Happy Birthday, Mark Strand

As an extra credit project during my junior year in high school, a classmate and I created a bulletin board display entitled “Three Savannah Poets—Conrad Aiken, Billy Bray, and Michael Goodman.” I would like to think that we consciously gave Aiken top billing; after all, he was the only one of us whose poetry had been published. But I suspect that we were just arranging the names in alphabetical order. Billy and I each spent a lot of time writing poems. And what did our efforts get us? Extra credit in English 11.

I am thinking of those days because I read this morning that today is the birthday of Mark Strand, a former U.S. Poet Laureate and, for one semester in my college career, the man who directed a poetry writing seminar that had a major impact on me. During our housecleaning efforts as part of our Pandemic isolation, I came across some of my poems from that class. I wrote some of the best poems of my life during that semester. I also wrote very few poems. It wasn’t so much that I was intimidated by the other writers’ work. I became more critical of my own writing, and less willing to share what I considered to be inferior work. The novelist and essayist Allegra Goodman (no relation) calls this “the inner critic” and suggests that it can screw up even good writers. She explains this in an essay entitled “O.K., You're Not Shakespeare. Now Get Back to Work.” I wish she had been around when I was taking Strand’s seminar.

Mark Strand, as I remember him, big head and all

I remember a lot of details about Strand, who passed away in 2014 at age 80. He was tall and handsome. He had an impressively large head. He had a lot of poet friends whose work he often shared with us—Charles Simic, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, and, most impressive of all, Elizabeth Bishop, whom he even invited to read at Yale. He also had some innovative techniques that I appropriated when I taught writing a few years later.

For example, he would give us six random words to include in a poem of 8-12 lines. The words could violate certain grammar rules. A word normally a noun could be used as a verb if that worked for you. Here is one I wrote using the words fit, ice, hazard, flour, flower, and oxygen.

A Warmer World

Born into another age

Fit not for ice, but with the warmth

Of wool unsheared,

I would not care to hazard all I own

To flee to the harshness of a winter’s hate.

Born into another world

Where sunlight falls upon my eyes

Like sifted flour,

I then would dream of sharing oxygen

With flowers now left lonely by my flight.

Does this poem make any sense? Not really. But it fit the rules of the class. It also taught me that every word in a poem (article or story) counts. That is probably the most important lesson that I learned from Strand. It may help explain why I took up editing as a profession. And the poem above vividly shows why I did not continue as a poet.

For some of us, writing poetry blends pleasure with pain.
Our readers may have other ideas.

But I did write a few of what I considered to be good poems during the semester. Here is my favorite:

Love at 5:15

Wedged between the world’s problems

And an artist-beard in the smell of rush hour

I proposed breath then marriage

To a blonde-haired escapist

On the run to the Grand Concourse;

Then marrying her reflection in the artist’s glasses

I begot a subway map

Of every exotic location in central Queens.

Tell me, dearest,

Why I have never seen you before on the five-fifteen?

Your hair is beautiful near the green Dyre Avenue sign;

Your eyes more intriguing than the Daily News.

While I thought this poem “intriguing” with its suggestion that someone could fall madly in love with someone else on a crowded subway car and expect to encounter the same person again during another rush-hour trip, I noticed a critical comment that I must have received when I read the poem out in the class. “Its archness shows a lack of seriousness, which is attractive but may spell ultimate failure.” I think that’s a little harsh, don’t you?

Happy Birthday, Mark Strand. I am remembering you fondly today. Thank you for your gift of words. I use a little of that gift every day.