Monday 20 July 2015

MARK STRAND: THE LOST TELEGRAPH OBITUARY

I wrote the following piece in early December for the Daily Telegraph, but for some reason it didn't appear in the paper immediately, and then it just drifted onto the spike. I was never taken with Strand's poetry, though I did enjoy his book on Hopper. But researching his obit made me appreciate some of the convergences between his life and his work. I was particularly fascinated with the idea he studied with Josef Albers, and then moved from art to poetry via Wallace Stevens: as if placing a cube in Tennessee...

Mark Strand, who has died aged 80, once said 'Poetry tries to lead us to relocate ourselves in the self.' Relocate seemed to be the key word for Strand, who has died aged 80. In his often spare but always elegant poetry, Strand seems to be looking at the world, and at himself, from the outside. 'The poet provides the reader with a surrogate world through which he reads this world,' Strand said, and at his best he achieved the paradoxical success of bringing readers closer to the very worlds from which he felt distanced and alienated.

That sense of dislocation may have begun in childhood. Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island 11 April 1934. His father's work took the family to Halifax, Nova Scotia and Montreal before moving to Philadelphia, where Strand started school as an outsider, speaking English with a heavy French-Canadian accent. His father's new job with Pepsi-Cola took the family to Cuba, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, but the young Mark returned each summer with his mother to St Margaret's Bay, Nova Scotia, and memories of that seacoast and its pine forests reverberate through his work. Still feeling less than comfortable with English, he intended to become an artist. While earning a BA from Antioch College (Ohio) he spent a summer an assistant to the Mexican muralist David Siquieros, painting 'the kind of art I learned to despise while I was working at it.' He moved to Yale, taking a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree studying under the painter Josef Albers. The contrast between Siquieros' social realism and Albers' abstract focus on the language of paint itself might be seen as template for Strand's later poetry.

While at Yale he immersed himself in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and began to move away from painting, placing poems in the New Yorker. A Fulbright grant took him to Italy to study 19th century poetry; when he returned he took a creative writing MFA at the University of Iowa, America's most prestigious programme. In 1965 he received another Fulbright, to teach in Brazil. His first collection, Sleeping With One Eye Open (1964) was published by a small press in Iowa, but in 1968 the influential editor Harry Ford at Athaneum published Reasons For Moving, establishing Strand as a major voice. He moved to New York and taught at Columbia, Brooklyn College, Yale and Princeton. There he became close to Richard Howard, Charles Wright, and Charles Simic, poets whose work incorporated elements of surrealism, what Wright and Robert Bly labelled 'leaping poetry'. But Strand's closest affinity might be with John Ashbery, particularly in their shared roots in painting.

He published three more collections whose titles are revealing: Darker (1970), The Story Of Our Lives (1973) and The Late Hour (1978), as well a long prose poem about immortality, The Monument (1978) and translations of the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti and the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade. But following publication of his Selected Poems (1980) he gave up writing poetry for a decade. 'I didn't like what I was writing; I didn't believe in my autobiographical poems,' he said. He moved to the University of Utah to teach and wrote three childrens books, a collection of essays on art, The Art Of The Real (1983) and a monograph on the artist William Bailey (1987). That year he also received a MacArthur Foundation 'genius grant'.

Strand marked his return to poetry with the 1990 collection A Continuous Life, and spent a year as America's Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress. His new publisher was Alfred Knopf, a relationship which survived an argument over reissuing The Monument labelled as prose. Dark Harbor (1993) received the Bollingen Prize, and in 1994 his monograph on Edward Hopper was a magnificent exercise in affinity, as Strand's minute breakdown of Hopper's paintings speaks of the waiting, the sense of time, and the position as observer of the poet in his own poems.

His 1998 collection, Blizzard Of One, received the Pulitzer Prize, deservedly so as it was perhaps his finest work. It includes the long meditation 'Delerium Waltz', reflecting on life as a waltz 'we think will never end'. He followed with the surprisingly brighter Man and Camel (2006), New Selected Poems (2007) and this year his Collected Poems, which was nominated for the National Book Award.

Strand died 29 November 2014, of liposarcoma, at his daughter's home in Brooklyn, to which he was moving back after living in Madrid. His two marriages ended in divorce, and he is survived by his partner Maricruz Bilbao, his daughter Jessica and son Thomas.
'Poetry tries to lead us to relocate ourselves in the self,' Mark Strand once told an interviewer. Relocate seemed to be the key word for Strand, who has died aged XX. In his often spare but always elegant poetry, Strand seems to be looking from the outside, at the world and at himself. 'The poet provides the reader with a surrogate world through which he reads this world,' he said, and at his best Strand achieved the paradoxical success of bringing readers closer to the very worlds from which he felt distanced and alienated.

That sense of dislocation may have begun in childhood. Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island 11 April 1934. His father's work took the family to Halifax, Nova Scotia and Montreal before moving to Philadelphia, where Strand started school as an outsider, speaking English with a heavy French-Canadian accent. His father's new job with Pepsi-Cola took the family to Cuba, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, but the young Mark returned each summer with his mother to St Margaret's Bay, Nova Scotia, and memories of that seacoast and its pine forests reverberate through his work. Still feeling less than comfortable with English, he intended to become an artist. While earning a BA from Antioch College (Ohio) he spent a summer an assistant to the Mexican muralist David Siquieros, painting 'the kind of art I learned to despise while I was working at it.' He moved to Yale, taking a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree studying under the painter Josef Albers. The contrast between Siquieros' social realism and Albers' abstract focus on the language of paint itself might be seen as template for Strand's later poetry.

While at Yale he immersed himself in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and began to move away from painting, placing poems in the New Yorker. A Fulbright grant took him to Italy to study 19th century poetry; when he returned he took a creative writing MFA at the University of Iowa, America's most prestigious programme. In 1965 he received another Fulbright, to teach in Brazil. His first collection, Sleeping With One Eye Open (1964) was published by a small press in Iowa, but in 1968 the influential editor Harry Ford at Athaneum published Reasons For Moving, establishing Strand as a major voice. He moved to New York and taught at Columbia, Brooklyn College, Yale and Princeton. There he became close to Richard Howard, Charles Wright, and Charles Simic, poets whose work incorporated elements of surrealism, what Wright and Robert Bly labelled 'leaping poetry'. But Strand's closest affinity might be with John Ashbery, particularly in their shared roots in painting.

He published three more collections whose titles are revealing: Darker (1970), The Story Of Our Lives (1973) and The Late Hour (1978), as well a long prose poem about immortality, The Monument (1978) and translations of the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti and the Brazilian Carlos Drummond de Andrade. But following publication of his Selected Poems (1980) he gave up writing poetry for a decade. 'I didn't like what I was writing; I didn't believe in my autobiographical poems,' he said. He moved to the University of Utah to teach and wrote three childrens books, a collection of essays on art, The Art Of The Real (1983) and a monograph on the artist William Bailey (1987). That year he also received a MacArthur Foundation 'genius grant'.

Strand marked his return to poetry with the 1990 collection A Continuous Life, and spent a year as America's Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress. His new publisher was Alfred Knopf, a relationship which survived an argument over reissuing The Monument labelled as prose. Dark Harbor (1993) received the Bollingen Prize, and in 1994 his monograph on Edward Hopper was a magnificent exercise in affinity, as Strand's minute breakdown of Hopper's paintings speaks of the waiting, the sense of time, and the position as observer of the poet in his own poems.

His 1998 collection, Blizzard Of One, received the Pulitzer Prize, deservedly so as it was perhaps his finest work. It includes the long meditation 'Delerium Waltz', reflecting on life as a waltz 'we think will never end'. He followed with the surprisingly brighter Man and Camel (2006), New Selected Poems (2007) and this year his Collected Poems, which was nominated for the National Book Award.

Strand died 29 November 2014, of liposarcoma, at his daughter's home in Brooklyn, to which he was moving back after living in Madrid. His two marriages ended in divorce, and he is survived by his partner Maricruz Bilbao, his daughter Jessica and son Thomas. As he wrote in Blizzard Of One, in the poem 'A Piece Of The Storm':

A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
That's all there was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral.

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