Mark Strand, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate widely praised for his concentrated, elegiac verse and graceful command of both humour and despair, has died. He was 80.
Mr. Strand, whose works were translated into more than 30 languages, died Nov. 29 at his daughter's New York home from liposarcoma that had spread throughout his body, just weeks after entering hospice care, said his daughter, Jessica Strand.
"He was a funny, elegant, generous and brilliant man," she said of her father. "A man who lived to work and to be with his friends and the people he loved."
A distinctive presence to the end of his life, with his lean build, white hair and round glasses, Mr. Strand received
numerous honours, including the Pulitzer in 1999 for Blizzard of One, a gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a National Book Award nomination this fall for Collected Poems. He was appointed poet laureate for 1990-91, although he did not count his time in Washington among his great achievements.
"It's too close to the government. It's too official. I don't
believe that poetry should be official," he told Associated Press in 2011. "There are poets who aspire to such positions; I never did."
Louise Glueck, also a former poet laureate, said Mr. Strand was a "hero" to her, "one of the few [poets] who grew more amazing as he grew older."
Mr. Strand, author of more than a dozen books of poetry and several works of prose, was haunted even as a young man by absence, loss and the passage of time, sometimes peering just beyond the contents of the page and wondering what, if anything, was out there. Some of his most famous lines appear in Keeping Things Whole, a poem from Sleeping With One Eye Open, his 1964 debut:
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
Mr. Strand also wrote children's books and art criticism, helped edit several poetry anthologies and translated the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. He was a committed doubter, even about poetry. He went through occasional periods when he stopped writing verse and once quarrelled with his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, because he considered his 2012 collection Almost Invisible to be prose, not poetry.
"I don't make the same demands of prose as I do with poetry," he told the AP. "You don't have to worry about sustaining a cadence. You don't have to worry about the specific creativity of each word."
Mark Apter Strand was born April 11, 1934, in Summerside on Prince Edward Island. His mother was a painter, his father a Pepsi-Cola salesman whose work led to the family living everywhere from Peru to Cleveland. He lived until age four in Montreal, speaking French. He spent his summers on the water in picturesque St. Margaret's Bay, N.S. until he was 12. The family name was Stransky when his Czech Jewish grandparents immigrated to the United States and anglicized the name, he told The Globe and Mail in 1999. Still, he told reporter Val Ross, "Mark Strand" is a good name. "It's a footprint on the beach. And 'strand' is that liminal territory between land and sea, the beginning of the unknown …"
Atlantic Canada appears in some of his poems, including A Morning, in which he writes, "I looked over the gunwale and saw beneath the surface/a luminous room, a light-filled grave, saw for the first time/the one clear place given to all of us when we are alone."
In 1990, however, when he was named U.S. poet laureate, he told The New York Times that he didn't feel strong ties to the country of his birth.
"I don't exist in Canada. I never published there and the strength of Canadian literature makes it resistant to U.S. goings-on. You have a very strong sense of national priority there," he said.
Mr. Strand originally thought of himself as a visual artist, and would dismiss his adolescent poetry as "feverish attempts to put 'my feelings' on paper, and little more."
In his own poems, he said, "I try to be accessible but inaccessible at the same time. It's more important to me to be close to a mystery than to have it disappear into forgettable knowledge."
Mr. Strand majored in art at Yale University, but felt "stifled" and by graduate school had decided he was better suited for writing, with Philip Larkin and Thomas Hardy among the poets he was reading. He received a master's degree from the University of Iowa's prestigious Writers' Workshop, and later taught at Iowa, Columbia University and the University of Chicago among other schools.
In the long poem Dark Harbor, Mr. Strand set down his belief that art could change the world "for a while," but not save it. The most profound absence in his work was that of God, his atheism passed down to him from his father, who had terrified his son with stories of heretics burned at the stake. In Poem After the Last Seven Words, from the 2006 collection Man and Camel, Mr. Strand imagined how it felt "To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing."
"I haven't met God and I haven't been to heaven, so I'm skeptical," he told AP. "Nobody's come back to me to tell me they're having a great time in heaven and that they've seen God, although there are a lot of people claiming that God is telling them what to do. I have no idea how God talks to them. Maybe they're getting secret e-mails."
His daughter said her father found comfort in art.
"We weren't religious people, but we worshipped at the foot of culture," she said. "He was always an artist."
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Strand leaves his partner, Maricruz Bilbao. His two marriages ended in divorce. He also leaves his son, Thomas; a sister, Judith Major; and a grandson.
With files from The Globe and Mail and the New York Times
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