Mark Strand Dies at 80

Over the weekend we were deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Mark Strand. The New York Times reports:

Mark Strand, whose spare, deceptively simple investigations of rootlessness, alienation and the ineffable strangeness of life made him one of America’s most hauntingly meditative poets, died on Saturday at his daughter’s home in Brooklyn. He was 80.

His daughter, Jessica Strand, said the cause was liposarcoma, a rare cancer of the fat cells.

Mr. Strand, who was named poet laureate of the United States in 1990 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999 for his collection “Blizzard of One,” made an early impression with short, often surreal lyric poems that imparted an unsettling sense of personal dislocation — what the poet and critic Richard Howard called “the working of the divided self.”

His first poetry collection, “Sleeping With One Eye Open,” published in 1964, set the tone.

The Miami Book Fair International hosted a tribute to Strand on November 22nd. Poetry Foundation President Robert Polito introduced the tribute by describing Strands contributions to the art of poetry:

Few poets have so dominated and transformed the poetry of their time as Mark Strand. A poet of dark elegance, sly wit, and elusive interior music, as well as a gifted translator, art writer, and collagist, he is one of our essential makers, as over and over from book to book he steadily enlarges the possibilities of the modern poem. Looking back from the vantage of his new Collected Poems one can now readily track the subtle ways his shifting styles, tones, dictions, and perspectives anticipated, created, and defined the poetry of our moment, as he moved from Sleeping with One Eye Open through Darker, The Story of Our Lives, The Continuous Life, Dark Harbor, and Blizzard of One, to cite just a few of his many resonant titles. Along the way he received all the proper honors, among them a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Prize as well as the respect, admiration, and love of his fellow poets. I'm still very grateful to him for including early on one of my own poems in the volume of Best American Poetry he edited. That's the kind of writer and generous literary citizen Mark is.

Celebrate Strand's remarkable life in writing by going here to read his work, and head here to listen to an "Essential American Poets" podcast featuring a recording of Strand reading his poetry in New York in 2008.