking about the dangers inherent in bad weather.
Superficial people may be able to party as the hurricane bears
down upon the coast, it is true,
But for us, the wide-awake, who tend
To believe the worst is always waiting
Around the next corner or hiding in the dry,
Unsteady branch of a sick tree, debating
Whether or not to fell the passerby,
It has a sinister air.
This central consciousness is also fastidious, apparently finding
much of the real world ugly—certainly much uglier than the
“bright landscapes” he concocts in his own head. The poem
“The Way It Is” is an attempt to define the general appearance
and nature of the world, with its epigraph taken from Stevens
(“The world is ugly. / And the people are sad.”) and its direct
concluding stanza: “Everything dims. / The future is not what it
used to be. / The graves are ready. The dead / shall inherit the
dead.”
So deeply does the speaker feel the ugliness of reality, its
power to render death and destruction upon him, that he
attempts to retreat farther and farther from it. Through his
death-consciousness, he diminishes the world until it virtually
disappears into nothingness: “I grow into my death. / My life is
small / and getting smaller. The world is green. / Nothing is all.”
Another poem expresses the same desire paradoxically: “More is
less. / I long for more.” The closer reality draws to nothingness,
the greater looms the power of the mind and the world it creates
for itself. This movement gives rise to two of the most important
issues in Strand’s early poetry—the question of identity and the
question of knowledge. How is man to be defined if he is this
radically alien to nature? And what can such a man know of a
world so foreign to him?
—Peter Stitt. “Stages of Reality: The Mind/Body Problem in
Contemporary Poetry” The Georgia Review 37: 1 (Spring 1983):
pp. 202.
41
C R I T I C A L A N A LY S I S O F
“Elegy for My Father”
“Elegy for My Father” is one of Strand’s most striking poems, for
the power of its litany, for the presence of the usually distant
poet, and for its foreshadowing of later poems, like Dark Harbor.
Strand places readers immediately into his psyche by providing
the dates of his father’s life. This notion clearly states that unlike
other poems, this speaker will be Mark Strand, a son trying to
reconcile the loss of his father and by extension, a part of himself.
The first of the poem’s six sections is entitled “The Empty
Body,” suggesting a certain level of psychic distance brought
about presumably from the shock of seeing his father’s dead
body. Throughout the section, Strand sets up the dichotomy of
all that is in the world and in the room, the father’s hands, his
arms, his mouth, “the distant sun,” “the pale green light of
winter”; all were there save his father. He repeats the line over
and over “you were not there,” it becomes a litany of grief, a way
in which the living son tries to accept his new reality by stating
and re-stating what he sees to be true but can hardly believe. By
calling to the father in the second person, there is still the
suggestion of a connection, as if the reader believes he can still
speak with the dead and find some sort of closure in that way.
In an attempt to gather the answers he feels he needs as a son,
the poet directs questions to his father, questions that are at first
flippant, then serious. The first answers suggest what one might
tell a child, as the poet asks questions of his father with the same
sort of vulnerability a child might show. “What did you wear? / I
wore a blue suit, a white shirt, yellow tie, and yellow socks. / What did
you wear? / I wore nothing. A scarf of pain kept me warm.” In this
way, the son tries to collect answers to questions that are so
emotional and clouded by memory that they are hard to
articulate. By the end of the section, the father becomes so
exhausted he can no longer answer the questions; he can only
repeat them back in affirmation to his son. The section gains
much of its power because it is so reminiscent of Strand himself.
The father’s answers which initially joke also ultimately lead to a
42
larger truth, one in which the son has absolute faith. They
suggest a gnosis for Strand’s central themes and poetic discourse.
The third section, “Your Dying,” is the longest and most
agonized, appropriately so to mirror the struggle of the family
waiting for the father’s body to yield to what his spirit had already
accepted. Throughout this section, the poet blames his father for
his seeming determination to die. He begins the section
“Nothing could stop you. / Not the best day. Not the quiet. Not
the ocean rocking. / You went on with your dying.” Strand
creates a litany, naming meticulously all the things that formerly
brought joy but could no longer touch the father. The pace picks
up, moved by short phrases and parallel constructions. The effect
is accusatory and furious. Strand repeats the claim that neither
the father’s son (Strand himself) nor his daughter could stop him,
and the betrayal and hurt evident in the statement is devastating,
particularly as the poet tries by referring himself in the third
person, as the son, to distance himself from the pain. That
struggle provides tension, giving the section a breathless feeling.
In the end of the section, nothing can bring the father back, “Not
your breathing. Not your life. / Not the life you wanted. / Not
the life you had. / Nothing could stop you.” The last lines show
that neither memory nor hope has hold of the father now; he is
irretrievable and the son cannot yet reconcile the loss.
By the fourth section, “Your Shadow,” the shadow is all that
remains of the father. It becomes the inheritance of the son who
chronicles its movement through the past. It travels from “The
Newsboys Home,” “The streets of New York,” “the street of
Montreal,” “Mexico City where you wanted to leave it.” The son
effortlessly relates the details of his father’s past, showing his
investment in the details. In some way, they have been his
formative details as well; in following the path of his father’s life,
even metaphorically, the poet becomes even more intimately
acquainted with the reality of his father’s dying and what that loss
truly is, from memory to corporeal reality. The poet/son retraces
his father’s steps, gathering his father’s past. He uses the
metaphor of reclaiming the lost shadow from all the places it had
been with the father. After the elder Strand died, the shadow was
left behind to mourn his death. Strand imagines it sleeping “at
43
the mouth of the furnace” waiting for the father and eating
“ashes for bread.” It eventually finds its way to Strand’s home
when it cannot find the father. It settles around the son, as if
finding a second home. For Strand, it is not enough to be second
hand, to be somehow the same as his father and yet other. He
chooses instead to send the shadow away. “Your shadow is yours.
I told it so. I said it was yours. / I have carried it with me too long.
I give it back.” In this final act, the son is emancipated from the
father, living on his on terms after being haunted by the father
and the father’s past. It frees him to grieve and move on.
With this new understanding, Strand finds himself watching
the other mourners with a certain impersonal distance. The fury
has subsided a little, and now Strand is ready to relate the
immediate scene, moving from his own mourning to that of
those around him. Their mourning borders on hysteria. They
mourn him by recreating him, in memory, in his last set of
clothes, in the money that will get him into heaven or out of hell,
with the prayers they send forth, with the begging they do at his
bedside. There is no way to reach the dying man.
But they cannot drag the buried light from your veins.
They cannot reach your dreams.
Old man, there is no way.
Rise and keep rising, it does no good.
They mourn for you the way they can.
Despite all of the machinations of the mourners, the pleas, the
hand wringing, the deals with God, the dead man is gone. Strand
has already released him in a way that the others cannot.
In the sixth section, the New Year has come and with it, both
the metaphors of death and rebirth that already pervade the
poem. The imagery of this section only serves to reinforce that
notion. In this winter scape, the poet tells his father, “Nobody
knows you.” The father is truly gone. He lies under “the weather
of stones,” acted upon and inanimate. It is a place without escape,
totally irrevocable, a realization that the poet has been coming to
throughout the poem. His father’s friends lie in their beds,
pleasantly enjoying sleep, its physical reality, and think nothing
of the dead man. The father sees nothing now; this lack of sight
44
and the knowledge it brings is one more form of death. The poet
repeats his opening line, as if to confirm once more that “It is
over. It is the winter and the new year.” The repetition suggests
a new setting, a new time, a new mindset. It is a walking away
from the past and the power of the father’s memory. The poet
acknowledges finally “And nothing comes back. / Because it is
over. / Because there is silence instead of a name. / Because it is
winter and the new year.” The litany becomes all the reasons that
Strand is moving on, and provide all of the apology necessary for
invoking the dead again. The litany creates a cycle that mirrors
that of death and rebirth, powerfully reinforcing the themes
carved out over the course of six sections.
45
CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“Elegy for My Father”
LAURENCE LIEBERMAN ON THE USE OF LITANY
[Laurence Lieberman is the author of twelve volumes of
poetry and three books of critical essays. He is on the
faculty in the University of Illinois MFA program and
has been the poetry editor at the University of Illinois
Press since 1971. In this essay, Lieberman asserts that
the use of litany creates a dirge that heightens the
profundity of the mourning in the poem.]
In “Elegy for My Father,” the stately, slow-paced, hypnotic dirge
that begins the new volume, Strand amplifies the serial mode of
litany. Exhibiting a remarkable range of technical virtuosity, he
adapts the device of image chains to six widely varying fantasias.
In each, a simple statement—flat and blunt—is repeated at
irregular intervals, and operates less like a conventional refrain
than an aria or leitmotiv in an opera. The statement tends to
fade, to become hidden, vanishing into a chanted monotony, but
it subtly builds resonance in the reader’s ear and accumulates a
force of quiet, but irreversible, authority. “Nothing could stop
you. You went on with your dying.”
In “Your Dying,” the midsection of the poem, the father’s
unswerving complicity in his progress toward death exalts the
process of welcoming death into an austere discipline, an artistry
that by its propulsive force of negation, by its revulsion from
nature and human society, sends all things into orbit around
itself. He achieves an absolute solipsism of dying, which is
mirrored by the son’s solipsism of mourning. The total psychic
withdrawal from life, paradoxically, adds a dimension to being
alive, a deepening and heightening of spirit, which threatens the
comfortable world of the living, the friends and neighbors who
“doze in the dark / of pleasure and cannot remember.” The living
are shocked into a panic of opposition—they are wavery,
unstable, flighty, aimless. The act of dying easily imposes its
46
higher will and design on the chaos of life, its deathly order on
the disorder that is prevalent everywhere.
The whole book is a profound act of mourning; hence, the
aptly grotesque irony of the fifth section of the elegy, titled
“Mourning,” a Kafkaesque caricature of conventional funerals in
which the mourning process, so indispensable to healing the
psychic wounds of bereavement, is debased and betrayed by selfpity. The common blind refusal to accept death is parodied as a
procession of beggarly kin pleading with the corpse to come back
to life, perverting the funeral rites into a litany of gamy ruses to
pamper and coddle him into not dying, as if a complex
gymnastics of undying could undo the death:
They mourn for you.
When you rise at midnight ...
They sit you down and teach you to breathe.
And your breath burns,
It burns the pine box and the ashes fall like sunlight.
They give you a book and tell you to read.
They listen and their eyes fill with tears.
The women stroke your fingers.
They comb the yellow back into your hair.
They shave the frost from your beard.
They knead your thighs.
They dress you in fine clothes.
They rub your hands to keep them warm.
They feed you. They offer you money.
They get on their knees and beg you not to die.
When you rise at midnight they mourn for you.
They close their eyes and whisper your name over and over.
But they cannot drag the buried light from your veins.
They cannot reach your dreams.
So far from resisting, or denying, the reality of his father’s
death, Strand’s own mode of mourning is to follow his father into
dying, taking as many steps down the path toward death as
possible short of dying himself, and though this process
culminates in a valiant entreaty invoking the invisible powers for
release from the bondage to his father’s corpse (“It came to my
house. / It sat on my shoulders. / Your shadow is yours. I told it
47
so. I said it was yours. / I have carried it with me too long. I give
it back.”), it is clear from the other poems of the present volume
that the elegy is only the first milestone in an interior odyssey in
which he follows a long, intricate course in developing a new
poetics that recapitulates his vision of his father’s dying. Strand is
obsessed, in poem after poem, with absence, vanishings,
disappearance of parts of his own psyche. The opening litany of
the elegy, “The Empty Body,” suggests that the author’s
obsession with disappearance grew initially out of the shock of
witnessing his father’s dead body. He could not fathom or accept
the emptiness—the spiritual evacuation—of the corpse:
The hands were yours, the arms were yours,
But you were not there.
The eyes were yours, but they were closed and would not open....
The body was yours, but you were not there.
The air shivered against its skin.
The dark leaned into its eyes.
But you were not there.
—Laurence Lieberman. “Mark Strand: The Book of Mourning.”
Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets
(Columbia and London, University of Missouri Press: 1995): pp.
220–222. Originally appeared in The Yale Review, 1968.
RICHARD HOWARD ON THE POEM AS AN AFFIRMATION
OF LIFE
[Richard Howard teaches in the Writing Division of the
School of the Arts, Columbia University. He is the
author of eleven books of poetry, a gifted translator and
a respected essayist on contemporary poetry. In this
essay, Howard examines the way in which Strand’s
insistent refusal of his father’s shadow, coupled with the
insistence of the poetic structure, ultimately affirms
process rather than stagnation.]
One more celebration of an empty place, this elegy is an
emblematic trajectory, a six-poem acknowledgment of the
48
necessity to put off knowledge, to deny, to refuse, to gainsay:
“There were no secrets. There was nothing to say.” Strand
insists, or broods, which is his brand of insistence, on the
importance, for individual survival (“they cannot reach your
dreams”), of rejecting that extremity of consciousness which
process, which historical existence, cannot endure or transcend.
Sometimes—later on in the book—he is wistful about such
ecstatic apprehensions (“If only there were a perfect moment ...
if only we could live in that moment”), but he is quite certain that
they are not available to him, that they are not within life, as
indeed the sense of the word ecstasy makes evident they are not.
So Strand divides to conquer, divides the self to conquer the self
(“you are the neighbor of nothing”), for the price of experience,
experience which Blake has told us cannot be bought for a song,
is negation.
Which is why Strand writes his lament not in verse but in the
very dialect of negation, in prose, the one linguistic medium out
to eliminate itself, to use itself up in the irrecoverable rhythms of
speech rather than in the angelic (or ecstatic) measures of
repetition and return. No recurrence, no refrain here, but the
horror of knowing too much, of suffering more than is to be
borne: “I have carried it with me too long, I give it back,” Strand
says to his father’s “shadow”, that Blakean spector of the mortal
body which is life without time, or death within eternity where
“there is silence instead of a name.” For once we accept, once we
put on the consciousness of others, Strand implies, we are lost.
Such an assumption is a “rejoicing among ruins,” a “crystal
among the tombs”; to say No to consciousness—
... to stand in a space is to
forget time, to forget time
is to forget death ...
is the one way of evincing and yet evading the horror: negation
is a mask which points to itself (as a mask), advancing. The prose
sentences of “Elegy for My Father” are for life in their refusal to
recuperate a rhythm, to reverse. They insist upon process, upon
the rudiments of narrative (“The beginning is about to occur.
The end is in sight”) which will get past those nodal points when
49
it all becomes so saturated with Being that life has nowhere to go
and so cannot go on. Strand’s poem is a way of outdistancing the
mind in its submission to consciousness—it is a discarding in
order to pick up the blank card, the next ... “that silence is the
extra page.”
—Richard Howard. “Mark Strand: ‘The Mirror Was Nothing
Without You.’” Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the
United States Since 1950, Enlarged Edition (New York, Atheneum:
1980): pp. 599–600. Originally appeared in the Ohio Review (1974).
DAVID KIRBY ON THE POEM AS LOSS OF SELF
[David Kirby, author or co-author of twenty-one books,
is the W. Guy McKenzie Professor of English at Florida
State University. Recipient of five Florida State Teaching
Awards, he has had work appear in the Best American
Poetry and the Pushcart Prize series. In this essay, he
posits the poem as a loss of self and the development of
a poetic voice that would ultimately result in The
Monument.]
Perhaps none of this would have been possible, though, had
Strand not written “Elegy for My Father (Robert Strand
1908–68).” This magnificent poem, one of the great elegies of
the English language, distinguishes itself from Lycidas and
Adonais and In Memoriam by being more a poem of dispersal than
they are, a poem of cleaning up and giving away. The loss of a
father is in part a loss of self for any man, provided he is able to
lose it. However, as one might expect from Strand at this point,
to lose that self takes effort.
“Elegy for My Father” consists of six parts. Part 1, “The
Empty Body,” is a fairly straightforward anatomy of the body’s
physical aspects in contrast to its departed spirit. “The hands
were yours, the arms were yours,” begins the poem, “But you
were not there.” There is no pain anymore, no secrets. The
world encroaches, but it can no longer trouble the dead man:
50
The body was yours, but you were not there.
The air shivered against its skin.
The dark leaned into its eyes.
But you were not there.
(85)
Part 2, “Answers,” is a dialogue in which each question (except
the last two) is asked twice and receives two answers, the first
literal and the second figurative; the first response is always true,
the second truer. For example, when the son asks the father
whom he slept with, the father says a different woman every
night, but when the question is repeated, the father says he
always slept alone—each of us sleeps this way, and none more so
than the libertine. In this section the father seems at first a cynic
(“nothing means much to me anymore”), then a skeptic (“I don’t
know, I have never known” [86]), and ultimately a stoic. Amid the
multiplicity of answers, the section concludes with an
unambiguous acknowledgment of death’s finality: when the son
asks how long he should wait for the father, the answer is that he
should not wait, that the father is tired and wants to lie down.
“Are you tired and do you want to lie down?” asks the son (86).
But the father is so exhausted by this point that he can only
repeat the question.
Silent now, the father begins the last stage of his dying. The
third part of the poem, “Dying,” is the longest, for death is never
easy. The father seems determined; the section begins, “Nothing
could stop you,” and the line is repeated throughout. In
elaboration of that statement, most of the other lines begin with
the word not: “Not your friends who gave you advice. / Not your
son. Not your daughter who watched you grow small.” Grief
spills like water here as the father himself wakes at night, wet
with tears, as the “son who thought you would live forever”
observes over and over, now in anguish, now numbly, “You went
on with your dying” (86–87).
The father’s effort over, the speaker must now make his own.
The father achieves a kind of completion in death; the divided
self that troubles so many others in Strand’s poetry comes
together here in part 4, entitled “The Shadow.” Still, the
51
surviving son must assist the departed father, just as the living
pray for or attend the dead in formally organized religions. Here,
the speaker catalogs each appearance of the father’s shadow and
the shadow’s return to its source:
The rooms in Belém where lizards would snap at mosquitos
have given it back.
The dark streets of Manaus and the damp streets of Rio have
given it back.
Mexico City where you wanted to leave it has given it back.
(88)
The most important place for the shadow to have lingered is in
the speaker’s own house, where “it sat on my shoulders.” But the
speaker must be his own man now. This section ends with the
speaker’s angry address, not to the father whom he loved, but to
the father’s shadowy partial self, the abstraction the dead become
when the living reduce them to terms that are manageable and
false:
Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours.
I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.
(89)
As in “The Untelling,” one succeeds here by failing: to never
write the poem is to write the best poem ever, and to reject a
limited version of a dead father is to have that father always in his
fullness. The two works also have in common the fact that the
speaker in each, while on the surface honoring something
exterior (a poem, a father), is secretly engaged in his own
salvation.
Among other things, “Elegy for My Father” is a poem
noticeable for its symmetry. The first two comparatively brief
sections introduce the father in body and spirit, the longer third
and fourth sections deal with the father’s hard-fought dying and
the son’s equally difficult struggle to both honor his father and
live his own life, and the two short, final sections describe the
public mourning for the father and the son’s private consolation.
52
In part 5, “Mourning,” those who knew the dead man simply
“mourn for you the way they can” (90). However, in the poem’s
last part, “The New Year,” there is genuine closure as the speaker
moves beyond the clichés of traditional mourning to make peace
on his own terms with the spirit of the departed parent, now “the
neighbor nothing.”
—David Kirby. “And Then I Thought of The Monument.” Mark
Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary Culture (Columbia and
London, University of Missouri Press: 1990): pp. 38–41.
SVEN BIRKERTS ON THE POEM’S INFLUENCES
[Sven Birkerts is the director of students and core faculty
writing instructor at Bennington College’s MFA
Program and an instructor in Emerson College’s MFA
Program. He is a prolific and respected critic/reviewer
and the author of The Gutenberg Elegies. He received a
National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in
Reviewing among other awards. In this review, he
discusses Strand’s treatment of absence through
borrowed style elements, taken from Spanish and South
American writers. ]
For Strand, it is thus: we have been hurled into being and there
is no immanent or transcendent ground for the self. Yet we
possess, in uneasy wakefulness, a capacity to perceive and to
reflect. This is our curse, for it cuts us off from the serene
unknowingness of the rest of the natural world. The traditional
recourse has been religion—to believe that we are not held
simply within ourselves, but, in some fashion, within the love (or
purpose) of a higher being. But there is no hint of this in Strand,
not anywhere. He has rigorously pruned from his lines anything
that could suggest a telos, or a redemption of pain and isolation.
His figures are at large in space; they move about in time—time
afflicts them—but they never progress to anything. (...)
With the publication in 1973 of The Story of Our Lives, Strand
made what was for him a significant departure, leaving behind
53
the short poems, so distinctive in their polished austerity, to
explore the rhetorical and narrative possibilities of the long
poem. The book opens with the powerful “Elegy for My Father,”
a poem in six sections. Strand’s lines are loose, often repetitive,
but they press at their subject with a mounting urgency. In the
absence of any argument or metaphysics, the sheer perseverance
of address is impressive. Strand succeeds by varying the pitch and
approach, moving from the affectless pronouncements of the
first section:
The hands were yours, the arms were yours,
But you were not there.
The eyes were yours, but they were closed
and would not open.
to a more urgent reimagining of the process of dying in section
three:
You put your watch to your ear.
You felt yourself slipping.
You lay on the bed.
You folded your arms over your chest and
you dreamed of the world without you.
to the final section, which achieves an impersonal, even
elemental perspective, integrating the loss into the rhythm of
seasonal passage:
It is winter and the new year.
Nobody knows you.
Away from the stars, from the rain of light,
You lie under the weather of stones.
The elegy manifests rather overtly the influences of Spanish
and South American poets. Strand freely adopts the surreal
particularizations favored by Neruda and Vallejo (“The years, the
hours, that would not find you / Turned in the wrists of other.”)
and the recursive repetitions of Carlos Drummond de Andrade,
whom Strand has translated.
—Sven Birkerts. “The Art of Absence.” The New Republic 3, 961
(December 17, 1990): pp. 37.
54
EDWARD BYRNE ON THE POEM AS A PRECURSOR TO A
BLIZZARD OF ONE
[Edward Byrne is a Professor of American Literature and
creative writing at Valparaiso University. He is the
author of five volumes of poetry and the editor of
Valparaiso Poetry Review. In this essay, he considers the
poem as part of the poetic evolution that resulted in
Strand’s Pulitzer Prizing winning volume as well as his
later book of essays, The Weather of Words.]
The same concerns voiced in Blizzard of One were evident more
than a decade ago when readers encountered The Continuous Life
(1990): “When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and
the sky / Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of
cirrus / And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are
suspended in flight, / Not every man knows what is waiting for
him ...” (“The End”). Although death as “the central concern”
and the issue of scenes in a poet’s life being witnessed “as they
exist in passing” may be most clearly evident earlier in The Story
of Our Lives (1973), especially “Elegy for My Father” and “The
Untelling,” those compelling poems in memory of his parents
starting and concluding this important and influential volume
that appeared more than a quarter century ago:
It is winter and the new year.
Nobody knows you.
Away from the stars, from the rain of light,
You lie under the weather of stones.
[“Elegy for My Father”]
He leaned forward over the paper
and he wrote:
... They moved beyond the claims
of weather, beyond whatever news there was,
and did not see the dark beginning to deepen
in the trees and bushes, and rise in the folds
of their own dresses and in the stiff white
of their own shirts.
[“The Untelling”]
55
Here, as well as elsewhere in many of his poems, particularly
more recent works, Strand’s attention to suspended moments or
different measurements of time again recalls his earliest pleasure
of reading McLeish’s poem “both about time and in time.”
However, these poems also resemble Robert Penn Warren’s
repeated explorations of time, timelessness, and no-time,
especially in his later poetry—or as Warren would state it in
“There’s a Grandfather’s Clock in the Hall,” those moments
when “Time thrusts through the time of no-Time.” Though
perhaps not as strong as other influences, Warren’s distinctive
poetic figure is often present, lingering not far behind the lines
of Strand’s poetry, such as those in “The Garden” (The Late Hour,
1978), a poem dedicated to Warren, and one reminiscent of “The
Untelling”.
—Edward Byrne. “Weather Watch: Mark Strand’s The Weather of
Words.” Valparaiso Poetry Review: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
II: 2 (Spring/Summer 2001): www.valpo.edu/english/vprv2n2.html.
56
C R I T I C A L A N A LY S I S O F
“Dark Harbor”
Despite its portentous title, “ Dark Harbor” is a poem of redemption,
an act of reclamation through song and through a direct
confrontation with mortality. In typical Strand fashion, it is not
enough to casually imagine an afterlife; instead, he actively
constructs it, forcing both he and the reader to face a landscape
that may well be death, where reality is made exclusively by the
dead and for the dead. The living are too earnest in their every
day pursuits, assuming consequences that simply don’t exist in
this new world where death is not the ultimate consequence.
Strand begins the book length poem with a short prologue,
entitled, “Proem.” In it, the narration is third person,
presumably a poet, who chooses to leave behind his town and all
that he knows. As he journeys: “he would move his arms // And
begin to mark, almost as a painter would, / The passages of
greater and lesser worth, the silken / Topes and calls to this or
that, coarsely conceived….” The poet is being posited as painter,
his search for detail and symbols a part of his work; and as he
walks away, he finally finds himself able to breathe. In this
uncharted landscape, he tells himself, “This is the life.” In the
first section, the point of view shifts so that the “he” of the first
“proem” has become the “I” in the interior. The reader is to
believe the narrator has entered “the night without end” a
metaphor for death, the very thing that so many of Strand’s
earlier characters are trying to avoid. In this place, “it is best to
be ready, for the ash / Of the body is worthless and only goes so
far.” In essence, Strand is freeing his narrator to take the journey
without the encumbrance of the body and its sundry boundaries.
With the mind, there are no such restrictions, and that is part of
the journey foretold in “Proem.”
In the second section, the speaker claims “I am writing from a
place you have never been,” calling readers to attention. This will
not be death of hellfire and brimstone; it is somewhere else,
regardless of punishment and godliness. What is here is an
extension of the mind, a greater capacity for joy and emotion
unclouded by obligation. When “the heavenly choir at the
57
barbecue” is “adjusting its tone to serve the occasion,” all the
participants are “staring, stunned into magnitude.” This place
opens up the possibility of awe and celebration. He asserts in the
third section that this is a pre-body place; people have been here
before:
And you pass by unsure if this coming back is a failure
Or a sign of success, a sign that the time has come
To embrace your origins as you would yourself,
It is the place primordial, both pre and post body. Here memory
coincides, in the shape of Mom and Dad, in the shape of dreams,
in the shape of the landscape. It is both familiar and exotic. In the
fifth section, the speaker views the other side of the equation: the
living, and claims:
On the other side, no one is looking this way.
They are committed to obstacles,
To the textures and levels of darkness,
To the tedious enactment of duration,
And they labor not for bread or love
But to perpetuate the balance between the past
And the future. They are the future as it
Extends itself, just as we are the past
Coming to terms with itself.
In this stanza, the living are trying hard to provide for their
families. They work with practical concerns to assure a future.
The dead don’t need to do that; their time goes on. Their notion
of the past, as with writers who have the possibility of writing
something immortal, is marked differently, less concerned with
practicality. There existence is no longer finite. Strand suggests
that the dead view the past to make sense of it. That is their
project. As a poet, the narrator reconciles with memory, whether
it be ancestral or a studied heritage, as in the case of the sections
of Dark Harbor that pay homage to poets of Strand’s past,
Octavio Paz, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Richard Howard,
Rilke, and others.
58
In section X, Strand presents one of his most central trials as
a poet and inheritor of the art:
It is a dreadful cry that rises up,
Hoping to be heard, that comes to you
As you wake, so your day will be spent
In the futile correction of a distant longing.
He relates the process of writing and re-writing, its ongoing
frailties. In a sort of ars poetica, Strand attempts to answer why
he writes, why he listens to the voices of misery, of heartbreak, of
fear, and of pain:
And you have no choice but to follow their prompting,
Saving something of that sound, urging the harsh syllables
Of disaster into music.
He continues a few lines later:
How do you turn pain
Into its own memorial, how do you write it down,
Turning it into itself as witnessed
Through pleasure, so it can be known, even loved,
As it lives in what it could not be.
This, it seems is the project of the book, to conceive of how
poetry can articulate that which could not be spoken, indeed,
could barely be endured. It posits the music of poetry as
something that might make pain something loved, something
more than the events themselves. It might make immortality.
Moving ahead to the sixteenth section, Strand invokes his
acknowledged mentor, Wallace Stevens, “It is true, as someone
has said, that in/ A world without heaven all is farewell.” This is
a frightening truth, to suggest that without a god figure, the end
is truly the end. Loved ones will not be rediscovered in heaven.
They are simply gone from our lives. The notion forces a
different way of living. Strand continues to drive the point home
59
throughout the poem, insisting that nothing will keep that truth
from being, not ignorance, not lack of feeling, not denial. It is
simultaneously what the poet must endure and must express. It is
the human condition, and the condition of the songster that so
saddens Orpheus, the poet’s alter ego, in section XXVIII:
Orpheus can change the world
For a while, but he cannot save it, which is his despair.
It is a brilliant limitation that he enacts and
He knows it, which is why the current of his song
Is always mournful, always sad. It is even worse
For the rest of us.
The plight is the same. The poet can change the world for as
long as the reader chooses to engage the song. In a sense, Strand
is commenting on his own early works, which are so often
described as “dark;” he offers a compelling reason for that
darkness. Also, in this section, as in others, a mirror appears, but
like the images that will follow in other sections, that mirror
shows a paradise that cannot be touched.
A shadowed glass held within its frozen calm an image
Of abundance, a bloom of humanness, a hymn in which
The shapes and sounds of Paradise are buried.
It is the trick of the mirror, to make visible that which cannot be
accessed, like perfection and the act that might save the world.
Still, the act of writing restores the spirit simply because it is an
attempt to unearth the mirror image and the inaccessible or,
impossible to articulate, human truth that is reflected. It is always
the fulfillment of the mirror image for which the poet strives.
Along with Orpheus, Strand invokes another mythic name,
Marsyas, the satyr, skinned by Apollo for daring to challenge the
god to a contest of music. The poet ruminates on the plight of
the satyr, whose blood became a river, whose song was beautiful
and lost. He questions the use of the body:
60
Or is a body scraped
From the bone of experience, the chart of suffering
To be read in such ways that all flesh might be redeemed,
At least for the moment, the moment it passes into song.
Strand returns again to the notion that music is redemptive, that
the body in service of music is made meaningful. He builds this
understanding throughout the poem so that it culminates in the
last section. In the dark harbor, this landscape that is the afterlife,
or some form of immortality or perhaps, more accurately, post
mortality, there is some form of faith, or power, and it is song,
the word, poetry, and those who sing it are angels. In the final
section, the speaker arrives in a misty place to find poets huddled
around a fire:
there were many poets who wished to be alive again.
They were ready to say the words they had been unable to
say—
Words whose absence had been the silence of love,
Of pain, and even of pleasure.
Finally, he figures these former poets as something more divine
than a set of lost wishes and lost words:
I looked away to the hills
Above the river, where the golden lights of sunset
And sunrise are one and the same, and saw something flying
Back and forth, fluttering its wings. Then it stopped in mid-air.
It was an angel, one of the good ones, about to sing.
This final angel is redemption not only for the dead poets, who
thought themselves lost, but also for the world at large, who can
listen to the song, and if they are careful not to look back, this
Orphic angel might bring them back from the dead.
61
CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“Dark Harbor”
CHRISTOPHER BENFEY ON THE POEM AS A KIND OF
ARS POETICA
[Christopher Benfey is Professor of English at Mount
Holyoke. He is the author of several critical studies,
among them a biography of Stephen Crane which was
named a “notable book of the year” by the New York
Times and most recently, he published Degas in New
Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and
George Washington Cable, which the Chicago Tribune
named on the 1997’s ten most important books. In this
review, he shows how the influences and the techniques
converge in Dark Harbor, to arrive at a kind of ars
poetica.]
Strand has worked steadily on, transforming himself from a
surrealistic, “deep-image” poet of the ‘60s (a description that I
will qualify in a moment) to someone who, in a different voice,
eludes easy categorization. His new book is a kind of summing
up: of the poet’s task in dark times; of a poet’s engagement with
predecessors and contemporaries; of what poetry can make, and
make happen. Dark Harbor is a fine occasion for making sense of
Strand. ( ... )
This is the voice of Dark Harbor, Strand’s hauntingly beautiful
new volume. It is a single long poem consisting of a “Proem” and
forty-five numbered sections. The long poem in English derives
from at least three traditions, each with its own conventions and
generic expectations: the epic (The Bridge, Paterson, The Waste
Land, among twentieth-century examples); the novel in verse
(Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate); and the sonnet sequence
(Lowell’s Notebook and its spill-off volumes, Berryman’s Sonnets).
Dark Harbor belongs to the third category; its major forebears
are Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and Stevens’s longer poetic
sequences. The elastic, three-line stanzas, with a good deal of
62
enjambment across lines and across stanzas, also derive from
Stevens, and from various versions of terza rima reaching back to
Dante (a bit of whose work Strand has recently translated). (...)
Strand has always had what Stevens called “a mind of winter,”
more attuned to austerities than to luxuries. He is in love with
negatives, privatives, the empty and erased. “I would like to be /
In that solitude of soundless things, in the random / Company of
the wind, to be weightless, nameless” (xviii). When he mulls over
“the seasonal possibilities” in one poem (xvii) and vows in
another to take as his muse “The burning / Will of weather”
(“Proem”), it’s winter, predictably, that he apostrophizes:
O pretty densities of white on white!
O snowflake lost in the vestibules of April
air!
Beyond the sadness-the empty
restaurants,
The empty streets, the small lamps shining
Down on the town-I see only the stretches
Of ice and snow, the straight pines, the
frigid moon.
In these late poems, Strand has begun to notice the snow in
his own hair: “Here comes old age, dragging a tale of soft /
Inconvenience, of golfing in Florida, / Of gumming bad food.”
He sees himself increasingly as an aging poet writing in dark
times. In a poem that links him compellingly with Ashbery—it is
not the only bow to Ashbery in this book—Strand notes that
“There is / A current of resignation that charges even our most /
Determined productions.” In another poem, where Whitman is
the honored companion (“Me at my foulest, the song of me ...”),
Strand says flatly, his own Jeremiah, “These are bad times. Idiots
have stolen the moonlight. / They cast their shadowy pomp
wherever they wish.”
Such poems, in which Strand acknowledges a community of
poets, both quick and dead, to keep the practicing poet company,
are among the most powerful in Dark Harbor. In poem xxvii, six
63
unnamed poets are invoked and praised—the first three for
achievements of rhetoric (“I love how the beautiful echoed /
Within the languorous length of his sentences, / Forming a
pleasing pointless commotion”), the second three for intensities
of vision (“Of yet another the precision, the pursuit of rightness,
/ Balance, some ineffable decorum, the measured, circuitous /
Stalking of the subject, turning surprise to revelation”).
It is a guessing game. Is that Wallace Stevens behind Door
No. 1? Elizabeth Bishop behind No. 4, or No. 6? But more
important than any particular identification are the terms of
appreciation here. Three poets who verge on absurdity and
chaos, three poets who verge on revelation. What Strand admires
is the pushing to extremes, the flirtation with the pointless (here
meaning, also, “without punctuation,” or “pointing”) and also
the pushing toward vision. It is a high-wire act that the poem
itself enacts, with its graceful tercets and its single long,
languorous sentence covering twenty-one lines and concluding
like a child’s counting game:
And that leaves this one on the side of his
mountain,
Hunched over the page, thanking his loves
for coming
And keeping him company all this time.
—Christopher Benfey. “The Enigma of Arrival.” The New
Republic (March 8, 1993): pp. 36.
DAVID ST. JOHN ON THE USE OF DREAM AND MEMORY
[David St. John teaches at the University of Southern
California, Los Angeles. He is the author of five books of
poetry, the recipient of the Prix de Rome fellowship in
literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The James D.
Phelan Prize, the Discover/The Nation prize and several
NEA fellowships. In this essay, he discusses the use of
memory and dream to create the intimate tone and
dreamscape of the poem.]
64
Strand’s poetry has often been discussed as a hybrid of the acutely
perceived “real,” as in the work of a poet like Elizabeth Bishop,
and of the highly speculative and imaginative verbal pageants of
a poet like Wallace Stevens. Strand himself has frequently
acknowledged these poetic parents, yet never has their marriage
seemed more apt than under the shaded arbors of “Dark
Harbor.” The deceptive simplicity of Strand’s lines and the
exquisite eloquence of his cadences reflect an ease of intelligence
unequaled since Stevens. In fact, in its abstract lyricism, “Dark
Harbor’s” most profound echoes seem to arise out of Stevens’
gorgeous late poems, notably “Notes Towards a Supreme
Fiction.”
Many readers of Strand’s early poems (his “Selected Poems”
appeared in 1990) are accustomed to work in which the self is
predicated upon a renunciation of the world, or upon a
recognition of the insubstantiality of all things. Indeed, it
sometimes seems that the self is barely held by the sieve of these
poems. Yet Strand’s early work always desires to invent its own
transparency, so that a more complex psychological life might be
revealed.
These attempts to pare down the self to its own essentiality
gave way somewhat in Strand’s most recent collection, “The
Continuous Life” (1990). Where once the quotidian was
banished, the elements of daily life there found celebration.
Now, in “Dark Harbor,” we find ourselves accompanying the
poet along the course—the journey—of an artistic life. From the
safety of home we begin what the speaker ironically calls
“passages of greater and lesser worth,” with the triple pun on
“passages” of time, travel and poetry.
—David St. John “A Devotion to the Vagaries of Desire” Los
Angeles Times Book Review Section 5 (May 9, 1993).
DAVID LEHMAN ON THE THEMATIC INFLUENCE OF
WALLACE STEVENS
[David Lehman is faculty member of the graduate
writing programs at Bennington College and the New
65
School for Social Research. He is the author of five
books of poems, the editor of the Best American Poetry
Series and a distinguished literary critic and editor. In
this review, he likens Strand’s project to Wallace Steven’s
“farewell to an idea.”]
Favored by fortune, Mark Strand won recognition early on as
one of the foremost poets of his generation. Great things were
routinely expected of him. His lyrical and rhetorical gifts went
together with a painter’s eye and a connoisseur’s disposition, as
was clear from his first two collections, “Sleeping With One Eye
Open” (1964) and “Reasons for Moving” (1968). In addition to
poems, he wrote prose books, art books and books for children,
edited anthologies and translated from the Portuguese; and he
did all these things well.
Strand had no trouble mastering two of the signature styles of
the late 1960s and early ’70s: the surrealistic (dark or impish,
sometimes dark and impish) and the Spartan (curt, austere and
strict). In time, these poetic strategies would deposit him at the
end of a dead-end street, and in the 1980s he entered a prolonged
dry spell. I suspect that for Strand this crisis was rather like those
described in Romantic odes by Wordsworth and Coleridge—a
crisis of faith to be triumphantly resolved in the end by an act of
affirmative imagination.
Strand snapped out of a decade-long silence with the best
poems of his life—those collected in “The Continuous Life”
(1990). “Dark Harbor,” his new book-length poem, is continuous
with its predecessor in theme and manner, and surpasses it as an
act of sustained literary grace.
In “Keeping Things Whole,” his most famous early poem,
Strand wrote, “In a field / I am the absence / of field / This is /
always the case. / Wherever I am / I am what is missing.” These
lines were treated by critics and commentators as the poet’s cri de
coeur. But in Strand’s recent work, the negative presence that felt
itself to be a displacement of airy molecules has prepared the way
for a rich profusion of imaginings.
In “Dark Harbor” Strand remains committed to the task of
negotiating, in verse, between desire and despair, possibility and
66
fulfillment. On occasion he still resorts almost reflexively to a
negating gesture (“I am writing from a place you have never
been, / Where the trains don’t run, and planes / Don’t land”).
What is new is the confidence of his speech, the extraordinary
clarity with which he addresses any poet’s biggest themes: love
and death and aging and change.
“Dark Harbor” consists of 45 sections of varying lengths.
Each can be read as an independent poem. The book is written
entirely in unrhymed three-line stanzas strongly suggestive of
the unit favored by Strand’s acknowledged master, Wallace
Stevens, in several of his great later poems. Indeed, “Dark
Harbor” may be Strand’s response to “The Auroras of Autumn,”
in which Stevens spoke his “farewell to an idea”—an idea
pictured as a deserted cabin on a beach. Here is Strand on the
same theme in “Dark Harbor.” This is part 16 in its entirety.
“It is true, as someone has said, that in / A world without
heaven all is farewell. / Whether you wave your hand or not,
“It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes / It Is still
farewell, and if you pretend not to notice, / Hating what passes,
it is still farewell.
“Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean / Over
the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans / Diving, and the
glistening bodies of bathers resting.
“Are stages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement / Of
sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body / Are part of
the same, a simplicity that turns being
“Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion / Worth
celebrating, for what else does one do, / Feeling the weight of the
pelicans’ wings.
“The density of the palms’ shadows, the cells that darken /
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions / Of
chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end
“Is enacted again and again. And we feel it / In the temptations
of sleep, in the moon’s ripening, / In the wine as it waits in the
glass.”
The artful repetition, the dramatic tempo, are characteristic of
the author—as is the verbal gusto, the way lament turns into
celebration and an abstract argument is superseded by the
67
imagery supposed to illustrate it. In the ebb and flow of his threeline stanzas, Strand has found the right measure for a meditative
style capable of terrific intensity and compression but also of a
certain expansiveness.
“The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world,”
Stevens wrote, and Strand’s poetry is in some sense an
elaboration of the sentiment. His work is unabashedly dedicated
to the pursuit of the good life—and to the project of testing the
extent to which it is possible to lead that life. One can well
imagine him contemplating death on the abyss while holding a
half-full wine glass on a balcony overlooking a Mediterranean
beach in winter.
In “Dark Harbor” we catch glimpses of the poet celebrating
“how good life / Has been and how it has culminated in this
instant,” lunching with his editor at Lutece, then striding along
the pavement, well-fed, lanky, in his “new dark blue doublebreasted suit.” A poet of glamor for whom light is “the mascara
of Eden,” he also is a poet of romance who speaks of the “... feel
of kisses blown out of heaven, / Melting the moment they land.”
—David Lehman. “Mark Strand’s Farewells: Celebrating a Booklength Poem of ‘sustained literary grace.’ ” Chicago Tribune Books
(August 1, 1993): pp. 13.
JEFFREY DONALDSON ON THE USE OF THE ORPHEUS
MYTH
[Jeffrey Donaldson teaches poetry and American
literature at McMaster University. His current projects
include work in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye
project. He has two books of poems and is widely
published in little magazines including The Paris Review.
In this essay-review, Donaldson posits Orpheus as the
poet’s representative in the landscape of the darkening
harbor.]
Orpheus is the poet’s representative in this landscape, as he
wanders quietly with the others among nearly half of the poems
68
collected here, asking as the light fails, how and what he should
sing, how he is to be heard, where he should go, to whom he
should call. Naturally, for the poet Orpheus, the darkening
harbor is something more than just the geography of our
historical lives, where we stand just a little offshore, trying to get
away. For someone who has been to the underworld and back,
our dark harbor is also the river Styx, the entrance to Hades,
populated with shades of the unliving:
... my hand, as I lift it over the shade
Of my body, becomes a flame pointing the way
To a world from which no one returns, yet towards
Which everyone travels....
... And the new place, the night,
Spacious, empty, a tomb of lights, turning away,
And going under, becoming what no one remembers. (17)
Wherever Orpheus’s presence is felt, the late world that we
inhabit is perceived to be in part already the underworld that it
promises to become. There is something ghostly and unreal
about the shades of lives we find moving about in the poems.
“Our friends who lumbered from room to room / Now move like
songs or meditations winding down, / Or lie about, waiting for
the next good thing—/ Some news of what is going on above, /
A visitor to tell them who’s writing well, / Who’s falling in or out
of love” (45). It is difficult to tell here whether Strand is
describing Orpheus’s encounters in the underworld, or
accounting for that analogous sense of loss and remoteness from
friends that is our portion in this world. They are
indistinguishable. There is a good deal of Milton behind all of
this, the lounging of the fallen angels on the hillsides of hell
(which seem strangely earthly and rural in their appearance), and
Satan’s cry that we ourselves are hell. Dante is here as well, who,
in his representations of life in the inferno, could draw so richly
from his earthly experiences. For Strand, however, the
underworld of where we live, like the Hades of the pagan poets,
involves no sense of judgment or punishment, but describes a
69
condition of human nature; it is a metaphor for a psychological
state that is already ours, a Hades of loss and remoteness that we
already inhabit, and where “all you want is to rise out of the
shade / Of yourself into the cooling blaze of a summer night /
When the moon shines and the earth itself / Is covered and silent
in the stoniness of its sleep” (9). This leaves us with the feeling of
being liberated into our own afterlife (detached, remote,
suspended in limbo, circling within ourselves), and the feeling
that we have entered into the bitter promise of things as they are.
The same might be said of the landscape itself. Dante’s
scorching inferno and Milton’s fiery “darkness visible” have
become here a living dark harbor after the blaze of sunset, a
world of shade and afterlight, a middle ground once again,
calmer and more melancholic, in which we are at once held back
and released, and find ourselves in a place and in a life that is both
less and more than itself:
Beyond the sadness—the empty restaurants,
The empty streets, the small lamps shining
Down on the town—I see only stretches
Of ice and snow, the straight pines, the frigid moon. (19)
This is one of the most characteristic qualities of Strand’s latest
poetry: that paradoxical feeling we have, under western skies,
that while the lights are going down the sky opens up, and that,
even while we become increasingly conscious of a painful, dull,
almost ascetic simplicity in the environment, there is an
accompanying sense of altitude, open distance and clarity that
fills it up. As objects return to themselves, they seem to become
larger. Strand is one of the few American poets still reminding us
that only very great artists can say the simple things. Each
landscape is made up of two or three elements that are moved
about in the poems like so much furniture, or they are parts of
very simple sliding stage-flats (the mountain and the tree here,
the harbor and the cloud there). And as with stage scenery, part
of our sense of spaciousness here derives from our instant
recognition that Strand’s mountains and skies are largely
symbolic. Like Bailey’s kitchen utensils, they are chosen, not
70
accidentally observed: their reality is ideational, and, diminished
as they seem, “we have the sensation that we are seeing an
arrangement that has always been and will continue to be long
after we depart” (Bailey 18). Abstraction is itself a way of lending
a place roomy clarity and permanence.
We do inhabit a closed world of darkening elements and
simplified spaces, but, for a poet, the reproduction of that world
in poetic terms (using simple tonal elements, coarsely conceived
imagery), does not stand merely as a metaphor for something
that we feel in the real world. It is an experience that the poem
itself partakes of, and one that it can by its very nature make real
to us. For Orpheus, the song is life; its extension is life’s
extension: the journey out into the dark harbor is also a journey
out to the end of the poem, a journey to the end of singing. It is
not unnatural, then, that he would fear the end, worry that it is
no more than an end, that “the Beyond is just a beyond” (and not
an underworld in which he can charm the gods with his music),
and that his own voice will not last: “... will I have proved that
whatever I love / Is unbearable, that the views of Lethe will never
/ Improve, that whatever I sing is a blank?” (43). The poems
themselves seem self-conscious of their own closed space: they so
often quietly invoke, just as they end, the whole problem of
ending and limitation. I have already quoted the end of “The
End” in The Continuous Life. Here are a few concluding lines
from Dark Harbor: “for the ash / Of the body is worthless and
goes only so far” (3); “... the particular way our voices / Erased all
signs of the sorrow that had been, / Its violence, its terrible
omens of the end” (13); “an understanding that remains
unfinished, unentire, / Largely imperfect so long as it lasts” (34);
“a fragment, a piece of a larger intention, that is all” (41). It
almost seems that as the poem concludes it cannot help but draw
discreet attention to the fact of its own imminent extinction, with
a note of lamentation or complaint in the phrases “goes only so
far,” “omens of the end,” “so long as it lasts,” and “that is all.”
Strand feels this limitation as a palpable reality of the poem itself,
but using something very like picture windows on the interior
walls, he also shows the way out beyond it. Here, in the proem
to the book, he announces his method:
71
“This is the way,” he continued as he watched
For the great space that he felt sure
Would open before him, a stark sea over which
The turbulent sky would drop the shadowy shapes
Of its song, and he would move his arms
And begin to mark, almost as a painter would,
The passages of greater and lesser worth, the silken
Tropes and calls to this or that, coarsely conceived,
Echoing and blasting all around. (vii)
—Jeffrey Donaldson. “Still Life of Mark Strand’s Darkening
Harbor.” Dalhousie Review 74:1 (Spring 1994): pp. 117–18.
RICHARD TILLINGHAST ON STRAND’S USE OF AND
PLACE WITHIN THE WESTERN CANON
[Richard Tillinghast teaches in the Master of Fine Arts
program at the University of Michigan. He is the author
of seven books of poetry, a travel writer, book reviewer,
Director of The Poet’s House in Ireland and a
memoirist. In this review, Tillinghast reveals the origins
of many of Strand’s poetic devices.]
This poetry has all of Strand’s accustomed smoothness, but the
voice can erupt into surprisingly heartfelt utterances. In VIII he
sets us up with a swiftly rendered scene that smacks of hearty
well-being where the poet goes “out tonight / In my new dark
blue double-breasted suit” to “sit in a restaurant with a bowl //
Of soup before me to celebrate how good life / Has been and
how it has culminated in this instant.” Then in a swift turnabout
we find ourselves in a Baudelairean world confronting Strand’s
muse, addressed ironically and disturbingly: “I love your gold
teeth and your dyed hair—/ A little green, a little yellow—and
your weight, / Which is finally up where we never thought / It
would be.” It is a dramatic moment that places Strand firmly in
the line of serious European poetry with roots in the French
72
nineteenth century: “O my partner, my beautiful death, / My
black paradise, my fusty intoxicant, // My symbolist muse, give
me your breast / Or your hand or your tongue” (XIV). “The ship
has been held in the harbor” takes the reader back to “Le Bateau
Ivre” of Rimbaud and other modern works that play on the
metaphor of a ship sailing out into the unknown. The gravity of
the sequence is accomplished not only by its lofty subject matter
but also by its alliteration and extended phrasing: “A long time
has passed and yet it seems / Like yesterday, in the midmost
moment of summer.” The line is often, as in the second of these
two, iambic pentameter. (...)
Dark Harbor is a treasure of different ploys, shifts in tone,
changes in genre. XVII, for instance, is a harvest poem that owes
something to Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” where “Someone has
fallen asleep on a boxcar of turnips.” XXII is a sexual comedy:
“Madame X begged to be relieved / Of a sexual pain that had my
name / Written all over it.” XXXI reprises a similar scene, this
time in a cabin in Labrador. The figure of Orpheus appears in a
couple of poems late in the book, touching on the role of poetry
in the world: “Rivers, mountains, animals, all find their true
place, // But only while Orpheus sings. When the song is over /
The world resumes its old flaws.”
—Richard Tillinghast. “Review.” Poetry (August 1995): pp.
293–4
CHRISTOPHER R. MILLER ON THE COMPARISON
BETWEEN DARK HARBOR AND STEVENS’ “WAVING
ADIEU, ADIEU, ADIEU”
[Christopher R. Miller is an Assistant Professor of
English at Yale University. He has published articles on
Coleridge and a number of 20-century American poets.
In this essay, he makes explicit comparisons between the
two poems, citing “inventions of farewell” a Stevens
phrase, as fundamental to understanding Strand’s
poetics.]
73
Strand wrote in his most overtly Stevensian vein in the sequence
Dark Harbor, which consists of what might be called, in Stevens’
phrase, “inventions of farewell” (CP 432). Several vignettes
address seasonal change in ways that implicitly ask how to write
a season-poem after Stevens. In one, Strand offers a brief
credence of summer, set in a “dark harbor” indeed—a tropical
seascape in which sybaritic contentment is shadowed by ultimate
thoughts of death, expressed in Stevens’ own idiom and
characteristic tercets:
It is true, as someone has said, that in
A world without heaven all is farewell.
Whether you wave your hand or not,
It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes
It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,
Hating what passes, it is still farewell. (DH 18)
“Someone” has said this, more or less, in “Waving Adieu, Adieu,
Adieu”:
That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.
In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings,
profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold. (CP 127)
Strand renders Stevens’ “Waving Adieu” even more
Stevensian: he expresses the flux of existence in sublime
abstractions, finds serene stasis behind motion. All elements of
the scene—leaning palms, diving pelicans, glistening bathers—
are “stages in an ultimate stillness”; the dark materiality of the
world is “beyond the distortions / Of chance.” Whereas Stevens’
poem begins as a scherzo, with its giddy, anapestic surges,
Strand’s maintains its meditative poise throughout. In comparing
74
the two variations on a theme of “adieu,” we see the poets’
distinct temperaments. Stevens’ most solemn inventions of
farewell often contain a countersong of jubilance, famously
expressed by the couplet in “Esthétique du Mal”: “Natives of
poverty, children of malheur, / The gaiety of language is our
seigneur” (CP 322). Strand’s poems, on the other hand, speak a
more austere language.
I have suggested that Strand does not quite fit the category of
“strong poet” as Bloom defines it; but in this poem, Strand does
adopt a strong stance toward Stevens in turning him into an
anonymous “someone,” a flash of voice coming momentarily
into consciousness. Stevens’ words, like the tropes of breath and
whiteness, serve as the keynote for a meditation. Is Strand merely
illustrating a Stevensian theme, or does he swerve from his
predecessor in some way? Since he begins with the concessive
phrase, “It is true,” we would expect him to introduce the
qualification of a “but” or an “and yet,” but he seems intent
instead on illustrating Stevens’ premise, visualizing a setting for
it. Toward the end, Strand introduces a choice of sorts: in a world
without heaven, mere being becomes “an occasion for
mourning” or “an occasion / Worth celebrating,” and Strand
refuses to arbitrate between these possibilities beyond suggesting
that there are no others. The poem turns, finally, on a rhetorical
question and a restatement of idea:
for what else does one do,
Feeling the weight of the pelicans’ wings,
The density of the palms’ shadows, the cells that darken
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions
Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end
Is enacted again. And we feel it
In the temptations of sleep, in the moon’s ripening,
In the wine as it waits in the glass. (DH 18)
How does one end a poem that begins with “farewell”? Both
poets ask questions, but they ask different kinds, and in different
orders. Strand’s suggests a starkly binary choice between
75
mourning and celebrating earthly mutability. Without preferring
one or the other, Strand simply offers further intimations of
mortality—tempting sleep, waxing moon, waiting wine—that
echo Stevens’ own infinitives of farewell (“to sip / One’s cup and
never to say a word, / Or to sleep or just to lie there still”).
Stevens’ adieux, however, lead to a different question: “Everjubilant, / What is there here but weather, what spirit / Have I
except it comes from the sun?” (CP 128). In Stevens’ symbolic
lexicon, the sun is the archetypal First Idea, a constant presence
in the poetry, from the “savage of fire” of “Gubbinal” to the
“battered panache” of “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing
Itself.” It is the hypothetical divinity to which the worshippers in
“Sunday Morning” chant “boisterous devotion”; the
“spaciousness and light / In which the body walks and is
deceived” in “Anatomy of Monotony”; the “opulent” vandal of
“A Postcard from the Volcano” that smears the abandoned house
with gilt graffiti. In Strand’s poem, however, the sun becomes yet
another intimation of mortality, the energy that shatters
chromosomes and causes skin cancer. Strand, who does not share
Stevens’ mythopoetic imagination, seems to suggest a countersublime here: the sun as destroyer rather than creator.
—Christopher R. Miller. “Mark Strand’s Inventions of Farewell.”
The Wallace Stevens Journal 24:2 (Fall 2000): pp. 143–44.
JAMES F. NICOSIA: MARSYAS IN DARK HARBOR
[Jim Nicosia is an independent scholar who has taught at
several schools in the northern New Jersey area.]
In an atypical Strandian twist that can be viewed in a Freudian
light, the precursor is transformed, one might say, into the poet’s
father in order that this poet can kill his father. Yet, perspective
becomes skewed here, as well, for poet and precursor begin to
become one and the same. When the speaker is shown painting
a gun into the precursor’s hand and pointing it at “the one who
assumed / The responsibility of watching” (24–25), it becomes
difficult to decipher who that “one who assumed” is. Indeed, it
76
seems to be both men, and attempting to distinguish the shooter
from the victim seems immaterial; when the trigger is pulled,
neither dies. Instead, “something falls, / A fragment, a piece of a
larger intention, that is all” (26–27). The poetic noise uttered at
the conclusion of part XXXVIII then leaves us with another
Strandian silence that must be confronted, and is, in the
following segment. In part XXXIX, the speaker seems to begin
again, and takes a deep breath in preparation for the final stages
of this monumental poem. He begins in a state of uncertainty,
issuing a sentence fragment that hesitantly declares his intention
to write without actually beginning the poem (of course, he has
begun, for the two stanzas are present, yet, in their assertion that
they will begin a poem, they thus declare the absence of poem).
With the struggle to recapture the poet’s voice thus brought to
the fore again, Strand declares, “Today I shall consider Marsyas,”
the mythological figure flayed after challenging Apollo to a
musical contest (2–3). The pieces that remain at the end of part
XXXVIII are picked up here as the remains of Marsyas, useless
items again needed by the poet to reconstruct something of the
world of the past—even if that world is the previous poem.
Again, the poem finds the speaker wondering whether or not he
should bother to try, whether the effort is worth expending.
Benfey is correct to note that “The company of poets [to
which Strand seeks to belong] can be intimidating, ... and in Dark
Harbor this fear is embodied in the figure of Marsyas” (36). His
further assumption, however, that “the link” in this poem “is
clearly that of fear of not being good enough, the writer’s ‘block’
that is both obstacle and punishment” overlooks the redemption
that ends the poem (36). In Strand’s familiar elegiac style, the
poem spirals upward. He “considers” Marsyas in the first, third
and fourth stanzas, seemingly lamenting that poet’s—and, by
extension, this poet’s—fate. Yet, in each reconsideration, Strand
brings something new to the mix, and thus rebuilds the poet in
the making. By the time the poem ends, it exhibits a certain
revitalization.
The grieving that dominates the early moments of this
segment gives way to a reuse of this materia poetica called
Marsyas. Strand transforms his flayed flesh into “the flesh of
77
light, / Which is fed to onlookers centuries later” (12–13). The
poetic influence of Marsyas is felt by, of course, Strand the
“onlooker,” who then repays Marsyas with the poem at the same
time as he rewrites Marsyas. “Can this be the cost of
encompassing pain?” this speaker now asks (14), as much of
himself as of his predecessor. He, too, has felt the pain of “a long
silence” (15), and attempts to use the experience as a unifying
feature for him and his predecessor. Yet, the “correct” answer
requires some reconsideration, and a useful Strandian
conjunction: “Or is a body scraped from the bone of experience,
the chart of suffering / To be read in such ways that all flesh
might be redeemed, / At least for the moment, the moment it
passes into song?” (19–21). Yes, for a moment, there is
redemption, there is hope, in the singing—that tiny instant of
engagement. As Spiegelman says, “Hopefulness, even muted, is
hopefulness still” (135).
Yet, if part XXXIX ends with an acknowledgment that the
poet can be redeemed in the moment he translates his experience
into song, that song, of course, ends at the poem’s conclusion,
and the new poem, XL, begins after the latest silence. It
necessarily must address loss, for the “moment” of segment
XXXIX has passed. And now, he asks,
How can I sing when I haven’t the heart, or the hope
That something of paradise persists in my song,
That a touch of those long afternoons of summer . . .
Will find a home in yet another imagined place? (1–5)
The other imagined place is, of course, in the mind of the
reader. His incessant goal as poet: eternal value for his creation.
“[W]ill I have proved / That I live against time,” he asks (8–9).
Or is the final answer: “whatever I sing is a blank?” (12). Though
the indecision is maddening, it is the indecision that is the subject
of his writing, and as the subject of his writing, it is the indecision
that keeps him writing. It is a painful temporary redemption for
this poet, indeed, and the concluding quintet of poems does its
utmost to speak up against the perpetual fear of the speaking
being ineffectual.
Segment XLI’s solution to the meaninglessness of “the night
78
sky” (2), to the realization that “I have no idea / Of what I see”
(2–3), and to the number of the stars being “far beyond / What I
can reckon” (4–5), is a “who knows,” that seems to speak more as
a “who cares?” (13). This poet speaks, he now says, because he
must speak—of his joys, of his fears, of his inability to speak, and
of his need to speak. Where the poem goes from there is now
immaterial in the face of the poet’s requirement to write. Of
tomorrow, he says, “We are already travelling faster than our /
Apparent stillness can stand, and if it keeps up / You will be lightyears away by the time I speak” (13–15). Indeed, this segment’s
point of utterance is already far removed from the reader’s point
of reading. The poet’s ability to affect the reader has long ended,
and, in the scheme of real time, several poems already have been
penned between this one and the reader’s reception of it.
Time continues to race past unconcerned with the world’s
human inhabitants in segment XLII, and now none of it matters
to the poet, or so he says. Marsyas, the hero of segment XXXIX,
has been “asleep for centuries” (9), and “Arion, whose gaudy
music drove the Phrygians wild, / Hasn’t spoken in a hundred
years” (10–11). Both are dead, and the poet seems sure of this
one “truth”: “Soon the song deserts its maker” (12). Yet, Strand
seems to be establishing a potential for union by linking these
early poets in their silence. Hints are present when he says, “The
airy demon dies, and others come along” (13). The others
include himself, and though no union is established just yet, the
experienced Strand reader can see it just around the corner, in
the next poem. Surely, while there is no celebration here, when
Strand says, “A different kind of dark invades the autumn woods,
/ A different sound sends lovers packing into sleep” (14-15), it is
still a sound of poets—new poets such as himself. Likewise, a line
like “The air is full of anguish” contains little to relish (16), yet it
is full of the anguish of the new poets. As for tomorrow, this poet
seems to leave it where it is—in that unreachable realm expressed
in the previous segment of Dark Harbor. He now says, “The
Beyond is merely beyond, / A melancholy place of failed and
fallen stars” (17–18, italics mine).
And so, with the old poets discussed and put to rest, part
XLIII begins to establish some continuity between poets.
79
Though the piano music is no longer played, and the players are
also gone, Strand links Jules Laforgue and Wallace Stevens in an
extension of the torch-passing theme of the previous poem. He
resurrects these poets and their poems in his reconsideration of
them, but, as in the previous segments, he ends without
resurrecting poetry to a place of honor. The connective bridge
sustained here again is poetry’s mutability: “The snows have
come, and the black shapes of the pianos / Are sleeping and
cannot be roused, like the girls themselves / Who have gone, and
the leaves, and all that was just here” (13–15). Strand’s own poem
(“all that was just here”) is unified with the poets who created the
precursor poems, and their poems (the leaves) themselves.
Though they “cannot be roused,” there are commonalities being
established in these final segments, ultimately which will be tied
together in the celebration of the final segment’s song. But for
now, “all that was just here,” the momentary salvation
experienced in the writing of this poem, as well as all the delight
achieved from the previous poems and their poets, are gone.
Part XLIV begins in a reminiscence of earlier days and ends in
a recognition of the sea as an enduring, generative force that
awed the speaker as a child and has intimidated the poet as an
adult, for it was the enduring force he wished his poetry could be.
Indeed, Dark Harbor ends at the sea, considering the past, the
same place from where the Proem was issued. For the speaker as
a child, there was also something frightening about the power of
the sea’s loud voice. But “now years later / It is the sound as well
as its size that I love” (8–9). Indeed, the sea has both the voice
and the endurance that the poet, that every poet, seeks so
fervently. And from the dawn of man, the sea has been speaking
to these poets. Here, this poet has lost his voice “in my inland
exile among the mountains” (10).
Ah, those mountains from part XXXII, those same mountains
that have intimidated him into submission, those same
mountains that separate him from his angel-poets in part
XXVII. They, too, are enduring, but they do not speak.
Ironically, the speaker now admires the ocean’s changeability.
Like the poet—or, perhaps more accurately, like the poet wishes
to be—the ocean creates and destroys and is varied in its
appearance from day to day, wave to wave, moment to moment.
80
This poet’s mountains: “do not change except for the light /
That colors them or the snows that make them remote / Or the
clouds that lift them, so they appear much higher / Than they
are” (11–14). The ocean is the imagination at its strongest,
capable of effecting change. This poet’s mountains “are acted
upon and have none / Of the mystery of the sea that generates
its own changes” (14–15). And this eternal sea cries, too. These
are the cries the poet now recognizes as a poetic need for him,
as well. Gone are the days of childhood. Now, despite the
futility of his situation—or because of the futility of his
situation—as mere mortal, he must face the silence, face death,
face the insecurity of the future:
[I]n those days what did I know of the pleasures of loss,
Of the abyss coming close with its hisses
And storms, a great watery animal breaking itself on the rocks,
Sending up stars of salt, loud clouds of spume. (19–22)
This poet now recognizes that poetry is not merely a bulwark
against pain and suffering. Now he recognizes that loss is a source
of poetry, as well. Instead of railing against the darknesses that
exist before and after the poetic invention, the poet now focuses
upon that invention that does, regardless of its origins and its fate,
exist.
Which brings us to segment XLV, which ends Dark Harbor by
radiating from itself, calling out to the future and to the past
“masters” of poetry. Finally, it presents that communion for
Strand among the community of poets. This concluding poemwithin-a-poem originates in a primal, “misty” scene, one that
seems to be left over just as the great forgetters of “Always,” from
Strand’s The Continuous Life, are completing their erasure of the
world. The speaker discovers “Groups of souls, wrapped in
cloaks” (3) in the fields. This place reminds the speaker of
another place, where a stranger who mysteriously recognizes
him:
Approached, saying there were many poets
Wandering around who wished to be alive again.
They were ready to say the words they had been unable to say—
81
Words whose absence had been the silence of love,
Of pain, and even of pleasure” (10–14)
Surely, these are not those inspirational poets wishing to return
to earth, the place of love. More likely they are the “lazy poets”
of Strand’s “The History of Poetry,” who, no longer having the
power to create that they had on earth, have gathered together to
mourn missed opportunity and to unlearn their habits. For they
have a new teacher now, and they are learning to speak of the
imagination. They have found communion, discovered that “the
golden lights of sunset / And sunrise are one and the same”
(18–19). Their teacher: “an angel, one of the good ones, about to
sing” (21).
Yet, upon closer scrutiny, perhaps, Strand is saying, this is the
fate of all poets once they have been defeated by death. In the
face of such eternal silence, Strand’s hedging throughout the
poem appears to be a waste of effort. Here, he seems to recognize
that there will be plenty of time for silence. Any words unsaid
now will be regretted in the long silence after the imagination
has been abandoned, after life has ceased. The “Someone, / who
claimed to have known me years before” (8–9)—this mysterious
speaker within the speaker’s poem—has a lesson to teach. He is a
liaison between the world of the now-silenced precursor poets
and the living poet. It is he who summons the good angel to
speak to his now-rapt audience, and the silence that ends the
poem is the most promising of all silences, for it awaits the
angel’s impending poem. Rarely has a Strand book ended with as
forward-looking and promising a hope as now found within the
figure of an angel—the imagination that Stevens calls “the
necessary angel”—hovering over this dark scene, right at the
moment when the song is about to be sung. Few things are more
promising than the promise of song. And if we indeed see the
poem as circular—or at least spoken in both directions—the
promise bears itself out in this most successful work of art, this
angel-song.
Lived experience between the bookends of darkness
Critics disagree on the tone of Dark Harbor. Tillinghast
82
remarks that Strand presents a sincerity of emotion in Dark
Harbor, noting an “elevated, classical tone that unifies its
disparate parts” (292–293). Spiegelman disunites the poem by
accurately identifying the “faux-naif tone” of certain poems
(136). Benfey reminds that Strand also exhibits startlingly playful
brashness in segments such as XIX, XXII and XXIII.
In general, Strand also appears in different form to different
people. Those with a penchant for European literature see
Frenchmen Baudelaire, Rimbaud and German Rilke in Strand,
and for good reason. Those who specialize in British
Romanticism, see in him Keats and Wordsworth, again with
well-founded opinions. It would be remiss to ignore the Danteesque quality of the three-line stanzas of Dark Harbor. And yet,
there are a few critics to correctly note his affinity with Latin
American poets, who he has studied and translated. On one
thing, critics (other than Gregerson, that is) seem to agree: his
work is oddly familiar despite the apparent originality of its
bluntness in the face of the world’s horrors. Pinsky may not have
been entirely complementary when saying, “Strand is an original
writer, but not of the kind who challenges our idea of poetry. He
confirms that idea, rather than enlarging it” (300-1), but few
poets can hope to reach the level of imaginative achievement
necessary to “confirm” our idea of poetry as compellingly—and,
I might add, definitively—as he does. Indeed, Strand is a wellread writer who seems unafraid to reconsider any of his
precursors. It is this universality of influence that probably
identifies the accuracy of Spiegelman’s contention, “Many of
Strand’s elegiac notes sound reassuring rather than threatening,
precisely because of the familiarity of their tone” (135).
Remarkably, they seem familiar to everyone, for different
reasons.
While given labels like confessionalist, surrealist, fantasist and
postmodernist, Strand is a serious poet in the Romantic tradition
contemplating and contending with the possibilities of poetry in
a world where faith in religion and most other institutions have
been lost. Without trying to oversimplify, a chart can be drawn
marking the increasing strength of the imagination throughout
Strand’s career. That chart has its peaks and valleys, but on the
83
whole, the poet’s voice grows louder in its capacity to call forth
an imaginative vision. In Dark Harbor, Strand charts the whole
territory anew, summarizing the growth of a poet from ephebe to
strong poet. In paying close attention to what the poems do and
how they do it, we have hopefully achieved what Henri Cole
rightly calls “the cumulative effect” of Strand’s vision. Indeed, it
is our contention that Dark Harbor intends to produce such a
cumulative effect. Despite its variations, it is a singleminded
poem aimed at expressing the obstacles presented to the
contemporary poet, and in particular, an aging contemporary
poet. As Spiegelman says, “Wedding his cool Stevensian side to
a more strapping Whitmanian feeling for the sea and its
combination of terror and maternal comfort, Strand
acknowledges certain adult emotions of which the young are
deprived” (135). Ultimately, Dark Harbor asserts the vitality of
“poetry itself, the naked poem, the imagination manifesting itself
in its domination of words” (Stevens Imaginary viii).
In our travels through this assertion of the imagination, we
have run into many repeating images—primitive and privative
absences and darknesses, the desire for safe haven amid the
world’s whirlwinds, the assertion of the imaginative gesture as
temporarily redeeming. Ultimately, what Dark Harbor comes
down to is the celebration of the subjectively meaningful action
in the face of an apathetic world. In imagining the poem, Strand
continually reinvents himself in a place of poets, that we, too, are
given when we accompany him. And in imagining the poem, he
provides for himself and his reader temporary joy. Although
Strand’s imaginative powers have grown steadily from the weak
attempts to stave off the storms of Sleeping with One Eye Open, to
the multiple-layered creative powers of Dark Harbor, for now,
Strand is still asking his blank page, “Where, where in Heaven
am I?” And for now, even if the imagination does not sustain,
“Still, we feel better for trying.”
—James F. Nicosia. “Marsyas in Dark Harbor” appears for the first
time in this publication. © 2003 James F. Nicosia.
84
WORKS BY
Mark Strand
Sleeping with One Eye Open, 1964.
Reasons for Moving: Poems, 1968.
The Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry Since 1940
(editor), 1968.
Darker: Poems, 1970.
New Poetry of Mexico (edited with Octavio Paz), 1970.
18 Poems from the Quechua (edited and translated by Strand),
1971.
The Story of Our Lives, 1973.
The Owl’s Insomnia (translation of Rafael Alberti), 1973.
The Sargeantville Notebook, 1974.
Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (edited
with Charles Simic), 1976.
Souvenir of the Ancient World (translation of Carlos Drummond
de Andrade), 1976.
Elegy for My Father, 1978.
The Late Hour, 1978.
The Monument, 1978.
Selected Poems, 1980.
The Planet of Lost Things, 1982.
Claims for Poetry (contributor, edited by Donald Hall).
The Night Book, 1983.
Art of the Real, 1983.
Mr. and Mrs. Baby and Other Stories, 1985.
Traveling in the Family (translation of Carlos Drummond
de Andrade with Thomas Colchie) 1986.
Rembrandt Takes a Walk, 1986.
William Bailey, 1987.
85
The Continuous Life, 1990.
New Poems, 1990.
The Monument, 1991.
The Best American Poetry 1991 (guest editor), 1991.
Reasons for Moving, Darker, and the Sargeantville Notebook, 1992.
Dark Harbor: A Poem, 1993.
Within This Garden: Photographs by Ruth Thorne-Thomsen
(contributor), 1993.
Golden Ecco Anthology (editor), 1994.
Hopper, 1994.
These Rare Lands: Images of America’s National Parks, 1997.
Blizzard of One: Poems, 1998.
The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention, 2000.
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (edited
with Eavan Boland), 2000.
86
WORKS ABOUT
Mark Strand
Aaron, Jonathan. “About Mark Strand: A Profile,” Ploughshares
(Winter 1995–96): pp. 202–206.
“A Conversation with Mark Strand,” Ohio Review, 13 (Winter
1972): pp. 54–71.
Bacchilega, Christine. “An Interview with Mark Strand,” The
Missouri Review 4:3 (1981): pp. 51–64.
Benfey, Christopher. “The Enigma of Arrival,” The New Republic
(March 8, 1993): pp. 34–7.
Bensko, John. “Reflexive Narration in Contemporary American
Poetry: Some Examples from Mark Strand, John Ashberry,
Norman Dubie, and Louis Simpson,” The Journal of Narrative
Technique 16:2 (Spring 1986): pp. 81–96.
Berger, Charles. “Reading as Poets Read: Following Mark
Strand,” Philosophy and Literature 20: 1 (1996): pp. 177–88.
Birkerts, Sven. “The Art of Absence,” The New Republic
(December 17, 1990): pp. 36–38.
Bloom, Harold. “Death and Radiant Peripheries: Mark Strand
and A.R. Ammons,” Southern Review (Winter 1972): pp. 13341.
Brennan, Matthew. “Mark Strand’s ‘For Her,’ ” Notes on
Contemporary Literature 13 (January 1983): pp. 11–12.
Byrne, Edward. “Weather Watch: Mark Strand’s The Weather of
Words.” Valparaiso Poetry Review: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics II:
2 (Spring/Summer 2000): www.valpo.edu/english/vprv2n2.html.
Cavalieri, Grace. “Mark Strand: An Interview,” American Poetry
Review 23:4 (1994): pp. 39–41.
Cole, Henri. Review. Poetry (April 1991): pp. 54–7.
87
Coleman, Jane Candia. Reviews. Western American Literature
(Summer 1991): pp. 178–9.
Coles, Katherine. “In the Presence of America: A Conversation
with Mark Strand: An Interview,” WeberStudies: An
Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal 9:3 (1992): pp. 8–28.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 6, 1976, Volume
18, 1981, Volume 41, 1987, Volume 71, 1992.
Cooper, Philip. “The Waiting Dark: Talking to Mark Strand,”
Hollins Critic 21 (October 1984): pp. 1–7.
Corn, Alfred. “Plural Perspectives, Heightened Perceptions,”
The New York Review of Books, March 24, 1991.
Crenner, James. “Mark Strand: Darker,” Seneca Review, 2 (April
1971): 87–97.
Dobyns, Stephen. “Penetrable and Impenetrable,” North
American Review 257:2 (1972): pp. 57–9.
Donaldson, Jeffrey. “The Still Life of Mark Strand’s Darkening
Harbor,” Dalhousie Review 74:1 (Spring 1994): pp. 110–124.
Gregerson, Linda. “Negative Capability (Mark Strand),”
Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2001: pp. 5–29. Originally in
Parnassus: Poetry in Review 9:2 (1981): 90–114.
Hoff, James. “Borges: Influences and References,” The Modern Word
(www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_infl_strand.html)
Howard, Richard. “Mark Strand,” Alone with America: Essays on
the Art of Poetry Since 1950, Enlarged Edition. New York:
Atheneum, 1980: pp. 589–602.
Jackson, Richard. “Charles Simic and Mark Strand: The
Presence of Absence,” Contemporary Literature 21 (1980): pp.
136–45.
Kinzie, Mary. “Through the Looking Glass: The Romance of
the Perceptual in Contemporary Poetry,” Ploughshares (Spring
1979): pp. 202–241.
88
Kirby, David. Mark Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary
Culture. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press,
1990.
Lehman, David. “Mark Strand’s Farewells: Celebrating a book of
‘sustained literary grace’,” Chicago Tribune Books, August 1,
1993, pp. 13.
Lieberman, Laurence. “Mark Strand: The Book of Mourning.”
Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets.
Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995. pp.
218-230. Originally appeared in The Yale Review (1968).
Maddox, Carolyn. “The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention,”
Antioch Review 59:1 (Winter 2001): pp.120.
Maio, Samuel. “The Self-Effacing Mode,” Creating Another Self:
Voice in Modern American Personal Poetry. Kirksville: Thomas
Jefferson University Press, 1995: pp.163–224.
Manguso, Sarah. “Where is that boy?” Iowa Review 29:2 (Fall
1999): pp. 168–171.
“Mark Strand,” Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group,
2001. www.galenet.com.
Martz, Louis L. “Recent Poetry: Visions and Revision,” Yale
Review 60 (1971): pp. 403–417.
McClanahan, Thomas. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5:
American Poets Since World War II, First Series. A Bruccoli Clark
Layman Book. Ed. Donald J. Greiner, University of South Carolina.
The Gale Group, 1980. pp. 303–309. www.galenet.com. pp. 6.
Miller, Christopher R. “Mark Strand’s Inventions of Farewell,”
The Wallace Stevens Journal 24:2 (Fall 2001): pp. 135–150
Miklitsch, Robert. “Beginnings and Endings: Mark Strand’s ‘The
Untelling,’ ” Literary Review 21 (1977-78): pp. 357–73.
Oakes, Elizabeth. “ ‘ To Hold Them in Solution, Unsolved’: The
Ethic of Wholeness in Four Contemporary Poems.” REAL,
The Journal of Liberal Arts 25:1 (2000): pp. 49–59.
89
Olsen, Lance. “The Country Nobody Visits: The Varieties of
Fantasy in Strand’s Poetry,” The Shape of the Fantastic: Selected
Essays from the Seventh International Conference on the Fantastic
in the Arts. Greenwood Press, Westport: 1990: pp. 3–8.
Plumly, Stanley. “From the New Poetry Handbook.” Ohio Review
13:1 (1971): pp. 74–80.
Shawn, Wallace. “The Art of Poetry LXXVII: Mark Strand,” The
Paris Review 148 (1998): pp. 146–178.
Sheehan, Donald. “Varieties of Technique: Seven Recent Books
of American Poetry,” Contemporary Literature X (Spring 1969):
pp. 284–302.
St. John, David. “ ‘ A Devotion to the Vagaries of Desire,’ ” Los
Angeles Times Book Review. May 9, 1993.
Stillinger, Jack. “Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Shaggy Dog:
The Novelty of Lyrical Ballads (1798).” Wordsworth Circle 31:2
(2000): pp. 70–6.
Stitt, Peter. “Engagements with Reality,” The Georgia Review vol.
35: 4 (Winter 1981): pp. 874–882.
________. “Stages of Reality: The Mind/Body Problem in
Contemporary Poetry,” The Georgia Review 37:1 (Spring
1983): pp. 201–210.
Strand, Mark. “Narrative Poetry,” Ploughshares 12:3 (Fall 1986):
pp. 13–4.
Thomas, Bill. “What’s a Poet Laureate to Do?” Los Angeles Times
Magazine, January 13, 1991: pp. 14.
Tillinghast, Richard. Review. Poetry (August 1995): pp. 292–295.
Village Voice. April 30, 1985: pp. 47.
Vine, Richard and Robert von Hallberg. “A Conversation with
Mark Strand,” Chicago Review 28:4 (Spring 1977): pp.
130–140.
90
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Negative Capability” by Linda Gregerson. From Negative
Capability: Contemporary American Poetry (Ann Arbor,
University of Michigan Press, 2001.): pp. 5–29. Originally
appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review 9:2 (1981): 90–114. ©
2001 by University of Michigan Press. Reprinted by
permission.
“Mark Strand” by Thomas McClanahan. From Dictionary of
Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets Since World War II,
First Series, Ed. Donald J. Greiner. (The Gale Group, 1980):
303–309. ©1980 by The Gale Group. Reprinted by
permission of the Gale Group.
“Stages of Reality: The Mind/Body Problem in Contemporary
Poetry” by Peter Stitt. From The Georgia Review 37: 1 (Spring
1983): 201–210. © 1983 by The Georgia Review. Reprinted by
permission.
“Reflexive Narration in Contemporary American Poetry” by
John Bensko. From The Journal of Narrative Technique 16:2
(Spring 1986): pp. 81–96. © 1986 by The Journal of Narrative
Technique. Reprinted by permission.
Reprinted from Mark Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary
Culture by David Kirby, by permission of the University of
Missouri Press. © 1990 by the curators of the University of
Missouri.
“The Art of Absence” by Sven Birkerts. From The New Republic
3, 961 (December 17, 1990): pp. 37. © 1990 by The New
Republic. Reprinted by permission.
“Mark Strand: ‘The Mirror Was Nothing Without You’” by
Richard Howard. From Alone with America: Essays on the Art of
Poetry in the United States Since 1950, Enlarged Edition (New
York, Atheneum: 1980): pp. 596–597. © 1980 by Atheneum.
Reprinted by permission.
“Dark and Radiant Peripheries: Mark Strand and A. R. Ammons” by
Harold Bloom. From Southern Review (Winter 1972): pp. 133–41.
© 1972 by the Southern Review. Reprinted by permission.
91
“Stages of Reality: The Mind/Body Problem in Contemporary
Poetry” by Peter Stitt. From The Georgia Review 37: 1 (Spring
1983): pp. 202. © 1983 by The Georgia Review. Reprinted by
permission.
Reprinted from Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on
Contemporary American Poets by Lawrence Liebermann, by
permission of the University of Missouri Press. © 1995 by the
curators of the University of Missouri.
“Weather Watch: Mark Strand’s The Weather of Words” by
Edward Byrne. From Valparaiso Poetry Review: Contemporary
Poetry and Poetics II: 2 (Spring/Summer 2000): www.valpo.edu/
english/vprv2n2.html. © 2000 by Valparaiso Poetry Review.
Reprinted by permission.
“The Enigma of Arrival” by Christopher Benfrey. From The New
Republic (March 8, 1993): pp. 36. © 1993 by The New Republic.
Reprinted by permission.
“A Devotion to the Vagaries of Desire” by David St. John. From
Los Angeles Times Book Review Section 5 (May 9, 1993). © 1993
by Los Angeles Times Book Review. Reprinted by permission.
“Mark Strand’s Farewells: Celebrating a Book-length Poem of
‘sustained literary grace’ ” by David Lehman. From Chicago
Tribune Books (August 1, 1993): pp. 13. © 1993 by Chicago
Tribune Books. Reprinted by permission.
“Still Life of Mark Strand’s Darkening Harbor” by Jeffrey
Donaldson. From Dalhousie Review 74:1 (Spring 1994): pp.
117–18. © 1994 by Dalhousie Review. Reprinted by permission.
“Review” by Richard Tillinghast. From Poetry (August 1995): pp.
293–4. © 1995 by Poetry. Reprinted by permission.
“Mark Strand’s Inventions of Farewell” by Christopher R. Miller.
From The Wallace Stevens Journal 24:2 (Fall 2000): pp. 143–44.
© 2000 by The Wallace Stevens Journal. Reprinted by
permission.
“Marsyas in Dark Harbor” by James F. Nicosia. © 2003 by James
F. Nicosia. Reprinted by permission.
92
INDEX OF
Themes and Ideas
“A BLIZZARD OF ONE,” 55
DANTE, 13, 63, 70, 83
“DARK HARBOR,” 57–84; ars poetica in, 62–64; critical
analysis on, 57–61; critical views on, 10, 13, 42, 62–84;
marsyas in, 76–84; memory and dream in, 64–65; Orpheus in,
68–72; poetic devices in, 72–73; redemption in, 57; Stevens’
“Farewell to an Idea,” 66–68; Stevens’ “Waving Adieu, adieu,
adieu,” 73–76
“ELEGY FOR MY FATHER,” 42–56; affirmation of life in,
48–50; critical analysis of, 42–45; critical views on, 46–56; loss
of self in, 50–53; precursor to “A Blizzard of One,” 55–56;
Spanish and South American influences in, 53–54; use of
litany in, 46–48
“FROM A LITANY,” 37
“GENERAL,” 37
“THE KITE,” 21
“NOT DYING,” 39
“OUR DEATH,” 37
“AN ORDINARY EVENING IN NEW HAVEN,” 11–13
“REASONS FOR MOVING,” 37
STRAND, MARK, as compared to Stevens, 10–12, 23, 33, 39,
66–68, 73–76; biography of, 14–16; critical analysis of, 83–84;
“a mind of winter,” 63: symbolist, 25
93
STEVENS, WALLACE, 63, 80; as compared to Strand, 10–12,
23, 33, 39, 66–68, 73–76; homage to, 10, 59
“THE STORY OF OUR LIVES,” 17–32; act of creation, 23;
critical analysis of, 17–20; critical views on, 21–32;
dehumanizing in, 20; fatal self-consciousness, 31: hopelessness
in, 20; ideal state in, 28–31; lack of telos in, 32; narrative
reflexivity in 26–28; narrative structure in, 21; questioning of
self in, 17; written word as reality in, 25
“TO BEGIN,” 24
“THE UNTELLING,” 21, 24, 31–32, 55–56
“THE WAY IT IS,” 33–41; critical analysis on, 33–36; critical
views on, 37–41; movement to public place in, 37–38;
perceptions of reality in, 40–41; public phantasmagoria in, 39
94
Strand
C U R R E N T LY AVA I L A B L E
BLOOM’S MAJOR POETS
Maya Angelou
Elizabeth Bishop
William Blake
Gwendolyn Brooks
Robert Browning
Geoffrey Chaucer
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Hart Crane
E.E. Cummings
Dante
Emily Dickinson
John Donne
H.D.
T.S. Eliot
Robert Frost
Seamus Heaney
Homer
A.E. Housman
Langston Hughes
John Keats
John Milton
Sylvia Plath
Edgar Allan Poe
Poets of World War I
Shakespeare’s Poems & Sonnets
Percy Shelley
Wallace Stevens
Mark Strand
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Walt Whitman
William Carlos Williams
William Wordsworth
William Butler Yeats
Mark
Strand
© 2003 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
Haights Cross Communications.
Introduction © 2003 by Harold Bloom.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written
permission of the publisher.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
First Printing
135798642
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mark Strand / Harold Bloom, ed..
p. cm. — (Bloom’s major poets)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-7393-9
1. Strand, Mark, 1934——Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom,
Harold. II. Series.
PS3569.T69 Z78 2002
811’.54—dc21
Chelsea House Publishers
1974 Sproul Road, Suite 400
Broomall, PA 19008-0914
http://www.chelseahouse.com
Contributing Editor: Camille-Yvette Welsch
Cover design by Keith Trego
Layout by EJB Publishing Services
CONTENTS
User’s Guide
7
About the Editor
8
Editor’s Note
9
Introduction
10
Biography of Mark Strand
14
Critical Analysis of “The Story of Our Lives”
Critical Views on “The Story of Our Lives”
Linda Gregerson on Narrative Structure in the Poem
Thomas McClanahan on the Act of Creation within
the Poem
Peter Stitt on the Transubstantiation of Thought to
Word to Reality
John Bensko on the Agency of Art in Reflexive Narration
David Kirby on Dealing with the Ideal State
Sven Birkerts on the Lack of Telos in Strand’s Poetry
17
21
21
23
24
25
28
32
Critical Analysis of “The Way It Is”
Critical Views on “The Way It Is”
Richard Howard on the Poet’s Movement from Interior
Dreamscape to Public Place
Harold Bloom on the Poem as Representative of a Shift
in Strand’s Poetics
Peter Stitt on the Poem as an Attempt to Define
the World
33
37
Critical Analysis of “Elegy for My Father”
Critical Views on “Elegy for My Father”
Laurence Lieberman on the Use of Litany
Richard Howard on the Poem as an Affirmation of Life
David Kirby on the Poem as Loss of Self
Sven Birkerts on the Poem’s Influences
Edward Byrne on the Poem as a Precursor to
A Blizzard of One
42
46
46
48
50
53
37
38
40
55
Critical Analysis of “Dark Harbor”
Critical Views on “Dark Harbor”
Christopher Benfey on the Poem as a Kind of Ars
Poetica
David St. John on the Use of Dream and Memory
David Lehman on the Thematic Influence of
Wallace Stevens
Jeffrey Donaldson on the Use of the Orpheus Myth
Richard Tillinghast on Strand’s Use of and Place
Within the Western Canon
Christopher R. Miller on the Comparison between
Dark Harbor and Stevens’ “Waving Adieu, Adieu,
Adieu”
James F. Nicosia: Marsyas in Dark Harbor
57
62
Works By Mark Strand
85
Works About Mark Strand
87
Acknowledgments
91
Index of Themes and Ideas
93
62
64
65
68
72
73
76
USER’S GUIDE
This volume is designed to present biographical, critical, and
bibliographical information on the author and the author’s bestknown or most important poems. Following Harold Bloom’s
editor’s note and introduction is a concise biography of the
author that discusses major life events and important literary
accomplishments. A critical analysis of each poem follows,
tracing significant themes, patterns, and motifs in the work. As
with any study guide, it is recommended that the reader read the
poem beforehand, and have a copy of the poem being discussed
available for quick reference.
A selection of critical extracts, derived from previously
published material, follows each thematic analysis. In most cases,
these extracts represent the best analysis available from a number
of leading critics. Because these extracts are derived from
previously published material, they will include the original
notations and references when available. Each extract is cited,
and readers are encouraged to check the original publication as
they continue their research. A bibliography of the author’s
writings, a list of additional books and articles on the author and
their work, and an index of themes and ideas conclude the
volume.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale
University and Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of
English at the New York University Graduate School. He is the
author of over 20 books, and the editor of more than 30 anthologies of literary criticism.
Professor Bloom’s works include Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959),
The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats
(1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism
(1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American
Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of
Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996).
The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s
provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great
writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a 1998 National Book
Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), and Genius: A Mosiac
of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002).
Professor Bloom earned his Ph.D. from Yale University in
1955 and has served on the Yale faculty since then. He is a 1985
MacArthur Foundation Award recipient and served as the
Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University
in 1987–88. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious American
Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism.
Professor Bloom is the editor of several other Chelsea House
series in literary criticism, including BLOOM’S MAJOR SHORT
STORY WRITERS, BLOOM’S MAJOR NOVELISTS, BLOOM’S MAJOR
DRAMATISTS, BLOOM’S MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS,
BLOOM’S MODERN CRITICAL VIEWS, and BLOOM’S BIOCRITIQUES.
8
EDITOR’S NOTE
This volume offers critical views on four major poems by Mark
Strand: The Story of Our Lives, The Way It Is, Elegy for my Father
and Dark Harbor.
My Introduction comments upon Dark Harbor, and attempts
to unravel the intricate relations between Strand and Wallace
Stevens.
There is so high a quality of commentary throughout that it is
invidious to single out individual critics.
On The Story of Our Lives I find Linda Gregerson and Sven
Birkerts most illuminating.
Richard Howard comments brilliantly on Strand’s exteriorization in The Way it Is.
On the dark Elegy for My Father, I am particularly moved by
Richard Howard and Sven Birkerts again.
Dark Harbor is most searchingly explored by James Nicosia in
his adumbrations of the figure of Marysas.
9
INTRODUCTION
Harold Bloom
I have known Mark Strand, as person and as poet, for more than
half a century. His gift is harbored rather than sparse: that is my
interpretation of his major work to date, Dark Harbor: A Poem
(1993). The poem constitutes a “Proem” and forty-five cantos or
sections.
Dark Harbor, like some earlier poems by Strand, is an overt
homage to Wallace Stevens. It is as though casting aside anxieties of influences Strand wishes reconcilement with his crucial
precursor. The “Proem” sets forth vigorously: “The burning/Will
of weather, blowing overhead, would be his muse.” But, by Canto
IV, we are in the world of Stevens:
There is a certain triviality in living here,
A lightness, a comic monotony that one tries
To undermine with shows of energy, a devotion
To the vagaries of desire, whereas over there
Is a seriousness, a stiff, inflexible gloom
That shrouds the disappearing soul, a weight
That shames our lightness. Just look
Across the river and you will discover
How unworthy you are as you describe what you see,
Which is bound by what is available.
On the other side, no one is looking this way.
They are committed to obstacles,
To the textures and levels of darkness,
To the tedious enactment of duration.
And they labor not for bread or love
But to perpetuate the balance between the past
And the future. They are the future as it
Extends itself, just as we are the past
10
Coming to terms with itself. Which is why
The napkins are pressed, and the cookies have come
On time, and why the glass of milk, looking so chic
In its whiteness, begs us to sip. None of this happens
Over there. Relief from anything is seen
As timid, a sign of shallowness or worse.
This is the voice of the master, particularly in An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven. Strand shrewdly undoes Stevens to the glass
of milk, setting aside any more metaphysical concerns. An effort is
made, for fifteen cantos, to domesticate Stevens, but the great voice,
of Stevens and Strand fused together, returns in Canto XVI:
It is true, as someone has said, that in
A world without heaven all is farewell.
Whether you wave your hand or not,
It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes
It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,
Hating what passes, it is still farewell.
Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean
Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans
Diving, and the listening bodies of bathers resting,
Are stages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement
Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body
Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being
Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion
Worth celebrating, for what else does one do,
Feeling the weight of the pelicans’ wings,
The density of the palms’ shadows, the cells that darken
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions
Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end
Is enacted again and again. And we feel it
In the temptations of sleep, in the moon’s ripening,
In the wine as it waits in the glass.
11
It is Stevens who tells us that, without heaven, all farewells are
final. What enchants me here are the Strandian variations on
farewell. Waves and tears yield to very Stevensian palms, and to
the pelicans of Florida, venereal soil. A greater meditation, suitable to Strand and Stevens as seers of the weather, arrives in
Canto XXIV:
Now think of the weather and how it is rarely the same
For any two people, how when it is small, precision is needed
To say when it is really an aura or odor or even an air
Of certainty, or how, as the hours go by, it could be thought of
As large because of the number of people it touches.
Its strength is something else: tornados are small
But strong and cloudless summer days seem infinite
But tend to be weak since we don’t mind being out in them.
Excuse me, is this the story of another exciting day,
The sort of thing that accompanies preparations for dinner?
Then what say we talk about the inaudible-the shape it assumes,
And what social implications it holds,
Or the somber flourishes of autumn-the bright
Or blighted leaves falling, the clicking of cold branches,
The new color of the sky, its random blue.
Is that final tercet Strand or Stevens? As the sequence
strengthens, deliberate echoes of Josh Ashbery, Octavio Paz and
Wordworth are evoked by Strand, until he achieves a grand
apotheosis in his final canto:
I am sure you would find it misty here,
With lots of stone cottages badly needing repair.
Groups of souls, wrapped in cloaks, sit in the fields
Or stroll the winding unpaved roads. They are polite,
And oblivious to their bodies, which the wind passes through,
Making a shushing sound. Not long ago,
I stopped to rest in a place where an especially
Thick mist swirled up from the river. Someone,
Who claimed to have known me years before,
12
Approached, saying there were many poets
Wandering around who wished to be alive again.
They were ready to say the words they had been unable to sayWords whose absence had been the silence of love,
Of pain, and even of pleasure. Then he joined a small group,
Gathered beside a fire. I believe I recognized
Some of the faces, but as I approached they tucked
Their heads under their wings. I looked away to the hills
Above the river, where the golden lights of sunset
And sunrise are one and the same, and saw something flying
Back and forth, fluttering its wings. Then it stopped in mid-air.
It was an angel, one of the good ones, about to sing.
The aura is Dante’s, and we are in a spooky place, paradise of
poets or purgatory of poets. If one line above all others in Dark
Harbor reverberates within me, it is: “They were ready to say the
words they had been unable to say-” The accent remains late
Stevens, but with a difference is altogether Mark Strand’s.
13
BIOGRAPHY OF
Mark Strand
Mark Strand published his first book in 1964, the year he turned
thirty. In the years following, he tackled poetry as a translator,
critic, and poet influenced by writers like Borges, Stevens,
Bishop, Kafka, and Donald Justice. As an editor and translator,
he exposed American readers to South American poets, the
intricacies of form, and his notions on the essential aspects of
poetry in translation. Always amiable, Strand is sought after for
interviews, bringing the unique perspective of an artist who has
experimented in different genres, dabbling in fiction, nonfiction, scholarly critique, children’s books and painting as well as
poetry.
Born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, on April
11, 1934, Mark Strand spent much of his youth relocating across
North and South America due to his father’s job as a salesman.
The family lived in Cuba, Columbia, Peru, Mexico, Philadelphia,
Halifax, and Montreal, affording the young boy exposure to a
number of languages, although at the time his primary interest
was not poetry, but painting. The dream of being an artist lasted
until he was twenty.
Strand attended Antioch College and completed his BA in
1957. By 1959, he had completed a BFA at Yale, studying under
Joseph Albers. During his course of study, he also took English
classes and excelled in them, and perhaps most formatively, he
kept returning to the poems of Wallace Stevens. While at Yale,
Strand received the Cook Prize and the Bergin Prize, and came
to the realization that he was not to be a painter, rather, he would
become a poet. In 1960, he received a Fulbright scholarship to
Italy to study nineteenth century poetry. Upon Strand’s return to
the United States, he married a fellow Fulbright scholar whom
he had met in Italy, Antonia Ratensky, in 1961 and began to be
published in The New Yorker. That same year, he began his study
at the University of Iowa, under the guidance of Donald Justice
with whom he studied for one year, earning his MA. After
completing his degree, he began a three-year teaching stint at the
14
University of Iowa. In 1964, he published his first book of poetry,
Sleeping with One Eye Open, and though it received little to no
critical fanfare, it does provide the symbolic apparatus for
reading Strand’s work. The book foreshadows his darkness, the
tension in his characters, the search for self and identity, the
grotesque detail, the morbid humor, the dream-like, elegant
tone. It also introduced a certain cavalier cleverness and empty,
formal ease for which some critics have chastised him.
After the publication of his book, Strand left Iowa to teach as
a Fulbright Lecturer in Brazil. During his time there, he
occasionally saw Elizabeth Bishop and began gathering
information for translating Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a
Brazilian poet whose poetry shares a keen feeling of isolation
with Strand’s. Funded by an Ingram-Merrill grant, Strand
returned to the United States and took up residence in New York
City. He began taking a series of teaching jobs at various colleges
and universities, Mt. Holyoke, the University of Washington,
Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Brandeis, University of Virginia,
Wesleyan, and Harvard. In 1967, he was awarded an NEA grant
and, in 1968, editor Harry Ford accepted and published Strand’s
second book, Reasons for Moving: Poems. Strand claims Ford as the
reason he has a career in poetry, and when Ford left Atheneum
in favor of Knopf, Strand went with him.
Reasons for Moving continued to have a feeling of barely
contained fear, an intense questioning of what constitutes the
self, and a sense of self-negation. In these poems, Strand’s
speakers often move between a world of their own making and
the world-at-large, each with its own uneasy atmosphere often
told in images juxtaposing frantic activity with absolute stillness.
After receiving a Rockefeller Foundation Grant in 1968, Strand
continued working, and by 1970, he published another
collection, Darker, that met with critical acceptance. Many
believed the book to be the start of a more life affirming oeuvre
for Strand, although the book retains his fascination with the
divided self. In 1973, he published The Story of Our Lives, his
most critically praised book at that time, which marked a turning
point. The poems were longer, more narrative and more
autobiographical than his earlier poems, although they are still
15
driven by Strand’s obsession with the interior and the way in
which the imagination figures reality. He received the first Edgar
Allan Poe award from the Academy of American Poets in 1974.
The honors kept coming: he received awards from the National
Institute for Arts and Letters and an American Academy Award
in Literature as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975. His
fifth major collection appeared in 1978, The Late Hour.
Strand also found the 1970s to be intensely productive as a
translator and editor, working with Charles Simic and Octavio
Paz on two of his projects. The work brought much of Strand’s
idiosyncratic taste to the market, exposing more people to the
influence of European and South American poets. In 1980,
Strand published his Selected Poems, his only volume of poetry
during the decade. Instead of poetry, he focused his energies on
children’s books, fiction, prose, and art criticism—publishing six
volumes collectively. He received critical praise for his prose
although the response to his children’s books was mixed. In the
1990’s, Strand made a triumphant return to poetry, serving as the
United States Poet Laureate from 1990-1991, and publishing
The Continuous Life in 1990, a book length poem and winner of
Yale University’s Bollingen Prize, Dark Harbor in 1993, and his
Boston Book Review Bingham Poetry Prize and Pulitzer Prize
winning volume, Blizzard of One in 1993. Critical praise was
overwhelming. Writers and scholars claimed that this was Strand
writing at his best, with a fully developed voice and balance they
had not seen before.
In the year 2000, success continued. Strand co-edited The
Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms and a book
of essays The Weather of Words: Poetic Inventions. He currently
teaches on the Committee for Social Thought at the University
of Chicago as the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service
Professor of Social Thought. Ultimately, his contribution to
American poetry has been vast. As an essayist, his writing is
insightful, funny and informative. In translating, his ear is keen
and his taste impeccable. But, it is as a poet that he is most
influential, attacking throughout his poetry the question of the
self and its divisions and tensions, and the place of the poet and
poetry in the contemporary world.
16
C R I T I C A L A N A LY S I S O F
“The Story of Our Lives”
This title poem from Strand’s fourth book reveals a structural
shift in his poetry, marking a book of lengthier narrative poems.
As with much of Strand’s work, the struggle of the poem is both
internal and external. The characters cannot help themselves,
trapped by their own inertia and inability to walk away from
expectations both societal and personal. The poem questions the
notion of self and how it is created through story and action.
The poem begins with a couple who are “reading the story of
our lives / which takes place in a room.” Immediately, Strand
gives his major plot point and suggests the kind of lives these two
are leading: small and self-contained, fitting neatly into one
room. And though the room has a view of the street, as in many
of Strand’s poems, no one is there; nothing stirs. Instead, a
dream-like, or death-like, hush prevails, the furniture never
moves and everything becomes slowly darker. It seems as if the
poem happens underwater with its slow pace, muffled sounds and
ever-falling darkness. Indeed, the moment when all is quiet,
where the leaves are full, is reminiscent of Keats’s urn, a
momentary, inalterable beauty and ripeness. Still, even this
moment, which the speaker claims as ideal, is flawed. The
speaker admits “We keep turning the pages, / hoping for
something, / something like mercy or change, /” Both the
husband/speaker and his wife desire something more than the set
life the book has given them, but with a sad irony that is typical
of Strand, that desire is thwarted. They are unable, either
separately or together, to ruin this perceived ideal story and state,
and so they become what they fear, stagnant and over-ripe,
spoiled and painfully aware of themselves, their story, their
failures, their future.
In the second section, they are still reading the story of their
lives. Strand uses the first person point of view throughout the
poem to suggest that, as readers, we are in some small way
mirroring the actions of the couple, particularly the speaker. The
story unfolds while we read it, as it unfolds for the narrator. The
17
repetition of the phrase “We are reading the story of our lives”
suggests that the action is cyclical and constant. The speaker
claims they read “as though we were in it, / as though we had
written it.” Here, the idea of the speaker and his wife feeling
distanced from the book is integral. They still believe themselves
to be more than the story the book suggests. They still believe
they have choices, that they might escape the pull of this
knowledge. In many ways, the story suggests a reverse Tree of
Knowledge; the fruit consumed does not provide knowledge of
mortality, instead it offers the speaker his life and all of his
choices. The knowledge is paralyzing. The speaker wonders
again and again who is writing the story; he knows only that he
is not the primary mover in this story. He tries briefly to turn
from the book. He tries to create causality based on his own
decisions; he chooses to try and write the story himself believing
that the act of writing will give him some autonomy. Before he
can get very far, the book tells him he put his pen down. This
preternatural accuracy unsettles the speaker and defeats him. He
turns to watch his wife read the book, knowing that she has come
to the section where she falls in love with the neighbor. He tells
her “You fell in love with him / because you knew that he would
never visit you, / would never know you were waiting.” After
reading the story of her life with the speaker, the woman chooses
ignorance. She chooses a man who will never know what she
wants. She prefers the anonymity and the free will it affords her.
As she reads, the narrator watches her, allegedly imagining his
life without her. She looks up from the book with this
knowledge. It rends the already growing rift between them. The
speaker writes, “The book describes much more than it should. /
It wants to divide us.” In writing this, the speaker bestows power
upon the book; it is a power neither he nor his wife possesses.
With a life already described, and in such unforgiving detail, the
characters lose their motivation to live that life and stagnate in
their room.
The third section begins with the husband waking and
internalizing the notion that he has no life, only the story of it.
When the wife disagrees, he points to the book, showing her
where she disagreed. She turns back to sleep, her last refuge for
18
the unexpected and the speaker continues to read, reliving the
moments that the wife used to find exciting, the moments before
she had all the knowledge that the book provided. The husband
turns to the early part of their relationship and relishes the sense
of uncertainty that was there. In response the book claims, “In
those moments it was his book. / A bleak crown rested uneasily on his
head. / He was the brief ruler of inner and outer discord, / anxious in
his own kingdom.” The book intimates that this man could never
actually rule his own life. His anxiety would overwhelm him, as
it overwhelms him now when all of the events are written before
him. He is paralyzed by his own fears; he both fears and desires
the idea that something unexpected might happen, for the good
or the bad.
He continues reading, despite these fears, or perhaps because
of them. He finds that his wife sleeps to slip back in time, and for
a moment, he wants to inhabit that sleep with her, to escape the
all-knowing book. The book chronicles this desire, stealing from
it all of his tenderness:
He wanted to see her naked and vulnerable,
To see her in the refuse, the costumes and masks
Of unattainable state.
It was as if he were drawn
Irresistibly to failure.
After reading this devastating portrayal of himself, the speaker
finds it hard to continue reading. He tries to move away from the
prescribed action, relying instead on his old form of knowledge
and story telling. He watches his wife’s face and breathing and
tries to read her that way, to understand and read signs of his own
volition, to attribute her actions and thoughts to a motivation
that cannot be recognized by the book.
The speaker cannot keep it up though. He goes back to the
book, searching for a perfect moment to live in, all the time
knowing that it is an impossible feat. Throughout, he knows that
his only chance at a perfect moment is to destroy the book, but
he cannot do it; he needs to have its corrupting power. The
section ends with one of the poem’s most devastating lines: “It
never explains. It only reveals.” And, the revelation is ugly and
19
sordid, inconsiderate of motivation and history. Instead, it runs
as a relentless, shallow newsreel, images devoid of context. The
lack of context ultimately becomes dehumanizing.
In prolonged agony, the couple continues to view the book.
They stare at themselves in the mirror, as if reading the book,
watching themselves in reverse to keep from being lonely. They
need to begin speaking to each other, to rectify the wrongs. The
book says so. It even acknowledges its own complicity in
destroying this relationship. Instead of speaking, they turn to the
book and more stagnation. In the book and in the room that is
their world, everything becomes make-believe and their own
pain is suspect because nothing has actually happened. There is
nothing to reconcile save imagined wrongs told by the book.
The last section affirms all the hopelessness that has come
before. “The book will not survive.” Of course not—it is a
representation of two mortal people. The tale necessarily ends.
The room continues to darken, adding to the mood of
desperation. The speaker cannot put the book aside; he wants to
and does not want to. His indecision binds him ultimately to a
life of nothing. Bound with him is his wife. They live inside the
book and learn to accept the truth of their lives: “They are the
book and they are / nothing else.” Here, Strand’s careful line
break supports the struggle of the poem. He acknowledges that
they exist, i.e. “they are” but that their existence means nothing.
They remain caught in a limbo of indecision. Should they break
from expectation and this prescribed notion of their lives and this
very dangerous book that tells them how to live and warns them
of what is to come, or should they make their own decisions, live
without its corrupting power and fear living without knowing
what will happen, without being able to prepare? It underscores
one of the pervasive fears in Strand’s work, a notion of
nothingness and how we help to create for ourselves through our
own fears, indecision and inaction.
20
CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“The Story of Our Lives”
LINDA GREGERSON
POEM
ON
NARRATIVE STRUCTURE
IN THE
[Linda Gregerson is a Professor at the University of
Michigan and a poet. She has three books of poems, the
most recent entitled, Waterborne. In this essay, she
examines the notion of negation in Strand’s work and its
evolution through the structuring of his poems.]
As the poet moves further away from his earliest poems, the
tension between line break and phrasing softens, enjambment
nearly disappears. The simplest of syntactical patterns simply
repeat; the eddies and stills of imagery even out. The poems
encounter less and less resistance as they move down the page,
until their progress becomes as frictionless as that of a kite or a
ghost ship:
We are reading the story of our lives
which takes place in a room.
The room looks out on a street.
There is no one there,
no sound of anything.
(“The Story of Our Lives”)
“The Story of Our Lives” and “The Untelling,” centerpieces of
Strand’s fourth major collection, pursue the formal discoveries
made in “The Kite.” Each poem contains a story that contains a
poem that steadily dismantles containment. As “The Story of
Our Lives” proceeds, a man and a woman, side by side, consult
the course of love in a book. Though love unfolds and doubles
back, no point of origin or terminus appears, no point, that is,
beyond which the mind might firmly declare itself to be outside
the story:
21
The book never discusses the causes of love.
It claims confusion is a necessary good.
It never explains. It only reveals.
In this way the book preserves the reasons for moving:
It describes your dependence on desire,
how the momentary disclosures
of purpose make you afraid.
Books have promulgated desire before. When Paolo and
Francesca, side by side, read the story of Lancelot and
Guinevere, adulterous love renewed its kingdom: “A Gallehault
was the book and he who wrote it; that day we read no farther in
it” (Inferno V, 137–38). Gallehault served as a go-between for
Lancelot and Guinevere. Boccaccio subtitled The Decameron
“Prince Gallehault” and dedicated his book to otiose donne, idle
ladies. The pattern for seduction is perfectly explicit, and
perfectly vicarious. Strand’s own poems mediate a vast inherited
culture by appearing to build in a clearing. Their faithlessness is
part of their pedigree, its faithlessness is the cement of love.
Paolo and Francesca owed their fealty and their desire to
Gianciotto, Lancelot and Guinevere to Arthur. The man and the
woman on the couch must interpolate a breach of faith in order
to perfect desire:
I lean back and watch you read
about the man across the street.
..................................................
You fell in love with him
because you knew that he would never visit you,
Would never know you were waiting.
Night after night you would say
that he was like me.
—Linda Gregerson. “Negative Capability.” Negative Capability:
Contemporary American Poetry (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan
Press, 2001.): pp. 5–29. Originally appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in
Review 9:2 (1981): 90–114.
22
THOMAS MCCLANAHAN ON THE ACT OF
CREATION WITHIN THE POEM
[Dr. Thomas McClanahan serves as the Associate Vice
President for Grants and Research for the South
Carolina Arts Council. Here, he discusses the way in
which Strand uses poetry/the act of creation as a mode
for understanding his reality.]
In The Story of Our Lives (1973), Strand attempts to come to terms
with reality through the imagination. Much like the woman in
Wallace Steven’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” who must
“order words of the sea,” Strand’s persona in “To Begin” creates a
world out of emptiness. It is an effort at imagining a world into
existence: “He stared at the ceiling / and imagined his breath
shaping itself into words.” The poet figure forces himself to say
words that, in turn, will prefigure a real world. The process is
slow and uncertain. It is ephemeral and unordered, but it is an
essential step in the direction of poetic and metaphysical order:
In the dark he would still be uncertain about how to begin.
He would mumble to himself; he would follow
his words to learn where he was.
He would begin.
And the room, the house, the field,
the woods beyond the field, would also begin,
and in the sound of his own voice beginning
he would hear them.
But even this successful creation is short-lived because Strand
understands that we must create and recreate endlessly if we are
to maintain this reality. In “The Story of Our Lives,” Strand
clearly points to this need for continual creation. In the second
part of the poem, he reinforces the notion that we fashion our
own existences through our imaginations:
We are reading the story of our lives
as though we were in it,
as though we had written it.
23
But all must face the pessimistic knowledge that “The book will
not survive. / We are the living proof of that. / It is dark outside,
/ in the room it is darker.”
“The Untelling” picks up where “The Story of Our Lives”
concludes. The poet figure’s attempt to give relatives an account
of a day he has recently spent with them illustrates the pain and
inherent inaccuracy of any effort to chronicle truth. The more
the man tries to describe what he believes has taken place, the
more paralyzed he becomes:
His pursuit was a form of evasion:
the more he tried to uncover
the more there was to conceal
the less he understood.
If he kept it up,
he would lose everything.
His attempts to “uncover” meet with failure, and the poem
concludes with the poet beginning once again to write it. Unlike
the situation in “To Begin,” where the poet has no objective
experience from which to fashion his story, the poet figure in
“The Untelling” has all the objective reality he can stand. His
problem is that of selectivity, not creation from nothing, and it
becomes apparent that the anguish of fashioning truth from
reality is as real for Strand as the pain of making a poem out of
the raw material of subjective consciousness.
—Thomas McClanahan, “Mark Strand.” Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Volume 5: American Poets Since World War II, First Series.
Ed. Donald J. Greiner. Gale, 1980.
PETER STITT ON THE TRANSUBSTANTIATION OF
THOUGHT TO WORD TO REALITY
[Peter Stitt is the Editor of The Gettysburg Review and a
full professor of English at Gettysburg College. He is a
prolific reviewer and the author of Uncertainty and
Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets and The World’s
Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets. In this review, he
24
articulates Strand’s method of internalizing the world to
the point where it becomes a separate written reality for
the speaker in the poem.]
The point of such poems as this is to strip away the outer world
so as to make the subject of poetry the act of perception in the
mind, the creation of the poem on the page. At a slightly later
stage in the development of this type of poetry (in which the
theme is the method, the method the theme) the version of
reality created on the page can come back and determine the
course of reality in the world. Which is precisely what happens
in “The Story of Our Lives,” where the action of the poem is
defined early: “We are reading the story of our lives / which takes
place in a room.” Mark Strand is, in many ways, a latter-day
symbolist, though his system is neither elaborate nor especially
consistent. Of the significance of one image, however, we can be
relatively sure—when he sets a poem in “a room,” he means that
room to stand for the mental world, as becomes clear later in this
poem: “It is almost as if the room were the world. / We sit beside
each other on the couch, / reading about the couch. / We say it
is ideal. / It is ideal.” To think something in this poem is to write
it; and to think it or to write it is to make it part of reality, an
event in the world or the room. Thus, “We are reading the story
of our lives / as though we were in it, / as though we had written
it.” Precisely. And in the final stage: “This morning I woke and
believed / there was no more to our lives / than the story of our
lives. / When you disagreed, I pointed / to the place in the book
where you disagreed.”
—Peter Stitt. “Stages of Reality: The Mind/Body Problem in
Contemporary Poetry.” The Georgia Review 37: 1 (Spring 1983):
201–210.
JOHN BENSKO ON THE AGENCY OF ART IN
REFLEXIVE NARRATION
[ J ohn Bensko is an Assistant Professor of English at the
University of Memphis. He is the author of three books
25
of poetry and his fiction has appeared in Quarterly West
and The Georgia Review, among other journals. Here, he
examines the way in which reflexive narration creates for
art the power of agency of the lives of the characters in
the poem.]
The structure of narrative, therefore, has within it an
unsynthesizable analog of the relationship between man and his
experience. But narrative realism tries to give the illusion of the
unchangeable primacy of the fabula, and this limits the poet and
the reader not just artistically, but philosophically and
psychologically as well. Reflexivity, on the other hand, allows the
poet to maintain the unsynthesizable quality of the relation
between art and reality and to explore the interchange. In Mark
Strand’s title poem from The Story of Our Lives (25–31), for
example, the narrator reads from a book which tells the story of
him and his wife:
In one of the chapters
I lean back and push the book aside
because the book says
it is what I am doing.
I lean back and begin to write about the book.
I write that I wish to move beyond the book,
beyond my life into another life.
I put the pen down.
The book says: He put the pen down
and turned and watched her reading
the part about herself falling in love.
The book is more accurate than we can imagine.
The title, “The Story of Our Lives,” suggests an autobiography,
but Strand inverts the common relationship of fabula to sjuzhet,
making the plot of the book control what is supposed to be the
preeminent reality of their lives. The “book” becomes the
embodiment of a truthfulness which exposes more of the reality
than the narrator wishes to know, and we wonder: is the art of the
book true to reality; or is it the result of an overly intense
confessional compulsion which has a mind of its own and is
creating the aesthetic pleasures of painful emotions? Has art, in
26
other words, become an agent on its own, transforming our lives,
mediating between the reality of our feelings and our awareness
of them in order to create forms and significances which are its
own, determined as much by the necessities of art as by those of
the human truth. One might say that such questions are farfetched, and that Strand is indulging needlessly in a fantasy; but
his poem confronts serious questions about the confessional
poetry of the recent decades: how often do the needs of art
dictate that the poet develop some area of suffering, and how
often does actual suffering result in art? Does writing about one’s
own life restrict that life or become a way of exploring and
broadening it? Speaking to his wife, the narrator says of the
book:
It describes your dependence on desire,
how the momentary disclosures
of purpose make you afraid.
The book describes more than it should.
It wants to divide us.
Strand projects a kind of aesthetic determinism which rules their
lives. At the end of the poem, the book’s narration takes over
from the human narrator, narrating its own story as well:
They sat beside each other on the couch.
They were determined to accept the truth.
Whatever it was they would accept it.
The book would have to be written
and would have to be read.
They are the book and they are
nothing else.
By merging the protagonists and the story of the protagonists,
the poem multiplies our perspectives on the experience, creating
aesthetic distance and also destroying that distance. The
reflexivity allows Strand to objectify psychological processes
which are artistic but also are intimately connected with our
lives. Because the reflexive narration breaks up the experience
and reflects the perspectives of subject and subject-as-artifice on
each other, it expands the poetic space of the narrational surface.
27
The fabula-sjuzhet division becomes much more than a structural
device for critics; it is the embodiment of the complex, diverging,
and yet inseparable elements of the determinism of natural
events, the human will, and the imagination.
—John Bensko. “Reflexive Narration in Contemporary American
Poetry.” The Journal of Narrative Theory 16:2 (Spring 1986): pp.
81–96.
DAVID KIRBY ON DEALING WITH THE IDEAL STATE
[David Kirby, author or co-author of over twenty books,
is the W. Guy McKenzie Professor of English at Florida
State University. Recipient of five Florida State Teaching
Awards, he has had work appear in the Best American
Poetry and the Pushcart Prize series. Here, Kirby
discusses Strand’s discomfort with the ideal state and the
way in which it ultimately helps to prefigure his work in
The Monument.]
Strand’s speakers’ desire for self-effacement reaches a peak of
seriousness in The Story of Our Lives, and that seriousness is
announced by a change in style. In the words of the dust jacket,
the poems collected here are “longer [in fact, there are only
seven of them], more mysterious, more engrossing” than Strand’s
earlier work. One might add “more strenuous” to that list of
adjectives; the reader of these poems really gets a sense of Jacob
wrestling with the angel. The title work, for example, is in seven
parts and deals almost claustrophobically with two people
struggling both to live their lives and to read about them in a
putative book that already seems to have been completed.
For example, in part 1 of “The Story of Our Lives” it is
observed that “we sit beside each other on the couch, / reading
about the couch,” and not only do “we say it is ideal” but in fact
“it is ideal” in the book the couple is reading. The ideal state is
not necessarily a comfortable one in Strand’s poetry, though; it is
perhaps too substantive in a world in which the material is
downplayed. As in earlier work, the atmosphere of the poem is
28
soundless, almost motionless (except for the turning of the
pages), and progressively darker. The room in which the action
takes place is almost a world unto itself, and indeed “it is almost
as if the room were the world” (97). The word room will have
greater significance in other poems in this collection, but for the
moment it is enough to say that it delimits the action by
providing a barrier between the couple and a noisy world outside
and also, on the strength of its soothing quietness, encourages
the couple to keep their own egos in check.
In part 2 of “The Story of Our Lives,” the man tries to push
past the ideal state not only by living his life and reading about it
but also by writing:
I lean back and begin to write about the book.
I write that I wish to move beyond the book,
beyond my life into another life.
This makes sense: it turns out that the book the couple is reading
is a bad book because it looks too far ahead and tells too much.
For example, it says that the woman will fall in love with the man
across the street and that the speaker will grow old without her.
Glimmerings of Strand’s early theme of the divided self are
present here. When the speaker says, “The book describes much
more than it should. / It wants to divide us,” the reader knows
not only that the couple may be separated but also that their
individual selves are in danger (98).
These feelings turn out to be prophetic. Part 3 has the speaker
rereading the “mysterious parts” of the book, especially the early
ones that leave him feeling as though he’s “dreaming of
childhood.” Having lost his focus on the here and now, the
speaker feels (and reads that he’s feeling) a sensation similar to
that described in “Sleeping with One Eye Open” for example, or
in “The Accident” and “The Man in the Mirror” (Reasons). The
book-within-the-poem says:
A bleak crown rested uneasily on his head.
He was the brief ruler of inner and outer discord,
anxious in his own kingdom.
(99)
29
As he confirms the horrible news of his own anxiety, the speaker
is waiting for the woman to awake. In part 4, she seems to him to
be secure, protected rather than vulnerable, and he is “moved by
a desire to offer myself / to the house of your sleep.” (As an
objectification of things solid and unchanging as opposed to
things ephemeral and unreliable, house is used here as room will
be used in several other poems.) The more he watches her and
the less he reads, the more it seems as though there will be a
breakthrough into a higher state of happy calm. If he knows this,
of course, then so will the book; so that when the speaker
confesses, “I was tired and wanted to give up,” he also says, “the
book seemed aware of this. / It hinted at changing the subject”
(100).
And that is the problem: the couple are followed everywhere
by the book, and they will never lose their self-consciousness as
long as the book masters their lives. It is worse than a mirror,
which merely reflects, as the images in the book preexist and
cause anxiety by announcing limits that cannot be transcended.
Part 5 deals with the paradox of longing for perfection, which
of course cannot exist, since the anxiety of longing prevents the
attainment of any perfect state. We know from earlier Strand
poems that the perfect state is immaterial, unselfconscious,
transcendent, but how can that state be reflected in the book,
which is material, self-conscious to the extreme, and imminently
mundane? No wonder the speaker observes ruefully, “if there
were a perfect moment in the book, / it would be the last” (101).
If the story of their lives ends, then so will their lives, and no
Strand speaker to date, regardless of the depth of his despair, has
expressed an interest in so ultimate a solution.
Clearly, it is lives that are important, not stories of lives. The
book is the story of the couple’s lives, and that is what is wrong:
in part 6 they read, “it was words that created divisions in the first
place, / that created loneliness.” The couple need to stop
narrating—more precisely, they need to stop being narrated to—
and start living. As it is, all they are doing is proving that
consciousness is a terrible thing.
30
The escape that seemed possible for this unlucky pair in part
4 of “The Story of Our Lives” never takes place. Struggle as they
may, they cannot get away from the Möbius strip of selfconsciousness that seems an inescapable aspect of the modern
condition:
You are asking me if I am tired,
if I want to keep reading.
Yes, I am tired.
Yes, I want to keep reading.
I say yes to everything.
In the final part of the poem, the people end as simulacra of
themselves, “the copies, the tired phantoms / of something they had
been before.” The book has the last word about the people and
about itself: “They are the book and they are nothing else” (102–3).
Thomas Jefferson described himself as having a canine
appetite for reading; here is a poem that turns that eighteenthcentury notion on its head and has a book eating people. Perhaps
this is the revenge of the written word: a Strand speaker was able
to devour some poems in “Eating Poetry” (Reasons), but an entire
book is too much for this couple to fend off, no matter how
strenuously they resist. From librarians to advertisers, everyone
offers us books as an unqualified good. But this poem seems to
be saying that the wrong book can be, not merely deadly boring,
but deadly.
If it is so dangerous for us to tell ourselves our own stories,
perhaps a more healthful activity is suggested in the title of a
poem called “The Untelling.” Indeed, if “The Story of Our
Lives” is an account of a long, losing battle against fatal selfconsciousness, “The Untelling” is an account of an equally long
but successful struggle. First, though, it will be helpful to look at
three shorter poems that provide some vocabulary important to
a reading of “The Untelling.”
—David Kirby. “And Then I Thought of The Monument.” Mark
Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary Culture. (Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press. 1990): pp. 28–31.
31
SVEN BIRKERTS ON THE LACK OF TELOS IN
STRAND’S POETRY
[Sven Birkerts is the director of students and core faculty
writing instructor in Bennington College’s MFA
Program and an instructor in Emerson College’s MFA
Program. He is a prolific and respected critic/reviewer
and the author of The Gutenberg Elegies. He received a
National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in
Reviewing, among other awards. In this review, he
discusses the lack of a telos and the tension that absence
creates within the collection. ]
...[W]e also find the long tour-de-force narratives “The Story of
Our Lives” and “The Untelling,” both of which pit narration
against itself, showing how the memory tape can be played
backward, undoing the causal chain until, as Eliot wrote, “What
might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is
always present.” In Strand’s version, the real and the possible
commingle in the perpetual present of art. He ends “The
Untelling,” a sequence in which the speaker is a writer wrestling
with what might be either a memory or an imagined event, by
putting the tail inside the snake’s mouth; the writer begins the
poem that we have, presumably, been reading. We read:
He turned and walked to the house.
He went to the room
that looked out on the lawn.
He sat and began to write:
THE UNTELLING
To the Woman in the Yellow Dress
While the conceit of these longer poems is interesting, the lineby-line progress is often tedious, without much to savor in the
poetry itself.
—Sven Birkerts. “The Art of Absence” The New Republic 3, 961
(December 17, 1990): pp. 37.
32
C R I T I C A L A N A LY S I S O F
“The Way It Is”
Wallace Stevens epigraph “The world is ugly. / And the people
are sad.” perfectly begins the very dark view of Strand’s fear
ravaged speaker. In this poem, suburbia becomes a nightmarish
hell where neighbors act as birds of prey and the potential for
violence sleeps one house over. Strand chose the poem to end his
third book of poems. With its longer narrative structure and
broadened concern with the public domain, it marks a change in
Strand from the self-referential to the socially aware. The
nightmare is no longer solely in the poet’s head. It has come to
the neighborhood to roost.
The title suggests a proclamation—a definitive fact that will
clearly define life for the reader. The definition disheartens. The
poem begins with the speaker spending a sleepless night. In stark
contrast to the speaker, the things around him are “cold
unruffled” as he stews through the evening. Immediately, despite
the neatness of the couplets that end the first stanza, we know
that something is awry. In the next apartment, the speaker’s
neighbor becomes a menace. Strand keeps the words and the
image militaristic and threatening:
My neighbor marches in his room,
wearing the sleek
mask of a hawk with a large beak.
He stands by the window. A violet plume
rises from his helmet’s dome.
The neighbor marches, dons a helmet, and wears a mask of a
hawk—symbols of ferocity, war and hunting. In the light of the
open window, the neighbor is bathed in a white light from the
moon, and his plume is violet, a traditional color of power. This
threat lives next door to the speaker, creating an atmosphere of
continual pending warfare.
That sense of danger is strangely intensified in the next stanza.
33
The neighbor sits in the park with his helmet, ready to go into
battle, to begin his hunt. In his hand, he waves a little American
flag as if to suggest that his aggression is for country, is the way
of the country, a national pastime of warmongering, perpetual
suburban defense. The neighbor is stealthy, according to the
speaker, who cannot contain his fear. At any moment, the speaker
expects violence to be enacted upon him. To protect himself, the
speaker sinks into denial, pretending to be a dog under the table,
convincing himself that were he a dog, and not a human, he
would not be killed. In his America, people are killed before
animals, focusing on the perversion of values in America.
As the speaker rests, delusional beneath the table, his
neighbor’s wife comes home. She controls her husband through
sex. All descriptions of her are dark, suggesting some sort of
complicity, “She seems to wade / through long flat rivers of
shade. / The soles of her feet are black. / She kisses her husband’s
neck / and puts her hand inside his pants. //” She too may be as
predatory as her husband, but her conquest is not death, it is
sexual submission. The speaker seems to fear her as well. After
the woman’s sexual invitation, the couple has sexual relations,
and she becomes the devil, the act, evil. He describes it “They
roll on the floor, his tongue / is in her ear, his lungs reek with the
swill and weather of hell.”
But the evil is happening not only within the apartment
building. It surrounds the speaker on every side. The scene on
the streets is apocalyptic, harkening back to the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse and images of the Holocaust. People lie on
their backs in the street, weeping as ash settles around them.
“Their clothes are torn from their backs. Their faces are worn. /
Horsemen are riding around them, telling them why / they
should die.” The scene is unutterable despair, articulated simply,
with the sort of psychic distance reminiscent of dreams.
In the next stanza, Strand returns to his speaker, who is still
tossing restlessly in his imperturbable bed. The wife tells him
that her husband is dead. The ambiguity here is devastating.
Perhaps the wife killed the husband. Perhaps she did it for the
speaker. Perhaps she is the carrier of the strange, “sleek” bird
mask. As to whether she is more or less evil, we never know. The
34
speaker accepts all the possibilities with little interest, glad only
that the immediate threat is gone. He prays she is telling the
truth, that he may be released from his paralyzing fear and
insomnia. Around him the room is gray from the light of the
moon and he drifts into a restless sleep with strange, portentous
dreams.
As the speaker sleeps, he dreams that he is floating, then
falling and incapable of calling for help. Even his scream is
“vague.” The speaker cannot even collect himself for that. In the
next dream, he envisions himself in a park, “on horseback,
surrounded by dark, / leading the armies of peace.” This dream
speaks to Robert Lowell’s poem, “For the Union Dead.” Union
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts
Volunteer Regiment lead the first black regiment gathered in the
North into battle, and as Lowell imagines it “…He rejoices in
man’s lovely, / peculiar power to choose life and die— / when he
leads his black soldiers to death, / he cannot bend his back.”
When he died with his men in battle, Southern officers ordered
his body to be thrown into a ditch with his men, and never
marked to show how disgraceful they thought his actions. In
Strand’s poem, though the speaker tries to lead the armies of
peace, his horse’s legs will not bend; this horse and this man are
monuments that represent little in actual lives. The horse is
merely a facsimile of a horse as the speaker’s courage is merely a
facsimile of Shaw’s courage. Unlike Shaw, the speaker drops the
reigns, defeated as if to suggest that heroes can no longer exist in
this nightmarish America.
All around the speaker, the normal sounds of the night
continue. “Taxis stall / in the fog, passengers fall / asleep. Gas
pours // from a tri-colored stack.” Strand breaks his lines to
emphasize the action: falling, stalling, pouring. The negativity
pervades the entire scene, as things seem to happen
uncontrollably. To combat the helplessness, people tell
themselves stories again and again, trying to recreate their lives
into something acceptable that is lived and chosen. Thematically,
the poem speaks strongly to the couple in “The Story of Our
Lives,” who lose even the ability to tell their own story. The
population is soulless. According to the speaker, “Everyone who
35
has sold himself wants to buy himself back.” Again, the feeling
here is resignation. Too much has happened for these people to
return to the lives they once envisioned for themselves. They
have been corrupted, and the corruption is marked by starkly
desperate imagery: “The night / eats into their limbs / like a
blight.”
The final stanza reaches a peak of despair and Strand expresses
it quietly. “Everything dims. / The future is not what it used to
be. / The graves are ready. The dead / shall inherit the dead.” As
the world darkens, and it is uncertain as to why it is so dark,
Strand does not try to account for causality specifically, he
merely claims that “the future is not what it used to be.” Instead,
the future leaves the people within it to become deadened or
predatory or terribly afraid. They are among the emotionally
dead, the untouchables who would kill a human before a dog,
who would circle people, tearing at them and telling them why
they are not worthy of life, or even those that huddle in their
rooms and dream of fighting this vague evil but are defeated by
their own thoughts before they even begin the battle. Ultimately,
the meek shall not inherit the earth. The picture is much
bleaker—hell on earth, where the dead inherit the already
emotionally dead.
36
CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“The Way It Is”
RICHARD HOWARD ON THE POET’S MOVEMENT FROM
INTERIOR DREAMSCAPE TO PUBLIC PLACE
[Richard Howard teaches in the Writing Division of the
School of the Arts, Columbia University. He is the
author of eleven books of poetry, a gifted translator and
a respected essayist on contemporary poetry. In this
essay, Howard examines Strand’s shift from an interior,
self reflective, mirror-like landscape to the dramatic
broadening of perspective in “The Way It Is.”]
Strand’s work since Reasons for Moving widens his scope, even as
it sharpens his focus; just as he had divided his body against itself
in order to discover an identity, he now identifies the body politic
with his own In order to recover a division; in a series of political
prospects, “Our Death,” “From a Litany,” “General,” and finest
of all, “The Way It Is,” the poet conjugates the nightmares of
Fortress America with his own stunned mortality to produce an
apocalypse of disordered devotion:
Everyone who has sold himself wants to buy himself back.
Nothing is done. The night
eats into their limbs
like a blight.
Everything dims.
The future is not what it used to be.
The graves are ready. The dead
shall inherit the dead.
But what gives these public accents of Strand’s their apprehensive
relevance is not just a shrewd selection of details (“My neighbor
marches in his room, / wearing the sleek / mask of a hawk with a
large beak ... His helmet in a shopping bag, / he sits in the park,
waving a small American flag”), nor any cosy contrast of the
poet’s intimeries against a gaining outer darkness (“Slowly I dance
out of the burning house of my head. / And who isn’t borne again
37
and again into heaven?”). Rather it is the sense that public and
private degradation, outer and inner weather, tropic and glacial
decors (Saint Thomas and Prince Edward Islands, in fact) are all
versions and visions of what Coleridge called the One Life, and
that the whole of nature and society are no more than the
churning content of a single and limitless human body—the
poet’s own. Such a sense—and in Strand it occupies all the senses
(“the flesh of clouds burns / in the long corridors of sunlight. / I
have changed. No one’s death surprises me”)—enables the poet
to include much more life in these later poems of his; to invoke
the wars of filiation, marriage and paternity; to explore the ennui
of mere survival:
Must we settle for a routine happiness?
Tell me something rotten about yourself.
Tell me you’ve been to the doctor and he says
I am going to die. Save me!
and to endure the depredations of the past, the claims of merely
having been:
Time tells me what I am. I change and am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.
—Richard Howard. “Mark Strand: ‘The Mirror Was Nothing
Without You.’ ” Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the
United States Since 1950, Enlarged Edition (New York, Atheneum:
1980): pp. 596–597.
HAROLD BLOOM ON THE POEM AS REPRESENTATIVE OF
A SHIFT IN STRAND’S POETICS
[Harold Bloom is the Sterling Professor of Humanities
at Yale University. He is a prolific and influential critic
and the author of the renowned Anxiety of Influence and
The Western Canon. In this essay, Bloom engages Strand’s
shift from his peripheral private phantasmagoria to a
public phantasmagoria.]
38
Strand’s unique achievement is to raise this mode to an aesthetic
dignity that astonishes me, for I would not have believed, before
reading him, that it could be made to touch upon a sublimity.
Darker moves upon the heights in its final poems, “Not Dying”
and the longer “The Way It Is,” the first work in which Strand
ventures out from his eye’s first circle, toward a larger art. “Not
Dying” opens in narcist desperation, and reaches no resolution,
but its passion for survival is prodigiously convincing. “I am
driven by innocence,” the poet protests, even as like a Beckett
creature he crawls from bed to chair and back again, until he
finds the obduracy to proclaim a grotesque version of natural
supernaturalism:
I shall not die.
The grave result
and token of birth, my body
remembers and holds fast.
“The Way It Is” takes its tone from Stevens at his darkest
(“The world is ugly / And the people are sad”) and quietly edges
out a private phantasmagoria until this merges with the public
phantasmagoria we all of us now inhabit. The consequence is a
poem more surprising and profound than Lowell’s justly
celebrated “For the Union Dead,” a juxtaposition made
unavoidable by Strand’s audacity in appropriating the same
visionary area:
I see myself in the park
on horseback, surrounded by dark,
leading the armies of peace.
The iron legs of the horse do not bend.
I drop the reins. Where will the turmoil end?
Fleets of taxis stall in the fog, passengers fall
asleep. Gas pours
from a tri-colored stack.
Locking their doors,
people from offices huddle together,
telling the same story over and over.
39
Everyone who has sold himself wants to buy himself back.
Nothing is done. The night
eats into their limbs
like a blight.
Everything dims.
The future is not what it used to be.
The graves are ready. The dead
shall inherit the dead.
Self-trained to a private universe of irreality, where he has
learned the gnomic wisdom of the deep tautology, Strand peers
out into the anxieties of the public world, to show again what can
be shown, the shallow tautologies of a universal hysteria, as much
a hysteria of protest as of societal repression. Wherever his
poetry will go after Darker, we can be confident it goes as a
perfected instrument, able to render an image not of any created
thing whatsoever, but of every nightmare we live these days,
separately or together.
—Harold Bloom. “Dark and Radiant Peripheries: Mark Strand
and A. R. Ammons,” Southern Review (Winter 1972): pp. 133–41.
PETER STITT ON THE POEM AS AN ATTEMPT TO
DEFINE THE WORLD
[Peter Stitt is the Editor of The Gettysburg Review and a
full Professor of English at Gettysburg College. He is a
prolific reviewer and the author of Uncertainty and
Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets and The World’s
Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets. In this review, he
examines the alienation of early Strand speakers based
on their perceptions of reality.]
A partial explanation for this intense sense of alienation may be
found in how this early speaker characterizes reality. It is perhaps
his paranoia that makes him emphasize so strongly the dangers
that lurk there. Injury and illness are among these but most
important is the fact of death, the ultimate assault of nature
40
against the self. The poem “Violent Storm” expresses much of
this feeling by talking about the dangers inherent in bad weather.
Superficial people may be able to party as the hurricane bears
down upon the coast, it is true,
But for us, the wide-awake, who tend
To believe the worst is always waiting
Around the next corner or hiding in the dry,
Unsteady branch of a sick tree, debating
Whether or not to fell the passerby,
It has a sinister air.
This central consciousness is also fastidious, apparently finding
much of the real world ugly—certainly much uglier than the
“bright landscapes” he concocts in his own head. The poem
“The Way It Is” is an attempt to define the general appearance
and nature of the world, with its epigraph taken from Stevens
(“The world is ugly. / And the people are sad.”) and its direct
concluding stanza: “Everything dims. / The future is not what it
used to be. / The graves are ready. The dead / shall inherit the
dead.”
So deeply does the speaker feel the ugliness of reality, its
power to render death and destruction upon him, that he
attempts to retreat farther and farther from it. Through his
death-consciousness, he diminishes the world until it virtually
disappears into nothingness: “I grow into my death. / My life is
small / and getting smaller. The world is green. / Nothing is all.”
Another poem expresses the same desire paradoxically: “More is
less. / I long for more.” The closer reality draws to nothingness,
the greater looms the power of the mind and the world it creates
for itself. This movement gives rise to two of the most important
issues in Strand’s early poetry—the question of identity and the
question of knowledge. How is man to be defined if he is this
radically alien to nature? And what can such a man know of a
world so foreign to him?
—Peter Stitt. “Stages of Reality: The Mind/Body Problem in
Contemporary Poetry” The Georgia Review 37: 1 (Spring 1983):
pp. 202.
41
C R I T I C A L A N A LY S I S O F
“Elegy for My Father”
“Elegy for My Father” is one of Strand’s most striking poems, for
the power of its litany, for the presence of the usually distant
poet, and for its foreshadowing of later poems, like Dark Harbor.
Strand places readers immediately into his psyche by providing
the dates of his father’s life. This notion clearly states that unlike
other poems, this speaker will be Mark Strand, a son trying to
reconcile the loss of his father and by extension, a part of himself.
The first of the poem’s six sections is entitled “The Empty
Body,” suggesting a certain level of psychic distance brought
about presumably from the shock of seeing his father’s dead
body. Throughout the section, Strand sets up the dichotomy of
all that is in the world and in the room, the father’s hands, his
arms, his mouth, “the distant sun,” “the pale green light of
winter”; all were there save his father. He repeats the line over
and over “you were not there,” it becomes a litany of grief, a way
in which the living son tries to accept his new reality by stating
and re-stating what he sees to be true but can hardly believe. By
calling to the father in the second person, there is still the
suggestion of a connection, as if the reader believes he can still
speak with the dead and find some sort of closure in that way.
In an attempt to gather the answers he feels he needs as a son,
the poet directs questions to his father, questions that are at first
flippant, then serious. The first answers suggest what one might
tell a child, as the poet asks questions of his father with the same
sort of vulnerability a child might show. “What did you wear? / I
wore a blue suit, a white shirt, yellow tie, and yellow socks. / What did
you wear? / I wore nothing. A scarf of pain kept me warm.” In this
way, the son tries to collect answers to questions that are so
emotional and clouded by memory that they are hard to
articulate. By the end of the section, the father becomes so
exhausted he can no longer answer the questions; he can only
repeat them back in affirmation to his son. The section gains
much of its power because it is so reminiscent of Strand himself.
The father’s answers which initially joke also ultimately lead to a
42
larger truth, one in which the son has absolute faith. They
suggest a gnosis for Strand’s central themes and poetic discourse.
The third section, “Your Dying,” is the longest and most
agonized, appropriately so to mirror the struggle of the family
waiting for the father’s body to yield to what his spirit had already
accepted. Throughout this section, the poet blames his father for
his seeming determination to die. He begins the section
“Nothing could stop you. / Not the best day. Not the quiet. Not
the ocean rocking. / You went on with your dying.” Strand
creates a litany, naming meticulously all the things that formerly
brought joy but could no longer touch the father. The pace picks
up, moved by short phrases and parallel constructions. The effect
is accusatory and furious. Strand repeats the claim that neither
the father’s son (Strand himself) nor his daughter could stop him,
and the betrayal and hurt evident in the statement is devastating,
particularly as the poet tries by referring himself in the third
person, as the son, to distance himself from the pain. That
struggle provides tension, giving the section a breathless feeling.
In the end of the section, nothing can bring the father back, “Not
your breathing. Not your life. / Not the life you wanted. / Not
the life you had. / Nothing could stop you.” The last lines show
that neither memory nor hope has hold of the father now; he is
irretrievable and the son cannot yet reconcile the loss.
By the fourth section, “Your Shadow,” the shadow is all that
remains of the father. It becomes the inheritance of the son who
chronicles its movement through the past. It travels from “The
Newsboys Home,” “The streets of New York,” “the street of
Montreal,” “Mexico City where you wanted to leave it.” The son
effortlessly relates the details of his father’s past, showing his
investment in the details. In some way, they have been his
formative details as well; in following the path of his father’s life,
even metaphorically, the poet becomes even more intimately
acquainted with the reality of his father’s dying and what that loss
truly is, from memory to corporeal reality. The poet/son retraces
his father’s steps, gathering his father’s past. He uses the
metaphor of reclaiming the lost shadow from all the places it had
been with the father. After the elder Strand died, the shadow was
left behind to mourn his death. Strand imagines it sleeping “at
43
the mouth of the furnace” waiting for the father and eating
“ashes for bread.” It eventually finds its way to Strand’s home
when it cannot find the father. It settles around the son, as if
finding a second home. For Strand, it is not enough to be second
hand, to be somehow the same as his father and yet other. He
chooses instead to send the shadow away. “Your shadow is yours.
I told it so. I said it was yours. / I have carried it with me too long.
I give it back.” In this final act, the son is emancipated from the
father, living on his on terms after being haunted by the father
and the father’s past. It frees him to grieve and move on.
With this new understanding, Strand finds himself watching
the other mourners with a certain impersonal distance. The fury
has subsided a little, and now Strand is ready to relate the
immediate scene, moving from his own mourning to that of
those around him. Their mourning borders on hysteria. They
mourn him by recreating him, in memory, in his last set of
clothes, in the money that will get him into heaven or out of hell,
with the prayers they send forth, with the begging they do at his
bedside. There is no way to reach the dying man.
But they cannot drag the buried light from your veins.
They cannot reach your dreams.
Old man, there is no way.
Rise and keep rising, it does no good.
They mourn for you the way they can.
Despite all of the machinations of the mourners, the pleas, the
hand wringing, the deals with God, the dead man is gone. Strand
has already released him in a way that the others cannot.
In the sixth section, the New Year has come and with it, both
the metaphors of death and rebirth that already pervade the
poem. The imagery of this section only serves to reinforce that
notion. In this winter scape, the poet tells his father, “Nobody
knows you.” The father is truly gone. He lies under “the weather
of stones,” acted upon and inanimate. It is a place without escape,
totally irrevocable, a realization that the poet has been coming to
throughout the poem. His father’s friends lie in their beds,
pleasantly enjoying sleep, its physical reality, and think nothing
of the dead man. The father sees nothing now; this lack of sight
44
and the knowledge it brings is one more form of death. The poet
repeats his opening line, as if to confirm once more that “It is
over. It is the winter and the new year.” The repetition suggests
a new setting, a new time, a new mindset. It is a walking away
from the past and the power of the father’s memory. The poet
acknowledges finally “And nothing comes back. / Because it is
over. / Because there is silence instead of a name. / Because it is
winter and the new year.” The litany becomes all the reasons that
Strand is moving on, and provide all of the apology necessary for
invoking the dead again. The litany creates a cycle that mirrors
that of death and rebirth, powerfully reinforcing the themes
carved out over the course of six sections.
45
CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“Elegy for My Father”
LAURENCE LIEBERMAN ON THE USE OF LITANY
[Laurence Lieberman is the author of twelve volumes of
poetry and three books of critical essays. He is on the
faculty in the University of Illinois MFA program and
has been the poetry editor at the University of Illinois
Press since 1971. In this essay, Lieberman asserts that
the use of litany creates a dirge that heightens the
profundity of the mourning in the poem.]
In “Elegy for My Father,” the stately, slow-paced, hypnotic dirge
that begins the new volume, Strand amplifies the serial mode of
litany. Exhibiting a remarkable range of technical virtuosity, he
adapts the device of image chains to six widely varying fantasias.
In each, a simple statement—flat and blunt—is repeated at
irregular intervals, and operates less like a conventional refrain
than an aria or leitmotiv in an opera. The statement tends to
fade, to become hidden, vanishing into a chanted monotony, but
it subtly builds resonance in the reader’s ear and accumulates a
force of quiet, but irreversible, authority. “Nothing could stop
you. You went on with your dying.”
In “Your Dying,” the midsection of the poem, the father’s
unswerving complicity in his progress toward death exalts the
process of welcoming death into an austere discipline, an artistry
that by its propulsive force of negation, by its revulsion from
nature and human society, sends all things into orbit around
itself. He achieves an absolute solipsism of dying, which is
mirrored by the son’s solipsism of mourning. The total psychic
withdrawal from life, paradoxically, adds a dimension to being
alive, a deepening and heightening of spirit, which threatens the
comfortable world of the living, the friends and neighbors who
“doze in the dark / of pleasure and cannot remember.” The living
are shocked into a panic of opposition—they are wavery,
unstable, flighty, aimless. The act of dying easily imposes its
46
higher will and design on the chaos of life, its deathly order on
the disorder that is prevalent everywhere.
The whole book is a profound act of mourning; hence, the
aptly grotesque irony of the fifth section of the elegy, titled
“Mourning,” a Kafkaesque caricature of conventional funerals in
which the mourning process, so indispensable to healing the
psychic wounds of bereavement, is debased and betrayed by selfpity. The common blind refusal to accept death is parodied as a
procession of beggarly kin pleading with the corpse to come back
to life, perverting the funeral rites into a litany of gamy ruses to
pamper and coddle him into not dying, as if a complex
gymnastics of undying could undo the death:
They mourn for you.
When you rise at midnight ...
They sit you down and teach you to breathe.
And your breath burns,
It burns the pine box and the ashes fall like sunlight.
They give you a book and tell you to read.
They listen and their eyes fill with tears.
The women stroke your fingers.
They comb the yellow back into your hair.
They shave the frost from your beard.
They knead your thighs.
They dress you in fine clothes.
They rub your hands to keep them warm.
They feed you. They offer you money.
They get on their knees and beg you not to die.
When you rise at midnight they mourn for you.
They close their eyes and whisper your name over and over.
But they cannot drag the buried light from your veins.
They cannot reach your dreams.
So far from resisting, or denying, the reality of his father’s
death, Strand’s own mode of mourning is to follow his father into
dying, taking as many steps down the path toward death as
possible short of dying himself, and though this process
culminates in a valiant entreaty invoking the invisible powers for
release from the bondage to his father’s corpse (“It came to my
house. / It sat on my shoulders. / Your shadow is yours. I told it
47
so. I said it was yours. / I have carried it with me too long. I give
it back.”), it is clear from the other poems of the present volume
that the elegy is only the first milestone in an interior odyssey in
which he follows a long, intricate course in developing a new
poetics that recapitulates his vision of his father’s dying. Strand is
obsessed, in poem after poem, with absence, vanishings,
disappearance of parts of his own psyche. The opening litany of
the elegy, “The Empty Body,” suggests that the author’s
obsession with disappearance grew initially out of the shock of
witnessing his father’s dead body. He could not fathom or accept
the emptiness—the spiritual evacuation—of the corpse:
The hands were yours, the arms were yours,
But you were not there.
The eyes were yours, but they were closed and would not open....
The body was yours, but you were not there.
The air shivered against its skin.
The dark leaned into its eyes.
But you were not there.
—Laurence Lieberman. “Mark Strand: The Book of Mourning.”
Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets
(Columbia and London, University of Missouri Press: 1995): pp.
220–222. Originally appeared in The Yale Review, 1968.
RICHARD HOWARD ON THE POEM AS AN AFFIRMATION
OF LIFE
[Richard Howard teaches in the Writing Division of the
School of the Arts, Columbia University. He is the
author of eleven books of poetry, a gifted translator and
a respected essayist on contemporary poetry. In this
essay, Howard examines the way in which Strand’s
insistent refusal of his father’s shadow, coupled with the
insistence of the poetic structure, ultimately affirms
process rather than stagnation.]
One more celebration of an empty place, this elegy is an
emblematic trajectory, a six-poem acknowledgment of the
48
necessity to put off knowledge, to deny, to refuse, to gainsay:
“There were no secrets. There was nothing to say.” Strand
insists, or broods, which is his brand of insistence, on the
importance, for individual survival (“they cannot reach your
dreams”), of rejecting that extremity of consciousness which
process, which historical existence, cannot endure or transcend.
Sometimes—later on in the book—he is wistful about such
ecstatic apprehensions (“If only there were a perfect moment ...
if only we could live in that moment”), but he is quite certain that
they are not available to him, that they are not within life, as
indeed the sense of the word ecstasy makes evident they are not.
So Strand divides to conquer, divides the self to conquer the self
(“you are the neighbor of nothing”), for the price of experience,
experience which Blake has told us cannot be bought for a song,
is negation.
Which is why Strand writes his lament not in verse but in the
very dialect of negation, in prose, the one linguistic medium out
to eliminate itself, to use itself up in the irrecoverable rhythms of
speech rather than in the angelic (or ecstatic) measures of
repetition and return. No recurrence, no refrain here, but the
horror of knowing too much, of suffering more than is to be
borne: “I have carried it with me too long, I give it back,” Strand
says to his father’s “shadow”, that Blakean spector of the mortal
body which is life without time, or death within eternity where
“there is silence instead of a name.” For once we accept, once we
put on the consciousness of others, Strand implies, we are lost.
Such an assumption is a “rejoicing among ruins,” a “crystal
among the tombs”; to say No to consciousness—
... to stand in a space is to
forget time, to forget time
is to forget death ...
is the one way of evincing and yet evading the horror: negation
is a mask which points to itself (as a mask), advancing. The prose
sentences of “Elegy for My Father” are for life in their refusal to
recuperate a rhythm, to reverse. They insist upon process, upon
the rudiments of narrative (“The beginning is about to occur.
The end is in sight”) which will get past those nodal points when
49
it all becomes so saturated with Being that life has nowhere to go
and so cannot go on. Strand’s poem is a way of outdistancing the
mind in its submission to consciousness—it is a discarding in
order to pick up the blank card, the next ... “that silence is the
extra page.”
—Richard Howard. “Mark Strand: ‘The Mirror Was Nothing
Without You.’” Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the
United States Since 1950, Enlarged Edition (New York, Atheneum:
1980): pp. 599–600. Originally appeared in the Ohio Review (1974).
DAVID KIRBY ON THE POEM AS LOSS OF SELF
[David Kirby, author or co-author of twenty-one books,
is the W. Guy McKenzie Professor of English at Florida
State University. Recipient of five Florida State Teaching
Awards, he has had work appear in the Best American
Poetry and the Pushcart Prize series. In this essay, he
posits the poem as a loss of self and the development of
a poetic voice that would ultimately result in The
Monument.]
Perhaps none of this would have been possible, though, had
Strand not written “Elegy for My Father (Robert Strand
1908–68).” This magnificent poem, one of the great elegies of
the English language, distinguishes itself from Lycidas and
Adonais and In Memoriam by being more a poem of dispersal than
they are, a poem of cleaning up and giving away. The loss of a
father is in part a loss of self for any man, provided he is able to
lose it. However, as one might expect from Strand at this point,
to lose that self takes effort.
“Elegy for My Father” consists of six parts. Part 1, “The
Empty Body,” is a fairly straightforward anatomy of the body’s
physical aspects in contrast to its departed spirit. “The hands
were yours, the arms were yours,” begins the poem, “But you
were not there.” There is no pain anymore, no secrets. The
world encroaches, but it can no longer trouble the dead man:
50
The body was yours, but you were not there.
The air shivered against its skin.
The dark leaned into its eyes.
But you were not there.
(85)
Part 2, “Answers,” is a dialogue in which each question (except
the last two) is asked twice and receives two answers, the first
literal and the second figurative; the first response is always true,
the second truer. For example, when the son asks the father
whom he slept with, the father says a different woman every
night, but when the question is repeated, the father says he
always slept alone—each of us sleeps this way, and none more so
than the libertine. In this section the father seems at first a cynic
(“nothing means much to me anymore”), then a skeptic (“I don’t
know, I have never known” [86]), and ultimately a stoic. Amid the
multiplicity of answers, the section concludes with an
unambiguous acknowledgment of death’s finality: when the son
asks how long he should wait for the father, the answer is that he
should not wait, that the father is tired and wants to lie down.
“Are you tired and do you want to lie down?” asks the son (86).
But the father is so exhausted by this point that he can only
repeat the question.
Silent now, the father begins the last stage of his dying. The
third part of the poem, “Dying,” is the longest, for death is never
easy. The father seems determined; the section begins, “Nothing
could stop you,” and the line is repeated throughout. In
elaboration of that statement, most of the other lines begin with
the word not: “Not your friends who gave you advice. / Not your
son. Not your daughter who watched you grow small.” Grief
spills like water here as the father himself wakes at night, wet
with tears, as the “son who thought you would live forever”
observes over and over, now in anguish, now numbly, “You went
on with your dying” (86–87).
The father’s effort over, the speaker must now make his own.
The father achieves a kind of completion in death; the divided
self that troubles so many others in Strand’s poetry comes
together here in part 4, entitled “The Shadow.” Still, the
51
surviving son must assist the departed father, just as the living
pray for or attend the dead in formally organized religions. Here,
the speaker catalogs each appearance of the father’s shadow and
the shadow’s return to its source:
The rooms in Belém where lizards would snap at mosquitos
have given it back.
The dark streets of Manaus and the damp streets of Rio have
given it back.
Mexico City where you wanted to leave it has given it back.
(88)
The most important place for the shadow to have lingered is in
the speaker’s own house, where “it sat on my shoulders.” But the
speaker must be his own man now. This section ends with the
speaker’s angry address, not to the father whom he loved, but to
the father’s shadowy partial self, the abstraction the dead become
when the living reduce them to terms that are manageable and
false:
Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours.
I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.
(89)
As in “The Untelling,” one succeeds here by failing: to never
write the poem is to write the best poem ever, and to reject a
limited version of a dead father is to have that father always in his
fullness. The two works also have in common the fact that the
speaker in each, while on the surface honoring something
exterior (a poem, a father), is secretly engaged in his own
salvation.
Among other things, “Elegy for My Father” is a poem
noticeable for its symmetry. The first two comparatively brief
sections introduce the father in body and spirit, the longer third
and fourth sections deal with the father’s hard-fought dying and
the son’s equally difficult struggle to both honor his father and
live his own life, and the two short, final sections describe the
public mourning for the father and the son’s private consolation.
52
In part 5, “Mourning,” those who knew the dead man simply
“mourn for you the way they can” (90). However, in the poem’s
last part, “The New Year,” there is genuine closure as the speaker
moves beyond the clichés of traditional mourning to make peace
on his own terms with the spirit of the departed parent, now “the
neighbor nothing.”
—David Kirby. “And Then I Thought of The Monument.” Mark
Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary Culture (Columbia and
London, University of Missouri Press: 1990): pp. 38–41.
SVEN BIRKERTS ON THE POEM’S INFLUENCES
[Sven Birkerts is the director of students and core faculty
writing instructor at Bennington College’s MFA
Program and an instructor in Emerson College’s MFA
Program. He is a prolific and respected critic/reviewer
and the author of The Gutenberg Elegies. He received a
National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in
Reviewing among other awards. In this review, he
discusses Strand’s treatment of absence through
borrowed style elements, taken from Spanish and South
American writers. ]
For Strand, it is thus: we have been hurled into being and there
is no immanent or transcendent ground for the self. Yet we
possess, in uneasy wakefulness, a capacity to perceive and to
reflect. This is our curse, for it cuts us off from the serene
unknowingness of the rest of the natural world. The traditional
recourse has been religion—to believe that we are not held
simply within ourselves, but, in some fashion, within the love (or
purpose) of a higher being. But there is no hint of this in Strand,
not anywhere. He has rigorously pruned from his lines anything
that could suggest a telos, or a redemption of pain and isolation.
His figures are at large in space; they move about in time—time
afflicts them—but they never progress to anything. (...)
With the publication in 1973 of The Story of Our Lives, Strand
made what was for him a significant departure, leaving behind
53
the short poems, so distinctive in their polished austerity, to
explore the rhetorical and narrative possibilities of the long
poem. The book opens with the powerful “Elegy for My Father,”
a poem in six sections. Strand’s lines are loose, often repetitive,
but they press at their subject with a mounting urgency. In the
absence of any argument or metaphysics, the sheer perseverance
of address is impressive. Strand succeeds by varying the pitch and
approach, moving from the affectless pronouncements of the
first section:
The hands were yours, the arms were yours,
But you were not there.
The eyes were yours, but they were closed
and would not open.
to a more urgent reimagining of the process of dying in section
three:
You put your watch to your ear.
You felt yourself slipping.
You lay on the bed.
You folded your arms over your chest and
you dreamed of the world without you.
to the final section, which achieves an impersonal, even
elemental perspective, integrating the loss into the rhythm of
seasonal passage:
It is winter and the new year.
Nobody knows you.
Away from the stars, from the rain of light,
You lie under the weather of stones.
The elegy manifests rather overtly the influences of Spanish
and South American poets. Strand freely adopts the surreal
particularizations favored by Neruda and Vallejo (“The years, the
hours, that would not find you / Turned in the wrists of other.”)
and the recursive repetitions of Carlos Drummond de Andrade,
whom Strand has translated.
—Sven Birkerts. “The Art of Absence.” The New Republic 3, 961
(December 17, 1990): pp. 37.
54
EDWARD BYRNE ON THE POEM AS A PRECURSOR TO A
BLIZZARD OF ONE
[Edward Byrne is a Professor of American Literature and
creative writing at Valparaiso University. He is the
author of five volumes of poetry and the editor of
Valparaiso Poetry Review. In this essay, he considers the
poem as part of the poetic evolution that resulted in
Strand’s Pulitzer Prizing winning volume as well as his
later book of essays, The Weather of Words.]
The same concerns voiced in Blizzard of One were evident more
than a decade ago when readers encountered The Continuous Life
(1990): “When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and
the sky / Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of
cirrus / And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are
suspended in flight, / Not every man knows what is waiting for
him ...” (“The End”). Although death as “the central concern”
and the issue of scenes in a poet’s life being witnessed “as they
exist in passing” may be most clearly evident earlier in The Story
of Our Lives (1973), especially “Elegy for My Father” and “The
Untelling,” those compelling poems in memory of his parents
starting and concluding this important and influential volume
that appeared more than a quarter century ago:
It is winter and the new year.
Nobody knows you.
Away from the stars, from the rain of light,
You lie under the weather of stones.
[“Elegy for My Father”]
He leaned forward over the paper
and he wrote:
... They moved beyond the claims
of weather, beyond whatever news there was,
and did not see the dark beginning to deepen
in the trees and bushes, and rise in the folds
of their own dresses and in the stiff white
of their own shirts.
[“The Untelling”]
55
Here, as well as elsewhere in many of his poems, particularly
more recent works, Strand’s attention to suspended moments or
different measurements of time again recalls his earliest pleasure
of reading McLeish’s poem “both about time and in time.”
However, these poems also resemble Robert Penn Warren’s
repeated explorations of time, timelessness, and no-time,
especially in his later poetry—or as Warren would state it in
“There’s a Grandfather’s Clock in the Hall,” those moments
when “Time thrusts through the time of no-Time.” Though
perhaps not as strong as other influences, Warren’s distinctive
poetic figure is often present, lingering not far behind the lines
of Strand’s poetry, such as those in “The Garden” (The Late Hour,
1978), a poem dedicated to Warren, and one reminiscent of “The
Untelling”.
—Edward Byrne. “Weather Watch: Mark Strand’s The Weather of
Words.” Valparaiso Poetry Review: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
II: 2 (Spring/Summer 2001): www.valpo.edu/english/vprv2n2.html.
56
C R I T I C A L A N A LY S I S O F
“Dark Harbor”
Despite its portentous title, “ Dark Harbor” is a poem of redemption,
an act of reclamation through song and through a direct
confrontation with mortality. In typical Strand fashion, it is not
enough to casually imagine an afterlife; instead, he actively
constructs it, forcing both he and the reader to face a landscape
that may well be death, where reality is made exclusively by the
dead and for the dead. The living are too earnest in their every
day pursuits, assuming consequences that simply don’t exist in
this new world where death is not the ultimate consequence.
Strand begins the book length poem with a short prologue,
entitled, “Proem.” In it, the narration is third person,
presumably a poet, who chooses to leave behind his town and all
that he knows. As he journeys: “he would move his arms // And
begin to mark, almost as a painter would, / The passages of
greater and lesser worth, the silken / Topes and calls to this or
that, coarsely conceived….” The poet is being posited as painter,
his search for detail and symbols a part of his work; and as he
walks away, he finally finds himself able to breathe. In this
uncharted landscape, he tells himself, “This is the life.” In the
first section, the point of view shifts so that the “he” of the first
“proem” has become the “I” in the interior. The reader is to
believe the narrator has entered “the night without end” a
metaphor for death, the very thing that so many of Strand’s
earlier characters are trying to avoid. In this place, “it is best to
be ready, for the ash / Of the body is worthless and only goes so
far.” In essence, Strand is freeing his narrator to take the journey
without the encumbrance of the body and its sundry boundaries.
With the mind, there are no such restrictions, and that is part of
the journey foretold in “Proem.”
In the second section, the speaker claims “I am writing from a
place you have never been,” calling readers to attention. This will
not be death of hellfire and brimstone; it is somewhere else,
regardless of punishment and godliness. What is here is an
extension of the mind, a greater capacity for joy and emotion
unclouded by obligation. When “the heavenly choir at the
57
barbecue” is “adjusting its tone to serve the occasion,” all the
participants are “staring, stunned into magnitude.” This place
opens up the possibility of awe and celebration. He asserts in the
third section that this is a pre-body place; people have been here
before:
And you pass by unsure if this coming back is a failure
Or a sign of success, a sign that the time has come
To embrace your origins as you would yourself,
It is the place primordial, both pre and post body. Here memory
coincides, in the shape of Mom and Dad, in the shape of dreams,
in the shape of the landscape. It is both familiar and exotic. In the
fifth section, the speaker views the other side of the equation: the
living, and claims:
On the other side, no one is looking this way.
They are committed to obstacles,
To the textures and levels of darkness,
To the tedious enactment of duration,
And they labor not for bread or love
But to perpetuate the balance between the past
And the future. They are the future as it
Extends itself, just as we are the past
Coming to terms with itself.
In this stanza, the living are trying hard to provide for their
families. They work with practical concerns to assure a future.
The dead don’t need to do that; their time goes on. Their notion
of the past, as with writers who have the possibility of writing
something immortal, is marked differently, less concerned with
practicality. There existence is no longer finite. Strand suggests
that the dead view the past to make sense of it. That is their
project. As a poet, the narrator reconciles with memory, whether
it be ancestral or a studied heritage, as in the case of the sections
of Dark Harbor that pay homage to poets of Strand’s past,
Octavio Paz, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Richard Howard,
Rilke, and others.
58
In section X, Strand presents one of his most central trials as
a poet and inheritor of the art:
It is a dreadful cry that rises up,
Hoping to be heard, that comes to you
As you wake, so your day will be spent
In the futile correction of a distant longing.
He relates the process of writing and re-writing, its ongoing
frailties. In a sort of ars poetica, Strand attempts to answer why
he writes, why he listens to the voices of misery, of heartbreak, of
fear, and of pain:
And you have no choice but to follow their prompting,
Saving something of that sound, urging the harsh syllables
Of disaster into music.
He continues a few lines later:
How do you turn pain
Into its own memorial, how do you write it down,
Turning it into itself as witnessed
Through pleasure, so it can be known, even loved,
As it lives in what it could not be.
This, it seems is the project of the book, to conceive of how
poetry can articulate that which could not be spoken, indeed,
could barely be endured. It posits the music of poetry as
something that might make pain something loved, something
more than the events themselves. It might make immortality.
Moving ahead to the sixteenth section, Strand invokes his
acknowledged mentor, Wallace Stevens, “It is true, as someone
has said, that in/ A world without heaven all is farewell.” This is
a frightening truth, to suggest that without a god figure, the end
is truly the end. Loved ones will not be rediscovered in heaven.
They are simply gone from our lives. The notion forces a
different way of living. Strand continues to drive the point home
59
throughout the poem, insisting that nothing will keep that truth
from being, not ignorance, not lack of feeling, not denial. It is
simultaneously what the poet must endure and must express. It is
the human condition, and the condition of the songster that so
saddens Orpheus, the poet’s alter ego, in section XXVIII:
Orpheus can change the world
For a while, but he cannot save it, which is his despair.
It is a brilliant limitation that he enacts and
He knows it, which is why the current of his song
Is always mournful, always sad. It is even worse
For the rest of us.
The plight is the same. The poet can change the world for as
long as the reader chooses to engage the song. In a sense, Strand
is commenting on his own early works, which are so often
described as “dark;” he offers a compelling reason for that
darkness. Also, in this section, as in others, a mirror appears, but
like the images that will follow in other sections, that mirror
shows a paradise that cannot be touched.
A shadowed glass held within its frozen calm an image
Of abundance, a bloom of humanness, a hymn in which
The shapes and sounds of Paradise are buried.
It is the trick of the mirror, to make visible that which cannot be
accessed, like perfection and the act that might save the world.
Still, the act of writing restores the spirit simply because it is an
attempt to unearth the mirror image and the inaccessible or,
impossible to articulate, human truth that is reflected. It is always
the fulfillment of the mirror image for which the poet strives.
Along with Orpheus, Strand invokes another mythic name,
Marsyas, the satyr, skinned by Apollo for daring to challenge the
god to a contest of music. The poet ruminates on the plight of
the satyr, whose blood became a river, whose song was beautiful
and lost. He questions the use of the body:
60
Or is a body scraped
From the bone of experience, the chart of suffering
To be read in such ways that all flesh might be redeemed,
At least for the moment, the moment it passes into song.
Strand returns again to the notion that music is redemptive, that
the body in service of music is made meaningful. He builds this
understanding throughout the poem so that it culminates in the
last section. In the dark harbor, this landscape that is the afterlife,
or some form of immortality or perhaps, more accurately, post
mortality, there is some form of faith, or power, and it is song,
the word, poetry, and those who sing it are angels. In the final
section, the speaker arrives in a misty place to find poets huddled
around a fire:
there were many poets who wished to be alive again.
They were ready to say the words they had been unable to
say—
Words whose absence had been the silence of love,
Of pain, and even of pleasure.
Finally, he figures these former poets as something more divine
than a set of lost wishes and lost words:
I looked away to the hills
Above the river, where the golden lights of sunset
And sunrise are one and the same, and saw something flying
Back and forth, fluttering its wings. Then it stopped in mid-air.
It was an angel, one of the good ones, about to sing.
This final angel is redemption not only for the dead poets, who
thought themselves lost, but also for the world at large, who can
listen to the song, and if they are careful not to look back, this
Orphic angel might bring them back from the dead.
61
CRITICAL VIEWS ON
“Dark Harbor”
CHRISTOPHER BENFEY ON THE POEM AS A KIND OF
ARS POETICA
[Christopher Benfey is Professor of English at Mount
Holyoke. He is the author of several critical studies,
among them a biography of Stephen Crane which was
named a “notable book of the year” by the New York
Times and most recently, he published Degas in New
Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and
George Washington Cable, which the Chicago Tribune
named on the 1997’s ten most important books. In this
review, he shows how the influences and the techniques
converge in Dark Harbor, to arrive at a kind of ars
poetica.]
Strand has worked steadily on, transforming himself from a
surrealistic, “deep-image” poet of the ‘60s (a description that I
will qualify in a moment) to someone who, in a different voice,
eludes easy categorization. His new book is a kind of summing
up: of the poet’s task in dark times; of a poet’s engagement with
predecessors and contemporaries; of what poetry can make, and
make happen. Dark Harbor is a fine occasion for making sense of
Strand. ( ... )
This is the voice of Dark Harbor, Strand’s hauntingly beautiful
new volume. It is a single long poem consisting of a “Proem” and
forty-five numbered sections. The long poem in English derives
from at least three traditions, each with its own conventions and
generic expectations: the epic (The Bridge, Paterson, The Waste
Land, among twentieth-century examples); the novel in verse
(Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate); and the sonnet sequence
(Lowell’s Notebook and its spill-off volumes, Berryman’s Sonnets).
Dark Harbor belongs to the third category; its major forebears
are Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and Stevens’s longer poetic
sequences. The elastic, three-line stanzas, with a good deal of
62
enjambment across lines and across stanzas, also derive from
Stevens, and from various versions of terza rima reaching back to
Dante (a bit of whose work Strand has recently translated). (...)
Strand has always had what Stevens called “a mind of winter,”
more attuned to austerities than to luxuries. He is in love with
negatives, privatives, the empty and erased. “I would like to be /
In that solitude of soundless things, in the random / Company of
the wind, to be weightless, nameless” (xviii). When he mulls over
“the seasonal possibilities” in one poem (xvii) and vows in
another to take as his muse “The burning / Will of weather”
(“Proem”), it’s winter, predictably, that he apostrophizes:
O pretty densities of white on white!
O snowflake lost in the vestibules of April
air!
Beyond the sadness-the empty
restaurants,
The empty streets, the small lamps shining
Down on the town-I see only the stretches
Of ice and snow, the straight pines, the
frigid moon.
In these late poems, Strand has begun to notice the snow in
his own hair: “Here comes old age, dragging a tale of soft /
Inconvenience, of golfing in Florida, / Of gumming bad food.”
He sees himself increasingly as an aging poet writing in dark
times. In a poem that links him compellingly with Ashbery—it is
not the only bow to Ashbery in this book—Strand notes that
“There is / A current of resignation that charges even our most /
Determined productions.” In another poem, where Whitman is
the honored companion (“Me at my foulest, the song of me ...”),
Strand says flatly, his own Jeremiah, “These are bad times. Idiots
have stolen the moonlight. / They cast their shadowy pomp
wherever they wish.”
Such poems, in which Strand acknowledges a community of
poets, both quick and dead, to keep the practicing poet company,
are among the most powerful in Dark Harbor. In poem xxvii, six
63
unnamed poets are invoked and praised—the first three for
achievements of rhetoric (“I love how the beautiful echoed /
Within the languorous length of his sentences, / Forming a
pleasing pointless commotion”), the second three for intensities
of vision (“Of yet another the precision, the pursuit of rightness,
/ Balance, some ineffable decorum, the measured, circuitous /
Stalking of the subject, turning surprise to revelation”).
It is a guessing game. Is that Wallace Stevens behind Door
No. 1? Elizabeth Bishop behind No. 4, or No. 6? But more
important than any particular identification are the terms of
appreciation here. Three poets who verge on absurdity and
chaos, three poets who verge on revelation. What Strand admires
is the pushing to extremes, the flirtation with the pointless (here
meaning, also, “without punctuation,” or “pointing”) and also
the pushing toward vision. It is a high-wire act that the poem
itself enacts, with its graceful tercets and its single long,
languorous sentence covering twenty-one lines and concluding
like a child’s counting game:
And that leaves this one on the side of his
mountain,
Hunched over the page, thanking his loves
for coming
And keeping him company all this time.
—Christopher Benfey. “The Enigma of Arrival.” The New
Republic (March 8, 1993): pp. 36.
DAVID ST. JOHN ON THE USE OF DREAM AND MEMORY
[David St. John teaches at the University of Southern
California, Los Angeles. He is the author of five books of
poetry, the recipient of the Prix de Rome fellowship in
literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The James D.
Phelan Prize, the Discover/The Nation prize and several
NEA fellowships. In this essay, he discusses the use of
memory and dream to create the intimate tone and
dreamscape of the poem.]
64
Strand’s poetry has often been discussed as a hybrid of the acutely
perceived “real,” as in the work of a poet like Elizabeth Bishop,
and of the highly speculative and imaginative verbal pageants of
a poet like Wallace Stevens. Strand himself has frequently
acknowledged these poetic parents, yet never has their marriage
seemed more apt than under the shaded arbors of “Dark
Harbor.” The deceptive simplicity of Strand’s lines and the
exquisite eloquence of his cadences reflect an ease of intelligence
unequaled since Stevens. In fact, in its abstract lyricism, “Dark
Harbor’s” most profound echoes seem to arise out of Stevens’
gorgeous late poems, notably “Notes Towards a Supreme
Fiction.”
Many readers of Strand’s early poems (his “Selected Poems”
appeared in 1990) are accustomed to work in which the self is
predicated upon a renunciation of the world, or upon a
recognition of the insubstantiality of all things. Indeed, it
sometimes seems that the self is barely held by the sieve of these
poems. Yet Strand’s early work always desires to invent its own
transparency, so that a more complex psychological life might be
revealed.
These attempts to pare down the self to its own essentiality
gave way somewhat in Strand’s most recent collection, “The
Continuous Life” (1990). Where once the quotidian was
banished, the elements of daily life there found celebration.
Now, in “Dark Harbor,” we find ourselves accompanying the
poet along the course—the journey—of an artistic life. From the
safety of home we begin what the speaker ironically calls
“passages of greater and lesser worth,” with the triple pun on
“passages” of time, travel and poetry.
—David St. John “A Devotion to the Vagaries of Desire” Los
Angeles Times Book Review Section 5 (May 9, 1993).
DAVID LEHMAN ON THE THEMATIC INFLUENCE OF
WALLACE STEVENS
[David Lehman is faculty member of the graduate
writing programs at Bennington College and the New
65
School for Social Research. He is the author of five
books of poems, the editor of the Best American Poetry
Series and a distinguished literary critic and editor. In
this review, he likens Strand’s project to Wallace Steven’s
“farewell to an idea.”]
Favored by fortune, Mark Strand won recognition early on as
one of the foremost poets of his generation. Great things were
routinely expected of him. His lyrical and rhetorical gifts went
together with a painter’s eye and a connoisseur’s disposition, as
was clear from his first two collections, “Sleeping With One Eye
Open” (1964) and “Reasons for Moving” (1968). In addition to
poems, he wrote prose books, art books and books for children,
edited anthologies and translated from the Portuguese; and he
did all these things well.
Strand had no trouble mastering two of the signature styles of
the late 1960s and early ’70s: the surrealistic (dark or impish,
sometimes dark and impish) and the Spartan (curt, austere and
strict). In time, these poetic strategies would deposit him at the
end of a dead-end street, and in the 1980s he entered a prolonged
dry spell. I suspect that for Strand this crisis was rather like those
described in Romantic odes by Wordsworth and Coleridge—a
crisis of faith to be triumphantly resolved in the end by an act of
affirmative imagination.
Strand snapped out of a decade-long silence with the best
poems of his life—those collected in “The Continuous Life”
(1990). “Dark Harbor,” his new book-length poem, is continuous
with its predecessor in theme and manner, and surpasses it as an
act of sustained literary grace.
In “Keeping Things Whole,” his most famous early poem,
Strand wrote, “In a field / I am the absence / of field / This is /
always the case. / Wherever I am / I am what is missing.” These
lines were treated by critics and commentators as the poet’s cri de
coeur. But in Strand’s recent work, the negative presence that felt
itself to be a displacement of airy molecules has prepared the way
for a rich profusion of imaginings.
In “Dark Harbor” Strand remains committed to the task of
negotiating, in verse, between desire and despair, possibility and
66
fulfillment. On occasion he still resorts almost reflexively to a
negating gesture (“I am writing from a place you have never
been, / Where the trains don’t run, and planes / Don’t land”).
What is new is the confidence of his speech, the extraordinary
clarity with which he addresses any poet’s biggest themes: love
and death and aging and change.
“Dark Harbor” consists of 45 sections of varying lengths.
Each can be read as an independent poem. The book is written
entirely in unrhymed three-line stanzas strongly suggestive of
the unit favored by Strand’s acknowledged master, Wallace
Stevens, in several of his great later poems. Indeed, “Dark
Harbor” may be Strand’s response to “The Auroras of Autumn,”
in which Stevens spoke his “farewell to an idea”—an idea
pictured as a deserted cabin on a beach. Here is Strand on the
same theme in “Dark Harbor.” This is part 16 in its entirety.
“It is true, as someone has said, that in / A world without
heaven all is farewell. / Whether you wave your hand or not,
“It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes / It Is still
farewell, and if you pretend not to notice, / Hating what passes,
it is still farewell.
“Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean / Over
the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans / Diving, and the
glistening bodies of bathers resting.
“Are stages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement / Of
sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body / Are part of
the same, a simplicity that turns being
“Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion / Worth
celebrating, for what else does one do, / Feeling the weight of the
pelicans’ wings.
“The density of the palms’ shadows, the cells that darken /
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions / Of
chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end
“Is enacted again and again. And we feel it / In the temptations
of sleep, in the moon’s ripening, / In the wine as it waits in the
glass.”
The artful repetition, the dramatic tempo, are characteristic of
the author—as is the verbal gusto, the way lament turns into
celebration and an abstract argument is superseded by the
67
imagery supposed to illustrate it. In the ebb and flow of his threeline stanzas, Strand has found the right measure for a meditative
style capable of terrific intensity and compression but also of a
certain expansiveness.
“The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world,”
Stevens wrote, and Strand’s poetry is in some sense an
elaboration of the sentiment. His work is unabashedly dedicated
to the pursuit of the good life—and to the project of testing the
extent to which it is possible to lead that life. One can well
imagine him contemplating death on the abyss while holding a
half-full wine glass on a balcony overlooking a Mediterranean
beach in winter.
In “Dark Harbor” we catch glimpses of the poet celebrating
“how good life / Has been and how it has culminated in this
instant,” lunching with his editor at Lutece, then striding along
the pavement, well-fed, lanky, in his “new dark blue doublebreasted suit.” A poet of glamor for whom light is “the mascara
of Eden,” he also is a poet of romance who speaks of the “... feel
of kisses blown out of heaven, / Melting the moment they land.”
—David Lehman. “Mark Strand’s Farewells: Celebrating a Booklength Poem of ‘sustained literary grace.’ ” Chicago Tribune Books
(August 1, 1993): pp. 13.
JEFFREY DONALDSON ON THE USE OF THE ORPHEUS
MYTH
[Jeffrey Donaldson teaches poetry and American
literature at McMaster University. His current projects
include work in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye
project. He has two books of poems and is widely
published in little magazines including The Paris Review.
In this essay-review, Donaldson posits Orpheus as the
poet’s representative in the landscape of the darkening
harbor.]
Orpheus is the poet’s representative in this landscape, as he
wanders quietly with the others among nearly half of the poems
68
collected here, asking as the light fails, how and what he should
sing, how he is to be heard, where he should go, to whom he
should call. Naturally, for the poet Orpheus, the darkening
harbor is something more than just the geography of our
historical lives, where we stand just a little offshore, trying to get
away. For someone who has been to the underworld and back,
our dark harbor is also the river Styx, the entrance to Hades,
populated with shades of the unliving:
... my hand, as I lift it over the shade
Of my body, becomes a flame pointing the way
To a world from which no one returns, yet towards
Which everyone travels....
... And the new place, the night,
Spacious, empty, a tomb of lights, turning away,
And going under, becoming what no one remembers. (17)
Wherever Orpheus’s presence is felt, the late world that we
inhabit is perceived to be in part already the underworld that it
promises to become. There is something ghostly and unreal
about the shades of lives we find moving about in the poems.
“Our friends who lumbered from room to room / Now move like
songs or meditations winding down, / Or lie about, waiting for
the next good thing—/ Some news of what is going on above, /
A visitor to tell them who’s writing well, / Who’s falling in or out
of love” (45). It is difficult to tell here whether Strand is
describing Orpheus’s encounters in the underworld, or
accounting for that analogous sense of loss and remoteness from
friends that is our portion in this world. They are
indistinguishable. There is a good deal of Milton behind all of
this, the lounging of the fallen angels on the hillsides of hell
(which seem strangely earthly and rural in their appearance), and
Satan’s cry that we ourselves are hell. Dante is here as well, who,
in his representations of life in the inferno, could draw so richly
from his earthly experiences. For Strand, however, the
underworld of where we live, like the Hades of the pagan poets,
involves no sense of judgment or punishment, but describes a
69
condition of human nature; it is a metaphor for a psychological
state that is already ours, a Hades of loss and remoteness that we
already inhabit, and where “all you want is to rise out of the
shade / Of yourself into the cooling blaze of a summer night /
When the moon shines and the earth itself / Is covered and silent
in the stoniness of its sleep” (9). This leaves us with the feeling of
being liberated into our own afterlife (detached, remote,
suspended in limbo, circling within ourselves), and the feeling
that we have entered into the bitter promise of things as they are.
The same might be said of the landscape itself. Dante’s
scorching inferno and Milton’s fiery “darkness visible” have
become here a living dark harbor after the blaze of sunset, a
world of shade and afterlight, a middle ground once again,
calmer and more melancholic, in which we are at once held back
and released, and find ourselves in a place and in a life that is both
less and more than itself:
Beyond the sadness—the empty restaurants,
The empty streets, the small lamps shining
Down on the town—I see only stretches
Of ice and snow, the straight pines, the frigid moon. (19)
This is one of the most characteristic qualities of Strand’s latest
poetry: that paradoxical feeling we have, under western skies,
that while the lights are going down the sky opens up, and that,
even while we become increasingly conscious of a painful, dull,
almost ascetic simplicity in the environment, there is an
accompanying sense of altitude, open distance and clarity that
fills it up. As objects return to themselves, they seem to become
larger. Strand is one of the few American poets still reminding us
that only very great artists can say the simple things. Each
landscape is made up of two or three elements that are moved
about in the poems like so much furniture, or they are parts of
very simple sliding stage-flats (the mountain and the tree here,
the harbor and the cloud there). And as with stage scenery, part
of our sense of spaciousness here derives from our instant
recognition that Strand’s mountains and skies are largely
symbolic. Like Bailey’s kitchen utensils, they are chosen, not
70
accidentally observed: their reality is ideational, and, diminished
as they seem, “we have the sensation that we are seeing an
arrangement that has always been and will continue to be long
after we depart” (Bailey 18). Abstraction is itself a way of lending
a place roomy clarity and permanence.
We do inhabit a closed world of darkening elements and
simplified spaces, but, for a poet, the reproduction of that world
in poetic terms (using simple tonal elements, coarsely conceived
imagery), does not stand merely as a metaphor for something
that we feel in the real world. It is an experience that the poem
itself partakes of, and one that it can by its very nature make real
to us. For Orpheus, the song is life; its extension is life’s
extension: the journey out into the dark harbor is also a journey
out to the end of the poem, a journey to the end of singing. It is
not unnatural, then, that he would fear the end, worry that it is
no more than an end, that “the Beyond is just a beyond” (and not
an underworld in which he can charm the gods with his music),
and that his own voice will not last: “... will I have proved that
whatever I love / Is unbearable, that the views of Lethe will never
/ Improve, that whatever I sing is a blank?” (43). The poems
themselves seem self-conscious of their own closed space: they so
often quietly invoke, just as they end, the whole problem of
ending and limitation. I have already quoted the end of “The
End” in The Continuous Life. Here are a few concluding lines
from Dark Harbor: “for the ash / Of the body is worthless and
goes only so far” (3); “... the particular way our voices / Erased all
signs of the sorrow that had been, / Its violence, its terrible
omens of the end” (13); “an understanding that remains
unfinished, unentire, / Largely imperfect so long as it lasts” (34);
“a fragment, a piece of a larger intention, that is all” (41). It
almost seems that as the poem concludes it cannot help but draw
discreet attention to the fact of its own imminent extinction, with
a note of lamentation or complaint in the phrases “goes only so
far,” “omens of the end,” “so long as it lasts,” and “that is all.”
Strand feels this limitation as a palpable reality of the poem itself,
but using something very like picture windows on the interior
walls, he also shows the way out beyond it. Here, in the proem
to the book, he announces his method:
71
“This is the way,” he continued as he watched
For the great space that he felt sure
Would open before him, a stark sea over which
The turbulent sky would drop the shadowy shapes
Of its song, and he would move his arms
And begin to mark, almost as a painter would,
The passages of greater and lesser worth, the silken
Tropes and calls to this or that, coarsely conceived,
Echoing and blasting all around. (vii)
—Jeffrey Donaldson. “Still Life of Mark Strand’s Darkening
Harbor.” Dalhousie Review 74:1 (Spring 1994): pp. 117–18.
RICHARD TILLINGHAST ON STRAND’S USE OF AND
PLACE WITHIN THE WESTERN CANON
[Richard Tillinghast teaches in the Master of Fine Arts
program at the University of Michigan. He is the author
of seven books of poetry, a travel writer, book reviewer,
Director of The Poet’s House in Ireland and a
memoirist. In this review, Tillinghast reveals the origins
of many of Strand’s poetic devices.]
This poetry has all of Strand’s accustomed smoothness, but the
voice can erupt into surprisingly heartfelt utterances. In VIII he
sets us up with a swiftly rendered scene that smacks of hearty
well-being where the poet goes “out tonight / In my new dark
blue double-breasted suit” to “sit in a restaurant with a bowl //
Of soup before me to celebrate how good life / Has been and
how it has culminated in this instant.” Then in a swift turnabout
we find ourselves in a Baudelairean world confronting Strand’s
muse, addressed ironically and disturbingly: “I love your gold
teeth and your dyed hair—/ A little green, a little yellow—and
your weight, / Which is finally up where we never thought / It
would be.” It is a dramatic moment that places Strand firmly in
the line of serious European poetry with roots in the French
72
nineteenth century: “O my partner, my beautiful death, / My
black paradise, my fusty intoxicant, // My symbolist muse, give
me your breast / Or your hand or your tongue” (XIV). “The ship
has been held in the harbor” takes the reader back to “Le Bateau
Ivre” of Rimbaud and other modern works that play on the
metaphor of a ship sailing out into the unknown. The gravity of
the sequence is accomplished not only by its lofty subject matter
but also by its alliteration and extended phrasing: “A long time
has passed and yet it seems / Like yesterday, in the midmost
moment of summer.” The line is often, as in the second of these
two, iambic pentameter. (...)
Dark Harbor is a treasure of different ploys, shifts in tone,
changes in genre. XVII, for instance, is a harvest poem that owes
something to Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” where “Someone has
fallen asleep on a boxcar of turnips.” XXII is a sexual comedy:
“Madame X begged to be relieved / Of a sexual pain that had my
name / Written all over it.” XXXI reprises a similar scene, this
time in a cabin in Labrador. The figure of Orpheus appears in a
couple of poems late in the book, touching on the role of poetry
in the world: “Rivers, mountains, animals, all find their true
place, // But only while Orpheus sings. When the song is over /
The world resumes its old flaws.”
—Richard Tillinghast. “Review.” Poetry (August 1995): pp.
293–4
CHRISTOPHER R. MILLER ON THE COMPARISON
BETWEEN DARK HARBOR AND STEVENS’ “WAVING
ADIEU, ADIEU, ADIEU”
[Christopher R. Miller is an Assistant Professor of
English at Yale University. He has published articles on
Coleridge and a number of 20-century American poets.
In this essay, he makes explicit comparisons between the
two poems, citing “inventions of farewell” a Stevens
phrase, as fundamental to understanding Strand’s
poetics.]
73
Strand wrote in his most overtly Stevensian vein in the sequence
Dark Harbor, which consists of what might be called, in Stevens’
phrase, “inventions of farewell” (CP 432). Several vignettes
address seasonal change in ways that implicitly ask how to write
a season-poem after Stevens. In one, Strand offers a brief
credence of summer, set in a “dark harbor” indeed—a tropical
seascape in which sybaritic contentment is shadowed by ultimate
thoughts of death, expressed in Stevens’ own idiom and
characteristic tercets:
It is true, as someone has said, that in
A world without heaven all is farewell.
Whether you wave your hand or not,
It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes
It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice,
Hating what passes, it is still farewell. (DH 18)
“Someone” has said this, more or less, in “Waving Adieu, Adieu,
Adieu”:
That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.
In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings,
profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold. (CP 127)
Strand renders Stevens’ “Waving Adieu” even more
Stevensian: he expresses the flux of existence in sublime
abstractions, finds serene stasis behind motion. All elements of
the scene—leaning palms, diving pelicans, glistening bathers—
are “stages in an ultimate stillness”; the dark materiality of the
world is “beyond the distortions / Of chance.” Whereas Stevens’
poem begins as a scherzo, with its giddy, anapestic surges,
Strand’s maintains its meditative poise throughout. In comparing
74
the two variations on a theme of “adieu,” we see the poets’
distinct temperaments. Stevens’ most solemn inventions of
farewell often contain a countersong of jubilance, famously
expressed by the couplet in “Esthétique du Mal”: “Natives of
poverty, children of malheur, / The gaiety of language is our
seigneur” (CP 322). Strand’s poems, on the other hand, speak a
more austere language.
I have suggested that Strand does not quite fit the category of
“strong poet” as Bloom defines it; but in this poem, Strand does
adopt a strong stance toward Stevens in turning him into an
anonymous “someone,” a flash of voice coming momentarily
into consciousness. Stevens’ words, like the tropes of breath and
whiteness, serve as the keynote for a meditation. Is Strand merely
illustrating a Stevensian theme, or does he swerve from his
predecessor in some way? Since he begins with the concessive
phrase, “It is true,” we would expect him to introduce the
qualification of a “but” or an “and yet,” but he seems intent
instead on illustrating Stevens’ premise, visualizing a setting for
it. Toward the end, Strand introduces a choice of sorts: in a world
without heaven, mere being becomes “an occasion for
mourning” or “an occasion / Worth celebrating,” and Strand
refuses to arbitrate between these possibilities beyond suggesting
that there are no others. The poem turns, finally, on a rhetorical
question and a restatement of idea:
for what else does one do,
Feeling the weight of the pelicans’ wings,
The density of the palms’ shadows, the cells that darken
The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions
Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end
Is enacted again. And we feel it
In the temptations of sleep, in the moon’s ripening,
In the wine as it waits in the glass. (DH 18)
How does one end a poem that begins with “farewell”? Both
poets ask questions, but they ask different kinds, and in different
orders. Strand’s suggests a starkly binary choice between
75
mourning and celebrating earthly mutability. Without preferring
one or the other, Strand simply offers further intimations of
mortality—tempting sleep, waxing moon, waiting wine—that
echo Stevens’ own infinitives of farewell (“to sip / One’s cup and
never to say a word, / Or to sleep or just to lie there still”).
Stevens’ adieux, however, lead to a different question: “Everjubilant, / What is there here but weather, what spirit / Have I
except it comes from the sun?” (CP 128). In Stevens’ symbolic
lexicon, the sun is the archetypal First Idea, a constant presence
in the poetry, from the “savage of fire” of “Gubbinal” to the
“battered panache” of “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing
Itself.” It is the hypothetical divinity to which the worshippers in
“Sunday Morning” chant “boisterous devotion”; the
“spaciousness and light / In which the body walks and is
deceived” in “Anatomy of Monotony”; the “opulent” vandal of
“A Postcard from the Volcano” that smears the abandoned house
with gilt graffiti. In Strand’s poem, however, the sun becomes yet
another intimation of mortality, the energy that shatters
chromosomes and causes skin cancer. Strand, who does not share
Stevens’ mythopoetic imagination, seems to suggest a countersublime here: the sun as destroyer rather than creator.
—Christopher R. Miller. “Mark Strand’s Inventions of Farewell.”
The Wallace Stevens Journal 24:2 (Fall 2000): pp. 143–44.
JAMES F. NICOSIA: MARSYAS IN DARK HARBOR
[Jim Nicosia is an independent scholar who has taught at
several schools in the northern New Jersey area.]
In an atypical Strandian twist that can be viewed in a Freudian
light, the precursor is transformed, one might say, into the poet’s
father in order that this poet can kill his father. Yet, perspective
becomes skewed here, as well, for poet and precursor begin to
become one and the same. When the speaker is shown painting
a gun into the precursor’s hand and pointing it at “the one who
assumed / The responsibility of watching” (24–25), it becomes
difficult to decipher who that “one who assumed” is. Indeed, it
76
seems to be both men, and attempting to distinguish the shooter
from the victim seems immaterial; when the trigger is pulled,
neither dies. Instead, “something falls, / A fragment, a piece of a
larger intention, that is all” (26–27). The poetic noise uttered at
the conclusion of part XXXVIII then leaves us with another
Strandian silence that must be confronted, and is, in the
following segment. In part XXXIX, the speaker seems to begin
again, and takes a deep breath in preparation for the final stages
of this monumental poem. He begins in a state of uncertainty,
issuing a sentence fragment that hesitantly declares his intention
to write without actually beginning the poem (of course, he has
begun, for the two stanzas are present, yet, in their assertion that
they will begin a poem, they thus declare the absence of poem).
With the struggle to recapture the poet’s voice thus brought to
the fore again, Strand declares, “Today I shall consider Marsyas,”
the mythological figure flayed after challenging Apollo to a
musical contest (2–3). The pieces that remain at the end of part
XXXVIII are picked up here as the remains of Marsyas, useless
items again needed by the poet to reconstruct something of the
world of the past—even if that world is the previous poem.
Again, the poem finds the speaker wondering whether or not he
should bother to try, whether the effort is worth expending.
Benfey is correct to note that “The company of poets [to
which Strand seeks to belong] can be intimidating, ... and in Dark
Harbor this fear is embodied in the figure of Marsyas” (36). His
further assumption, however, that “the link” in this poem “is
clearly that of fear of not being good enough, the writer’s ‘block’
that is both obstacle and punishment” overlooks the redemption
that ends the poem (36). In Strand’s familiar elegiac style, the
poem spirals upward. He “considers” Marsyas in the first, third
and fourth stanzas, seemingly lamenting that poet’s—and, by
extension, this poet’s—fate. Yet, in each reconsideration, Strand
brings something new to the mix, and thus rebuilds the poet in
the making. By the time the poem ends, it exhibits a certain
revitalization.
The grieving that dominates the early moments of this
segment gives way to a reuse of this materia poetica called
Marsyas. Strand transforms his flayed flesh into “the flesh of
77
light, / Which is fed to onlookers centuries later” (12–13). The
poetic influence of Marsyas is felt by, of course, Strand the
“onlooker,” who then repays Marsyas with the poem at the same
time as he rewrites Marsyas. “Can this be the cost of
encompassing pain?” this speaker now asks (14), as much of
himself as of his predecessor. He, too, has felt the pain of “a long
silence” (15), and attempts to use the experience as a unifying
feature for him and his predecessor. Yet, the “correct” answer
requires some reconsideration, and a useful Strandian
conjunction: “Or is a body scraped from the bone of experience,
the chart of suffering / To be read in such ways that all flesh
might be redeemed, / At least for the moment, the moment it
passes into song?” (19–21). Yes, for a moment, there is
redemption, there is hope, in the singing—that tiny instant of
engagement. As Spiegelman says, “Hopefulness, even muted, is
hopefulness still” (135).
Yet, if part XXXIX ends with an acknowledgment that the
poet can be redeemed in the moment he translates his experience
into song, that song, of course, ends at the poem’s conclusion,
and the new poem, XL, begins after the latest silence. It
necessarily must address loss, for the “moment” of segment
XXXIX has passed. And now, he asks,
How can I sing when I haven’t the heart, or the hope
That something of paradise persists in my song,
That a touch of those long afternoons of summer . . .
Will find a home in yet another imagined place? (1–5)
The other imagined place is, of course, in the mind of the
reader. His incessant goal as poet: eternal value for his creation.
“[W]ill I have proved / That I live against time,” he asks (8–9).
Or is the final answer: “whatever I sing is a blank?” (12). Though
the indecision is maddening, it is the indecision that is the subject
of his writing, and as the subject of his writing, it is the indecision
that keeps him writing. It is a painful temporary redemption for
this poet, indeed, and the concluding quintet of poems does its
utmost to speak up against the perpetual fear of the speaking
being ineffectual.
Segment XLI’s solution to the meaninglessness of “the night
78
sky” (2), to the realization that “I have no idea / Of what I see”
(2–3), and to the number of the stars being “far beyond / What I
can reckon” (4–5), is a “who knows,” that seems to speak more as
a “who cares?” (13). This poet speaks, he now says, because he
must speak—of his joys, of his fears, of his inability to speak, and
of his need to speak. Where the poem goes from there is now
immaterial in the face of the poet’s requirement to write. Of
tomorrow, he says, “We are already travelling faster than our /
Apparent stillness can stand, and if it keeps up / You will be lightyears away by the time I speak” (13–15). Indeed, this segment’s
point of utterance is already far removed from the reader’s point
of reading. The poet’s ability to affect the reader has long ended,
and, in the scheme of real time, several poems already have been
penned between this one and the reader’s reception of it.
Time continues to race past unconcerned with the world’s
human inhabitants in segment XLII, and now none of it matters
to the poet, or so he says. Marsyas, the hero of segment XXXIX,
has been “asleep for centuries” (9), and “Arion, whose gaudy
music drove the Phrygians wild, / Hasn’t spoken in a hundred
years” (10–11). Both are dead, and the poet seems sure of this
one “truth”: “Soon the song deserts its maker” (12). Yet, Strand
seems to be establishing a potential for union by linking these
early poets in their silence. Hints are present when he says, “The
airy demon dies, and others come along” (13). The others
include himself, and though no union is established just yet, the
experienced Strand reader can see it just around the corner, in
the next poem. Surely, while there is no celebration here, when
Strand says, “A different kind of dark invades the autumn woods,
/ A different sound sends lovers packing into sleep” (14-15), it is
still a sound of poets—new poets such as himself. Likewise, a line
like “The air is full of anguish” contains little to relish (16), yet it
is full of the anguish of the new poets. As for tomorrow, this poet
seems to leave it where it is—in that unreachable realm expressed
in the previous segment of Dark Harbor. He now says, “The
Beyond is merely beyond, / A melancholy place of failed and
fallen stars” (17–18, italics mine).
And so, with the old poets discussed and put to rest, part
XLIII begins to establish some continuity between poets.
79
Though the piano music is no longer played, and the players are
also gone, Strand links Jules Laforgue and Wallace Stevens in an
extension of the torch-passing theme of the previous poem. He
resurrects these poets and their poems in his reconsideration of
them, but, as in the previous segments, he ends without
resurrecting poetry to a place of honor. The connective bridge
sustained here again is poetry’s mutability: “The snows have
come, and the black shapes of the pianos / Are sleeping and
cannot be roused, like the girls themselves / Who have gone, and
the leaves, and all that was just here” (13–15). Strand’s own poem
(“all that was just here”) is unified with the poets who created the
precursor poems, and their poems (the leaves) themselves.
Though they “cannot be roused,” there are commonalities being
established in these final segments, ultimately which will be tied
together in the celebration of the final segment’s song. But for
now, “all that was just here,” the momentary salvation
experienced in the writing of this poem, as well as all the delight
achieved from the previous poems and their poets, are gone.
Part XLIV begins in a reminiscence of earlier days and ends in
a recognition of the sea as an enduring, generative force that
awed the speaker as a child and has intimidated the poet as an
adult, for it was the enduring force he wished his poetry could be.
Indeed, Dark Harbor ends at the sea, considering the past, the
same place from where the Proem was issued. For the speaker as
a child, there was also something frightening about the power of
the sea’s loud voice. But “now years later / It is the sound as well
as its size that I love” (8–9). Indeed, the sea has both the voice
and the endurance that the poet, that every poet, seeks so
fervently. And from the dawn of man, the sea has been speaking
to these poets. Here, this poet has lost his voice “in my inland
exile among the mountains” (10).
Ah, those mountains from part XXXII, those same mountains
that have intimidated him into submission, those same
mountains that separate him from his angel-poets in part
XXVII. They, too, are enduring, but they do not speak.
Ironically, the speaker now admires the ocean’s changeability.
Like the poet—or, perhaps more accurately, like the poet wishes
to be—the ocean creates and destroys and is varied in its
appearance from day to day, wave to wave, moment to moment.
80
This poet’s mountains: “do not change except for the light /
That colors them or the snows that make them remote / Or the
clouds that lift them, so they appear much higher / Than they
are” (11–14). The ocean is the imagination at its strongest,
capable of effecting change. This poet’s mountains “are acted
upon and have none / Of the mystery of the sea that generates
its own changes” (14–15). And this eternal sea cries, too. These
are the cries the poet now recognizes as a poetic need for him,
as well. Gone are the days of childhood. Now, despite the
futility of his situation—or because of the futility of his
situation—as mere mortal, he must face the silence, face death,
face the insecurity of the future:
[I]n those days what did I know of the pleasures of loss,
Of the abyss coming close with its hisses
And storms, a great watery animal breaking itself on the rocks,
Sending up stars of salt, loud clouds of spume. (19–22)
This poet now recognizes that poetry is not merely a bulwark
against pain and suffering. Now he recognizes that loss is a source
of poetry, as well. Instead of railing against the darknesses that
exist before and after the poetic invention, the poet now focuses
upon that invention that does, regardless of its origins and its fate,
exist.
Which brings us to segment XLV, which ends Dark Harbor by
radiating from itself, calling out to the future and to the past
“masters” of poetry. Finally, it presents that communion for
Strand among the community of poets. This concluding poemwithin-a-poem originates in a primal, “misty” scene, one that
seems to be left over just as the great forgetters of “Always,” from
Strand’s The Continuous Life, are completing their erasure of the
world. The speaker discovers “Groups of souls, wrapped in
cloaks” (3) in the fields. This place reminds the speaker of
another place, where a stranger who mysteriously recognizes
him:
Approached, saying there were many poets
Wandering around who wished to be alive again.
They were ready to say the words they had been unable to say—
81
Words whose absence had been the silence of love,
Of pain, and even of pleasure” (10–14)
Surely, these are not those inspirational poets wishing to return
to earth, the place of love. More likely they are the “lazy poets”
of Strand’s “The History of Poetry,” who, no longer having the
power to create that they had on earth, have gathered together to
mourn missed opportunity and to unlearn their habits. For they
have a new teacher now, and they are learning to speak of the
imagination. They have found communion, discovered that “the
golden lights of sunset / And sunrise are one and the same”
(18–19). Their teacher: “an angel, one of the good ones, about to
sing” (21).
Yet, upon closer scrutiny, perhaps, Strand is saying, this is the
fate of all poets once they have been defeated by death. In the
face of such eternal silence, Strand’s hedging throughout the
poem appears to be a waste of effort. Here, he seems to recognize
that there will be plenty of time for silence. Any words unsaid
now will be regretted in the long silence after the imagination
has been abandoned, after life has ceased. The “Someone, / who
claimed to have known me years before” (8–9)—this mysterious
speaker within the speaker’s poem—has a lesson to teach. He is a
liaison between the world of the now-silenced precursor poets
and the living poet. It is he who summons the good angel to
speak to his now-rapt audience, and the silence that ends the
poem is the most promising of all silences, for it awaits the
angel’s impending poem. Rarely has a Strand book ended with as
forward-looking and promising a hope as now found within the
figure of an angel—the imagination that Stevens calls “the
necessary angel”—hovering over this dark scene, right at the
moment when the song is about to be sung. Few things are more
promising than the promise of song. And if we indeed see the
poem as circular—or at least spoken in both directions—the
promise bears itself out in this most successful work of art, this
angel-song.
Lived experience between the bookends of darkness
Critics disagree on the tone of Dark Harbor. Tillinghast
82
remarks that Strand presents a sincerity of emotion in Dark
Harbor, noting an “elevated, classical tone that unifies its
disparate parts” (292–293). Spiegelman disunites the poem by
accurately identifying the “faux-naif tone” of certain poems
(136). Benfey reminds that Strand also exhibits startlingly playful
brashness in segments such as XIX, XXII and XXIII.
In general, Strand also appears in different form to different
people. Those with a penchant for European literature see
Frenchmen Baudelaire, Rimbaud and German Rilke in Strand,
and for good reason. Those who specialize in British
Romanticism, see in him Keats and Wordsworth, again with
well-founded opinions. It would be remiss to ignore the Danteesque quality of the three-line stanzas of Dark Harbor. And yet,
there are a few critics to correctly note his affinity with Latin
American poets, who he has studied and translated. On one
thing, critics (other than Gregerson, that is) seem to agree: his
work is oddly familiar despite the apparent originality of its
bluntness in the face of the world’s horrors. Pinsky may not have
been entirely complementary when saying, “Strand is an original
writer, but not of the kind who challenges our idea of poetry. He
confirms that idea, rather than enlarging it” (300-1), but few
poets can hope to reach the level of imaginative achievement
necessary to “confirm” our idea of poetry as compellingly—and,
I might add, definitively—as he does. Indeed, Strand is a wellread writer who seems unafraid to reconsider any of his
precursors. It is this universality of influence that probably
identifies the accuracy of Spiegelman’s contention, “Many of
Strand’s elegiac notes sound reassuring rather than threatening,
precisely because of the familiarity of their tone” (135).
Remarkably, they seem familiar to everyone, for different
reasons.
While given labels like confessionalist, surrealist, fantasist and
postmodernist, Strand is a serious poet in the Romantic tradition
contemplating and contending with the possibilities of poetry in
a world where faith in religion and most other institutions have
been lost. Without trying to oversimplify, a chart can be drawn
marking the increasing strength of the imagination throughout
Strand’s career. That chart has its peaks and valleys, but on the
83
whole, the poet’s voice grows louder in its capacity to call forth
an imaginative vision. In Dark Harbor, Strand charts the whole
territory anew, summarizing the growth of a poet from ephebe to
strong poet. In paying close attention to what the poems do and
how they do it, we have hopefully achieved what Henri Cole
rightly calls “the cumulative effect” of Strand’s vision. Indeed, it
is our contention that Dark Harbor intends to produce such a
cumulative effect. Despite its variations, it is a singleminded
poem aimed at expressing the obstacles presented to the
contemporary poet, and in particular, an aging contemporary
poet. As Spiegelman says, “Wedding his cool Stevensian side to
a more strapping Whitmanian feeling for the sea and its
combination of terror and maternal comfort, Strand
acknowledges certain adult emotions of which the young are
deprived” (135). Ultimately, Dark Harbor asserts the vitality of
“poetry itself, the naked poem, the imagination manifesting itself
in its domination of words” (Stevens Imaginary viii).
In our travels through this assertion of the imagination, we
have run into many repeating images—primitive and privative
absences and darknesses, the desire for safe haven amid the
world’s whirlwinds, the assertion of the imaginative gesture as
temporarily redeeming. Ultimately, what Dark Harbor comes
down to is the celebration of the subjectively meaningful action
in the face of an apathetic world. In imagining the poem, Strand
continually reinvents himself in a place of poets, that we, too, are
given when we accompany him. And in imagining the poem, he
provides for himself and his reader temporary joy. Although
Strand’s imaginative powers have grown steadily from the weak
attempts to stave off the storms of Sleeping with One Eye Open, to
the multiple-layered creative powers of Dark Harbor, for now,
Strand is still asking his blank page, “Where, where in Heaven
am I?” And for now, even if the imagination does not sustain,
“Still, we feel better for trying.”
—James F. Nicosia. “Marsyas in Dark Harbor” appears for the first
time in this publication. © 2003 James F. Nicosia.
84
WORKS BY
Mark Strand
Sleeping with One Eye Open, 1964.
Reasons for Moving: Poems, 1968.
The Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry Since 1940
(editor), 1968.
Darker: Poems, 1970.
New Poetry of Mexico (edited with Octavio Paz), 1970.
18 Poems from the Quechua (edited and translated by Strand),
1971.
The Story of Our Lives, 1973.
The Owl’s Insomnia (translation of Rafael Alberti), 1973.
The Sargeantville Notebook, 1974.
Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (edited
with Charles Simic), 1976.
Souvenir of the Ancient World (translation of Carlos Drummond
de Andrade), 1976.
Elegy for My Father, 1978.
The Late Hour, 1978.
The Monument, 1978.
Selected Poems, 1980.
The Planet of Lost Things, 1982.
Claims for Poetry (contributor, edited by Donald Hall).
The Night Book, 1983.
Art of the Real, 1983.
Mr. and Mrs. Baby and Other Stories, 1985.
Traveling in the Family (translation of Carlos Drummond
de Andrade with Thomas Colchie) 1986.
Rembrandt Takes a Walk, 1986.
William Bailey, 1987.
85
The Continuous Life, 1990.
New Poems, 1990.
The Monument, 1991.
The Best American Poetry 1991 (guest editor), 1991.
Reasons for Moving, Darker, and the Sargeantville Notebook, 1992.
Dark Harbor: A Poem, 1993.
Within This Garden: Photographs by Ruth Thorne-Thomsen
(contributor), 1993.
Golden Ecco Anthology (editor), 1994.
Hopper, 1994.
These Rare Lands: Images of America’s National Parks, 1997.
Blizzard of One: Poems, 1998.
The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention, 2000.
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (edited
with Eavan Boland), 2000.
86
WORKS ABOUT
Mark Strand
Aaron, Jonathan. “About Mark Strand: A Profile,” Ploughshares
(Winter 1995–96): pp. 202–206.
“A Conversation with Mark Strand,” Ohio Review, 13 (Winter
1972): pp. 54–71.
Bacchilega, Christine. “An Interview with Mark Strand,” The
Missouri Review 4:3 (1981): pp. 51–64.
Benfey, Christopher. “The Enigma of Arrival,” The New Republic
(March 8, 1993): pp. 34–7.
Bensko, John. “Reflexive Narration in Contemporary American
Poetry: Some Examples from Mark Strand, John Ashberry,
Norman Dubie, and Louis Simpson,” The Journal of Narrative
Technique 16:2 (Spring 1986): pp. 81–96.
Berger, Charles. “Reading as Poets Read: Following Mark
Strand,” Philosophy and Literature 20: 1 (1996): pp. 177–88.
Birkerts, Sven. “The Art of Absence,” The New Republic
(December 17, 1990): pp. 36–38.
Bloom, Harold. “Death and Radiant Peripheries: Mark Strand
and A.R. Ammons,” Southern Review (Winter 1972): pp. 13341.
Brennan, Matthew. “Mark Strand’s ‘For Her,’ ” Notes on
Contemporary Literature 13 (January 1983): pp. 11–12.
Byrne, Edward. “Weather Watch: Mark Strand’s The Weather of
Words.” Valparaiso Poetry Review: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics II:
2 (Spring/Summer 2000): www.valpo.edu/english/vprv2n2.html.
Cavalieri, Grace. “Mark Strand: An Interview,” American Poetry
Review 23:4 (1994): pp. 39–41.
Cole, Henri. Review. Poetry (April 1991): pp. 54–7.
87
Coleman, Jane Candia. Reviews. Western American Literature
(Summer 1991): pp. 178–9.
Coles, Katherine. “In the Presence of America: A Conversation
with Mark Strand: An Interview,” WeberStudies: An
Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal 9:3 (1992): pp. 8–28.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 6, 1976, Volume
18, 1981, Volume 41, 1987, Volume 71, 1992.
Cooper, Philip. “The Waiting Dark: Talking to Mark Strand,”
Hollins Critic 21 (October 1984): pp. 1–7.
Corn, Alfred. “Plural Perspectives, Heightened Perceptions,”
The New York Review of Books, March 24, 1991.
Crenner, James. “Mark Strand: Darker,” Seneca Review, 2 (April
1971): 87–97.
Dobyns, Stephen. “Penetrable and Impenetrable,” North
American Review 257:2 (1972): pp. 57–9.
Donaldson, Jeffrey. “The Still Life of Mark Strand’s Darkening
Harbor,” Dalhousie Review 74:1 (Spring 1994): pp. 110–124.
Gregerson, Linda. “Negative Capability (Mark Strand),”
Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2001: pp. 5–29. Originally in
Parnassus: Poetry in Review 9:2 (1981): 90–114.
Hoff, James. “Borges: Influences and References,” The Modern Word
(www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_infl_strand.html)
Howard, Richard. “Mark Strand,” Alone with America: Essays on
the Art of Poetry Since 1950, Enlarged Edition. New York:
Atheneum, 1980: pp. 589–602.
Jackson, Richard. “Charles Simic and Mark Strand: The
Presence of Absence,” Contemporary Literature 21 (1980): pp.
136–45.
Kinzie, Mary. “Through the Looking Glass: The Romance of
the Perceptual in Contemporary Poetry,” Ploughshares (Spring
1979): pp. 202–241.
88
Kirby, David. Mark Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary
Culture. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press,
1990.
Lehman, David. “Mark Strand’s Farewells: Celebrating a book of
‘sustained literary grace’,” Chicago Tribune Books, August 1,
1993, pp. 13.
Lieberman, Laurence. “Mark Strand: The Book of Mourning.”
Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets.
Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1995. pp.
218-230. Originally appeared in The Yale Review (1968).
Maddox, Carolyn. “The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention,”
Antioch Review 59:1 (Winter 2001): pp.120.
Maio, Samuel. “The Self-Effacing Mode,” Creating Another Self:
Voice in Modern American Personal Poetry. Kirksville: Thomas
Jefferson University Press, 1995: pp.163–224.
Manguso, Sarah. “Where is that boy?” Iowa Review 29:2 (Fall
1999): pp. 168–171.
“Mark Strand,” Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group,
2001. www.galenet.com.
Martz, Louis L. “Recent Poetry: Visions and Revision,” Yale
Review 60 (1971): pp. 403–417.
McClanahan, Thomas. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5:
American Poets Since World War II, First Series. A Bruccoli Clark
Layman Book. Ed. Donald J. Greiner, University of South Carolina.
The Gale Group, 1980. pp. 303–309. www.galenet.com. pp. 6.
Miller, Christopher R. “Mark Strand’s Inventions of Farewell,”
The Wallace Stevens Journal 24:2 (Fall 2001): pp. 135–150
Miklitsch, Robert. “Beginnings and Endings: Mark Strand’s ‘The
Untelling,’ ” Literary Review 21 (1977-78): pp. 357–73.
Oakes, Elizabeth. “ ‘ To Hold Them in Solution, Unsolved’: The
Ethic of Wholeness in Four Contemporary Poems.” REAL,
The Journal of Liberal Arts 25:1 (2000): pp. 49–59.
89
Olsen, Lance. “The Country Nobody Visits: The Varieties of
Fantasy in Strand’s Poetry,” The Shape of the Fantastic: Selected
Essays from the Seventh International Conference on the Fantastic
in the Arts. Greenwood Press, Westport: 1990: pp. 3–8.
Plumly, Stanley. “From the New Poetry Handbook.” Ohio Review
13:1 (1971): pp. 74–80.
Shawn, Wallace. “The Art of Poetry LXXVII: Mark Strand,” The
Paris Review 148 (1998): pp. 146–178.
Sheehan, Donald. “Varieties of Technique: Seven Recent Books
of American Poetry,” Contemporary Literature X (Spring 1969):
pp. 284–302.
St. John, David. “ ‘ A Devotion to the Vagaries of Desire,’ ” Los
Angeles Times Book Review. May 9, 1993.
Stillinger, Jack. “Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Shaggy Dog:
The Novelty of Lyrical Ballads (1798).” Wordsworth Circle 31:2
(2000): pp. 70–6.
Stitt, Peter. “Engagements with Reality,” The Georgia Review vol.
35: 4 (Winter 1981): pp. 874–882.
________. “Stages of Reality: The Mind/Body Problem in
Contemporary Poetry,” The Georgia Review 37:1 (Spring
1983): pp. 201–210.
Strand, Mark. “Narrative Poetry,” Ploughshares 12:3 (Fall 1986):
pp. 13–4.
Thomas, Bill. “What’s a Poet Laureate to Do?” Los Angeles Times
Magazine, January 13, 1991: pp. 14.
Tillinghast, Richard. Review. Poetry (August 1995): pp. 292–295.
Village Voice. April 30, 1985: pp. 47.
Vine, Richard and Robert von Hallberg. “A Conversation with
Mark Strand,” Chicago Review 28:4 (Spring 1977): pp.
130–140.
90
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Negative Capability” by Linda Gregerson. From Negative
Capability: Contemporary American Poetry (Ann Arbor,
University of Michigan Press, 2001.): pp. 5–29. Originally
appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review 9:2 (1981): 90–114. ©
2001 by University of Michigan Press. Reprinted by
permission.
“Mark Strand” by Thomas McClanahan. From Dictionary of
Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets Since World War II,
First Series, Ed. Donald J. Greiner. (The Gale Group, 1980):
303–309. ©1980 by The Gale Group. Reprinted by
permission of the Gale Group.
“Stages of Reality: The Mind/Body Problem in Contemporary
Poetry” by Peter Stitt. From The Georgia Review 37: 1 (Spring
1983): 201–210. © 1983 by The Georgia Review. Reprinted by
permission.
“Reflexive Narration in Contemporary American Poetry” by
John Bensko. From The Journal of Narrative Technique 16:2
(Spring 1986): pp. 81–96. © 1986 by The Journal of Narrative
Technique. Reprinted by permission.
Reprinted from Mark Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary
Culture by David Kirby, by permission of the University of
Missouri Press. © 1990 by the curators of the University of
Missouri.
“The Art of Absence” by Sven Birkerts. From The New Republic
3, 961 (December 17, 1990): pp. 37. © 1990 by The New
Republic. Reprinted by permission.
“Mark Strand: ‘The Mirror Was Nothing Without You’” by
Richard Howard. From Alone with America: Essays on the Art of
Poetry in the United States Since 1950, Enlarged Edition (New
York, Atheneum: 1980): pp. 596–597. © 1980 by Atheneum.
Reprinted by permission.
“Dark and Radiant Peripheries: Mark Strand and A. R. Ammons” by
Harold Bloom. From Southern Review (Winter 1972): pp. 133–41.
© 1972 by the Southern Review. Reprinted by permission.
91
“Stages of Reality: The Mind/Body Problem in Contemporary
Poetry” by Peter Stitt. From The Georgia Review 37: 1 (Spring
1983): pp. 202. © 1983 by The Georgia Review. Reprinted by
permission.
Reprinted from Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on
Contemporary American Poets by Lawrence Liebermann, by
permission of the University of Missouri Press. © 1995 by the
curators of the University of Missouri.
“Weather Watch: Mark Strand’s The Weather of Words” by
Edward Byrne. From Valparaiso Poetry Review: Contemporary
Poetry and Poetics II: 2 (Spring/Summer 2000): www.valpo.edu/
english/vprv2n2.html. © 2000 by Valparaiso Poetry Review.
Reprinted by permission.
“The Enigma of Arrival” by Christopher Benfrey. From The New
Republic (March 8, 1993): pp. 36. © 1993 by The New Republic.
Reprinted by permission.
“A Devotion to the Vagaries of Desire” by David St. John. From
Los Angeles Times Book Review Section 5 (May 9, 1993). © 1993
by Los Angeles Times Book Review. Reprinted by permission.
“Mark Strand’s Farewells: Celebrating a Book-length Poem of
‘sustained literary grace’ ” by David Lehman. From Chicago
Tribune Books (August 1, 1993): pp. 13. © 1993 by Chicago
Tribune Books. Reprinted by permission.
“Still Life of Mark Strand’s Darkening Harbor” by Jeffrey
Donaldson. From Dalhousie Review 74:1 (Spring 1994): pp.
117–18. © 1994 by Dalhousie Review. Reprinted by permission.
“Review” by Richard Tillinghast. From Poetry (August 1995): pp.
293–4. © 1995 by Poetry. Reprinted by permission.
“Mark Strand’s Inventions of Farewell” by Christopher R. Miller.
From The Wallace Stevens Journal 24:2 (Fall 2000): pp. 143–44.
© 2000 by The Wallace Stevens Journal. Reprinted by
permission.
“Marsyas in Dark Harbor” by James F. Nicosia. © 2003 by James
F. Nicosia. Reprinted by permission.
92
INDEX OF
Themes and Ideas
“A BLIZZARD OF ONE,” 55
DANTE, 13, 63, 70, 83
“DARK HARBOR,” 57–84; ars poetica in, 62–64; critical
analysis on, 57–61; critical views on, 10, 13, 42, 62–84;
marsyas in, 76–84; memory and dream in, 64–65; Orpheus in,
68–72; poetic devices in, 72–73; redemption in, 57; Stevens’
“Farewell to an Idea,” 66–68; Stevens’ “Waving Adieu, adieu,
adieu,” 73–76
“ELEGY FOR MY FATHER,” 42–56; affirmation of life in,
48–50; critical analysis of, 42–45; critical views on, 46–56; loss
of self in, 50–53; precursor to “A Blizzard of One,” 55–56;
Spanish and South American influences in, 53–54; use of
litany in, 46–48
“FROM A LITANY,” 37
“GENERAL,” 37
“THE KITE,” 21
“NOT DYING,” 39
“OUR DEATH,” 37
“AN ORDINARY EVENING IN NEW HAVEN,” 11–13
“REASONS FOR MOVING,” 37
STRAND, MARK, as compared to Stevens, 10–12, 23, 33, 39,
66–68, 73–76; biography of, 14–16; critical analysis of, 83–84;
“a mind of winter,” 63: symbolist, 25
93
STEVENS, WALLACE, 63, 80; as compared to Strand, 10–12,
23, 33, 39, 66–68, 73–76; homage to, 10, 59
“THE STORY OF OUR LIVES,” 17–32; act of creation, 23;
critical analysis of, 17–20; critical views on, 21–32;
dehumanizing in, 20; fatal self-consciousness, 31: hopelessness
in, 20; ideal state in, 28–31; lack of telos in, 32; narrative
reflexivity in 26–28; narrative structure in, 21; questioning of
self in, 17; written word as reality in, 25
“TO BEGIN,” 24
“THE UNTELLING,” 21, 24, 31–32, 55–56
“THE WAY IT IS,” 33–41; critical analysis on, 33–36; critical
views on, 37–41; movement to public place in, 37–38;
perceptions of reality in, 40–41; public phantasmagoria in, 39
94
