Mark Strand

At the time of his death at the age of eighty on November 29, 2014, Mark Strand had left an indelible stamp on American letters. He had served as United States poet laureate from 1990–91; his Dark Harbor received the Bollingen Award (1993), and Blizzard of One took the Pulitzer Prize (1999). He had previously received the first Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1974. His translations of Andalusian poet Rafael Alberti titled The Owl’s Insomnia (1973), are definitive, and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (1976), which he edited with Charles Simic, afforded many young American poets their first glimpse of Yehuda Amichai, Johannes Bobrowski, Zbigniew Herbert, Francis Ponge, and Yannis Ritsos. Born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, on April 11, 1934, Strand spent his formative years relocating to Columbia, Peru, Mexico, Halifax, and Montreal because of his father’s success as a traveling salesman. He learned both Spanish and French, and this perhaps explains his affinity for the international voice in poetry. Moreover, his mother loved the plastic arts, and Strand earned his BFA at Yale under the tutelage of Joseph Albers, with the intention of becoming a painter. But by 1961 Strand had begun to publish poems in the New Yorker, and he decided instead on the language arts as a career, enrolling in classes at the University of Iowa. During his stint as a graduate teaching assistant, he and Donald Justice entered into a rather unusual relationship. Even though he was on the faculty and Justice his student, at ten years his senior, Justice would in time become Strand’s mentor.

Strand learned from Justice the need for a firmly drawn moderation with regard to diction, as well as an emphasis on formal symmetry typically encountered in the later poems of Wallace Stevens or Robert Frost. His earliest poems have a pellucid quality, and his images put one in mind of the season’s first flakes breaking into crystal high above the moonlit spires of spruce and fir. Although Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964) is ostensibly a journeyman effort, lines such as these from “Winter in North Liberty” are worth quoting: “Snow falls, filling / The moonlit fields. / All night we hear / The wind on the drifts.” Already present in the second stanza are premonitions of the austere beauty one encounters in later poems: “Pale ferns and flowers / Form on the windows.” Here Strand suggests that even the slow encroachment of winter has a palpable design upon us, and we can discern this in the way that frost flowers on a windowpane. On the other hand, in the volume’s title poem, the wind does not tamper with the loose casements, “nor do the various / Areas / Of the house make their usual racket,” awakening in the speaker an unwonted apprehension: “It’s my night to be rattled, / Saddled / With spooks.” Strand’s lines are spare, speech pared to its bare bones, and his dubious protagonist longs only to weather this night: “My room is clammy and cold, / Moon-handled / And weird. The shivers / Wash over / Me, shaking my bones.” There is more than a faint echo of Stevens in the poet’s closure: “And I lie sleeping with one eye open, / Hoping / That nothing, nothing will happen.” As in Stevens’s “The Snowman,” nothingness, too, is a state of being, and here a consummation devoutly to be wished.