Reading Mark Strand

Reading Mark Strand His Collected Works, Career, and the Poetics of the Privative

James F. Nicosia

palgrave macmillan READING MARK STRAND © James F. Nicosia, 2007. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-7670-3

All citations from Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence used by permission of Oxford University Press. All David Kirby citations reprinted from Mark Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary Culture by David Kirby, by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Copyright © 1990 by the Curators of the University of Missouri. A portion of chapter III originally appeared, in altered form, in Bloom’s Major Poets: Mark Strand, edited by Harold Bloom. Used by permission of Chelsea House Publishers. Copyright © 2003 by James F. Nicosia. All selections from Selected Poems by Mark Strand, copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All selections from The Continuous Life by Mark Strand, copyright © 1990 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All selections from Dark Harbor by Mark Strand, copyright © 1993 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All selections from The Weather of Words:Poetic Invention by Mark Strand, copyright © 2000 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All selections from Blizzard of One by Mark Strand, copyright © 1998 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All selections from Man and Camel by Mark Strand, copyright © 2006 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-73799-4 ISBN 978-1-137-08555-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-08555-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nicosia, James F. Reading Mark Strand : his collected works, career, and the poetics of the privative / James F. Nicosia ; foreword by Harold Bloom. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Strand, Mark, 1934––Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS3569.T69Z79 2007 791.43Ј682––dc22 2007061155 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2007 10987654321 Transferred to Digital Printing in 2008

with Laura Nicosia for Jake Nicosia

Contents

Foreword ix Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: “Between Two Great Darks”: How to Read Poetry 1 1. Staving Off the World: The Early Years 19 2. “Still We Feel Better for Trying,” or Why Write a Poem?: The Story of Our Lives, The Late Hour, “New Poems,” The Continuous Life 45 3. Earning One’s Wings: Dark Harbor 73 4. Reinventing the Self: Blizzard of One 107 5. Supplement: Angel Becomes Dog Becomes Camel: Man and Camel 177 Coda: Between Two Great Darks 193

Notes 201 Bibliography 205 Index 211

Foreword

Harold Bloom

I have known Mark Strand for a half century, and have read his poetry for rather more than 40 years. Like his major precursors, Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens, Strand is a perpetual elegist of the self, not so much for himself as a person, but for himself as a poet, which is the mode of “always living, always dying,” he has learned from Whitman and from Stevens. If I had to name Strand’s most representative poems, they might include “The Story of Our Lives,” “The Way It Is,” “Elegy for My Father,” and the long poem or Stevensian sequence, Dark Harbor. I used to joke to Mark that his archetypal line was “The mirror was nothing without you,” but as I have aged, I prefer a grand moment in the final canto of Dark Harbor, where someone speaks of poets wan- dering around who wished to be alive again, and says, “They were ready to say the words they were unable to say.” Even some four decades back, I always read each new poem and volume by Mark Strand in the happy expectation that he was ready to say the words he had been unable to say. Across the decades, it keeps puzzling me that really there are not any words he was unable to say. Though much sparser in output than Whitman, Stevens, and John Ashbery, Strand has developed a versatility that can rival theirs. The elegy for the self may be the most American of all poetic genres, because our two greatest makers always will be Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and they were always at home in that mode. Like Ashbery, Strand is a legitimate descendant of Whitman and Stevens. As a literary critic, I am a kind of archaic survival, a dinosaur, and I particularly favor the brontosaurus, an amiable enough monster. I do not believe that poetry has anything to do with cultural politics. I ask of a poem three things: aesthetic splendor, cognitive power, and wisdom. I find all three in the work of Mark Strand. One of Strand’s unique achievements is to raise the self’s poignant confrontation with mortality to an aesthetic dignity that astonishes me. x F oreword

His earlier volume Darker moves upon the heights in its final poems, “Not Dying” and the longer “The Way It Is,” the first work in which Strand ventures out from his eye’s first circle, toward a larger art. “Not Dying” opens in narcissistic desperation, and reaches no resolu- tion, but its passion for survival is prodigiously convincing. “I am driven by innocence,” the poet protests, even as like a Beckett crea- ture he crawls from bed to chair and back again, until he finds the obduracy to proclaim a grotesque version of natural supernaturalism:

I shall not die. The grave result and token of my birth, my body remembers and holds fast.

“The Way It Is” takes its tone from Stevens at his darkest (“The world is ugly / And the people are sad”) and quietly edges out a pri- vate phantasmagoria until this merges with the public phantasmagoria all of us now inhabit. The consequence is a poem more surprising and profound than the late Robert Lowell’s justly celebrated “For the Union Dead,” a juxtaposition made unavoidable by Strand’s audacity in appropriating the same visionary area:

I see myself in the park on horseback, surrounded by dark, leading the armies of peace. The iron legs of the horse do not bend. I drop the reins. Where will the turmoil end? Fleets of taxis stall in the fog, passengers fall asleep. Gas pours from a tri-colored stack. Locking their doors, people from offices huddle together, telling the same story over and over. Everyone who has sold himself wants to buy himself back. Nothing is done. The night eats into their limbs like a blight. Everything dims. The future is not what it used to be. The graves are ready. The dead shall inherit the dead. F oreword xi

Strand’s gift is harbored rather than sparse: that is my interpretation of his major work to date, Dark Harbor: A Poem (1993). The poem constitutes a “Proem” and 45 cantos or sections. Dark Harbor, like some earlier poems by Strand, is an overt homage to Wallace Stevens. It is as though casting aside anxieties of influences Strand wishes reconcilement with his crucial precursor. The “Proem” sets forth vigorously: “The burning / Will of weather, blowing overhead, would be his muse.” But, by Canto IV, we all of us now are in the world of Stevens:

There is a certain triviality in living here, A lightness, a comic monotony that one tries To undermine with shows of energy, a devotion To the vagaries of desire, whereas over there Is a seriousness, a stiff, inflexible gloom That shrouds the disappearing soul, a weight That shames our lightness. Just look Across the river and you will discover How unworthy you are as you describe what you see, Which is bound by what is available. On the other side, no one is looking this way. They are committed to obstacles, To the textures and levels of darkness, To the tedious enactment of duration. And they labor not for bread or love But to perpetuate the balance between the past And the future. They are the future as it Extends itself, just as we are the past Coming to terms with itself. Which is why The napkins are pressed, and the cookies have come On time, and why the glass of milk, looking so chic In its whiteness, begs us to sip. None of this happens Over there. Relief from anything is seen As timid, a sign of shallowness or worse.

This is the voice of the master, particularly in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. Strand shrewdly undoes Stevens to the glass of milk, setting aside any more metaphysical concerns. An effort is made, for 15 cantos, to domesticate Stevens, but the great voice, of Stevens and xii F oreword

Strand fused together, returns in Canto XVI:

It is true, as someone has said, that in A world without heaven all is farewell. Whether you wave your hand or not, It is farewell, and if no tears come to your eyes It is still farewell, and if you pretend not to notice, Hating what passes, it is still farewell. Farewell no matter what. And the palms as they lean Over the green, bright lagoon, and the pelicans Diving, and the listening bodies of bathers resting, Are stages in an ultimate stillness, and the movement Of sand, and of wind, and the secret moves of the body Are part of the same, a simplicity that turns being Into an occasion for mourning, or into an occasion Worth celebrating, for what else does one do, Feeling the weight of the pelicans’ wings, The density of the palms’ shadows, the cells that darken The backs of bathers? These are beyond the distortions Of chance, beyond the evasions of music. The end Is enacted again and again. And we feel it In the temptations of sleep, in the moon’s ripening, In the wine as it waits in the glass.

It is Stevens who tells us that, without heaven, all farewells are final. What enchants me here are the Strandian variations on farewell. Waves and tears yield to very Stevensian palms, and to the pelicans of Florida, venereal soil. A greater meditation, suitable to Strand and Stevens as seers of the weather, arrives in Canto XXIV:

Now think of the weather and how it is rarely the same For any two people, how when it is small, precision is needed To say when it is really an aura or odor or even an air Of certainty, or how, as the hours go by, it could be thought of As large because of the number of people it touches. Its strength is something else: tornados are small But strong and cloudless summer days seem infinite But tend to be weak since we don’t mind being out in them. Excuse me, is this the story of another exciting day, F oreword xiii

The sort of thing that accompanies preparations for dinner? Then what say we talk about the inaudible-the shape it assumes, And what social implications it holds, Or the somber flourishes of autumn-the bright Or blighted leaves falling, the clicking of cold branches, The new color of the sky, its random blue.

Is that final tercet Strand or Stevens? As the sequence strengthens, deliberate echoes of Josh Ashbery, Octavio Paz, and Wordworth are evoked by Strand, until he achieves a grand apotheosis in his final canto:

I am sure you would find it misty here, With lots of stone cottages badly needing repair. Groups of souls, wrapped in cloaks, sit in the fields Or stroll the winding unpaved roads. They are polite, And oblivious to their bodies, which the wind passes through, Making a shushing sound. Not long ago, I stopped to rest in a place where an especially Thick mist swirled up from the river. Someone, Who claimed to have known me years before, Approached, saying there were many poets Wandering around who wished to be alive again. They were ready to say the words they had been unable to say- Words whose absence had been the silence of love, Of pain, and even of pleasure. Then he joined a small group, Gathered beside a fire. I believe I recognized Some of the faces, but as I approached they tucked Their heads under their wings. I looked away to the hills Above the river, where the golden lights of sunset And sunrise are one and the same, and saw something flying Back and forth, fluttering its wings. Then it stopped in mid-air. It was an angel, one of the good ones, about to sing.

The aura is Dante’s, and we are in a spooky place—paradise of poets or purgatory of poets. If one line above all others in Dark Harbor reverberates within me, it is “They were ready to say the words they had been unable to say.” The accent remains late Stevens, but with a difference that is Mark Strand’s. I commend James Nicosia’s Reading Mark Strand as a superb guide for all readers.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Harold Bloom, who has inspired me to be a better, stronger, more thoughtful reader; to James Tuttleton, for his thought- fulness and direction; to Josephine Hendin, for her encouragement; to Cyrus Patell, for asserting boldness. Thanks to Dan Bronson for encouraging originality; Lee Cullen Khanna for recognizing sincerity; Jim Nash for his cool confidence; Alyce Miller for her enthusiasm; and Naomi Liebler, for her genuine interest. Thanks to Lisa, Steve, Aimee, Janette, Jessica and Helen, for their constancy. Thanks to Mark Strand, for creating poetry that one can get excited about in these creatively challenged times. Thanks to my father, for his faith.