Top 25 Quotes by Mark Strand

Each moment is a place you've never been.

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb.

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.