Mark Strand
Mark Strand

The future is always beginning now.

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

Each moment is a place you've never been.

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

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

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

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

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

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

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

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

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

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

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

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

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

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

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

It's very hard to write humor.

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

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

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

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

Mark Strand
Mark Strand

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