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.