Where I Am From Poem

What Is Missing

Mark Strand has stopped writing poetry. Again. The first time he quit, the hiatus lasted five years, and, Strand says, it was agony. This time, “I have nothing left to say,” he explains. Strand, 77, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, has instead returned to his first love: art; he is creating a series of collages. He is also writing short, fun prose pieces and a memoir about his parents. He still gives talks about his poetry all over the world, including in Jerusalem in May. I heard him read his poetry in Madrid, Spain, in the summer of 2010. I then interviewed him twice in New York City, once in October 2010 and again in February 2011.

You often talk about how meditative poetry is and how important it is for finding out who one is. What have you found out?

I find out certain things that repeat and keep coming back. I have a proclivity for certain gambits, references for certain words. And in that way I have some insight into how I work. But it’s hard to draw conclusions about who I am. What I find in my own work, reading it back or writing it, is not anything more than any astute critic would find out. And so to say that I know only as much as a shrewd critic would know is not saying much.

One of Richard Howard’s essays talks about the absence in your poetry, and many critics after that refer to the absence.

When someone’s written a poem [“Keeping Things Whole”] that begins, “Wherever I am, I am. In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am, I am what is missing,” it’s easy to conjecture this guy is obsessed with absence. In essence it suggests the world could get along very well without him, that the imposition of consciousness is a negative factor because he is what is missing wherever he goes. He becomes, one could say, a negative influence. He disrupts the orderly. Absence is part of everything. You could say that the desire to be missed is a preoccupation with absence.

What do you love about poetry? Do you wake up and can’t wait to start writing?

Rarely. When I’m going strong I can’t wait to wake up and start. Without having something promising to work on, life would be pretty boring. With nothing to do, with nothing I like doing, why wake up in the morning? What I like about writing is its incision, the fact that language is operating at its fullest. Words and poems exist on multiple levels. Poetry is a way of feeling deeply without being threatened. The other thing about poetry, why I like writing it, is I like making things up. I like writing a sentence or a few words and wondering where they’re going to go. How can I create meaning, or the illusion of meaning, out of these words, words that have never been used in this particular order ever before and may not be used so again.

anything but poetry: Appalachian

I was just at a wonderful conference where the main focus was Appalachian writing or being an Appalachian writer.  This is a label that I've never felt or claimed.  I feel like my whole life growing up in West Virginia was leading up to my big exit, poem by poem I was planning my escape.  I finally left West Virginia in 1996 with a vow to never return.  Some, I observed at the conference, look at the landscape and see this huge connection to the earth, this comfort, endless metaphor about existence, a real compassion for the landscape.  I look at the landscape and see the backdrop to some of my greatest sadness, the landscape that witnessed the sadness, that kept me locked in, the world outside inaccessible.  So, it's odd that I'm in year three of being back in West Virginia, teaching there, living right where I never thought I'd be again.  I took the job for the teaching experience (you've seen the job market the last couple years) with a promise to myself that I'd leave after one year.  Then one year became two, two became three and so on.  This fall I will start my fourth year. I will see my first class all the way through. I can't completely say that I've stayed because of the market.  I've definitely worked outside academia and (minus the summers off) found it mostly fine. But I think I've stayed so long because I've needed to make peace with something. I've needed to settle into my head some, which I found extremely difficult to do when I lived in New York (part of the reason I stayed there so long, I guess). Have I come back to make peace with the past, the landscape, the monsters that I've realized weren't really so big after all? I don't know.  But I do know there are days when, despite the fact there is mostly nothing to do (and you won't catch me spending the day hiking) that I look at the stars out the back door, or the fog surrounding a moutain, and I think: not so bad. Maybe that's Appalachian, too? The going out, the coming back, the going back out again (which I'll do again eventually).  I think of Mary Lee Settle's novel Charley Bland where she talks about wanting the angel to bless her, wanting her homeland to approve of her. I don't know if I need blessed, but I do know that every day I feel less and less afraid of whatever that sadness was I was running from.