Mark Strand

“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.”

“Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.”

“The Coming of Light Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sen...”

“Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.”

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

“These wrinkles are nothing These gray hairs are nothing, This stomach which sags with old food, these bruised and swollen ankles, my darkening brain, they are nothing. I am the same boy my m...”

“When we walk in the sun our shadows are like barges of silence.”

“My Name Once when the lawn was a golden green and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed with the chirr and murmur of insect...”

“Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced...”

“From the shadow of domes in the city of domes, 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, sa...”

“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.”

“I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.”

“Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.”

“Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.”

“Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.”

“The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.”