12.9.14

It always seems that I come upon artists as they are leaving the world. Part of it is that I am not exposed to new work as much as I'd like. (recommendations to that end are welcome) Mark Strand died last week, a Canadian-born US Poet Laureate from the 90's and Pulitzer prize winner in 1999. His New York Times obituary marks him as a contemplative, meditative artists, seeking to define the spaces we inhabit and the meta-spaces around them. Initially thinking himself a visual artist, he attended Antioch college and Yale, and then studied in Florence on a Fulbright scholarship. A good passage:

His career took off when the celebrated poetry editor Harry Ford accepted his second volume of poems, “Reasons for Moving,” at Atheneum, which went on to publish the collections “Darker” (1970), “The Story of Our Lives” (1973) and “The Late Hour” (1978). To critics who complained that his poems, with their emphasis on death, despair and dissolution, were too dark, he replied, “I find them evenly lit.”
Interviewed in The Paris Review by the actor Wallace Shawn in 1998, Mr. Strand described his poetic territory as “the self, the edge of the self, and the edge of the world,” what he called “that shadow land between self and reality.” The severe economies of his early work, however, led to frustration and its “bleak landscape” came to feel repetitive.

Let's get to the work. The Remains


I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.
What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.
My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds.
How can I sing? Time tells me what I am.
I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.


Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in 
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole


Lines for Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are. 


As you can see, it is really easy just to post these poems and let them speak on their own. The pace is so measured, but without dragging. In The Remains, the repetition and salient verbs keep things moving as the speaker completes each action. In the subsequent poem, the lines don't have periods at the end of verses to punctuate, but allow the words to spill over. This does slow the work a little, but pulls the eye to the next line. The third is distinct in that it mixes enjambment, lines ending with periods, and the stair-stepping phrases. I feel like all these works exist in the same "universe" like a comic book, and can be read together and interchangeably because of their tone.  I'm sure if I thought better about it, I could come up with much more interesting commentary about the plight of the speaker in these situations, but all I can think about right now is how lovely they are to the ear. I'll give them due diligence in their time.