Summer 2015
Columbia Forum
Into the City of Souls
A selection of the work of Mark Strand (1934–2014), U.S. poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner and Columbia faculty member
P
oet Mark Strand was known for writing about death, but not necessarily in a tone that was tragic. “I feel myself inching towards it. So there it is in my poems,” he told The Paris Review in 1998. “But I don’t think of myself as gloomy at all.” His well-known poem “2002” shows Death daydreaming of his final rendezvous with the poet; the occasion seems natural and casual, almost like the prelude to an elegant party. “One of these days I’ll be out back, swinging my scythe/Or holding my hourglass up to the moon, and Strand will appear/In a jacket and tie, and together under the boulevards’/Leafless trees we’ll stroll into the city of souls.”
On November 29, 2014, Strand walked away with Death; he was 80. He had taught in the Department of English and Comparative Literature since 2005, and also at the School of the Arts. A number of his Columbia students have posted tributes to him online (arts.columbia.edu/writing/news/2014/mark-strand-obituary-p2). The U.S. poet laureate from 1990 to 1991, he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Bollingen Prize, and was also a MacArthur Fellow.
Strand trained as a visual artist in the 1950s and some of his poems are as spare, abstract and luminous as a late Rothko. In his Paris Review interview, Strand admitted: “The reality of the poem is a very ghostly one. It doesn’t try for the kind of concreteness that fiction tries for.” But that lack of concreteness is what gives his verbal canvases their strange, simple power. “It’s this ‘beyondness,’ that depth that you reach in a poem, that keeps you returning to it.”
In honor of Strand, and his contribution to American poetry, on the following pages is a selection of his work, chosen from Collected Poems (Knopf, 2014).
Rose Kernochan BC’82
THE GREAT POET RETURNS
When the light poured down through a hole in the clouds,
We knew the great poet was going to show. And he did.
A limousine with all-white tires and stained-glass windows
Dropped him off. And then, with a clear and soundless fluency,
He strode into the hall. There was a hush. His wings were big.
The cut of his suit, the width of his tie, were out of date.
When he spoke, the air seemed whitened by imagined cries.
The worm of desire bore into the heart of everyone there.
There were tears in their eyes. The great one was better than ever.
“No need to rush,” he said at the close of the reading, “the end
Of the world is only the end of the world as you know it.”
How like him, everyone thought. Then he was gone,
And the world was a blank. It was cold and the air was still.
Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?
Can anyone die without even a little?
KEEPING THINGS WHOLE
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
THE MARRIAGE
The wind comes from opposite poles,
traveling slowly.
She turns in the deep air.
He walks in the clouds.
She readies herself,
shakes out her hair,
makes up her eyes,
smiles.
The sun warms her teeth,
the tip of her tongue moistens them.
He brushes the dust from his suit
and straightens his tie.
He smokes.
Soon they will meet.
The wind carries them closer.
They wave.
Closer, closer.
They embrace.
She is making a bed.
He is pulling off his pants.
They marry
and have a child.
The wind carries them off
in different directions.
This wind is strong, he thinks
as he straightens his tie.
I like this wind, she says
as she puts on her dress.
The wind unfolds.
The wind is everything to them.
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,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
THE END
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
From the Book: COLLECTED POEMS. Copyright © 2014 by Mark Strand.
Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.