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🗓️ 27 August 2024
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Mark Strand was born on Canada’s Prince Edward Island on April 11, 1934. He received a BA from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and attended Yale University, where he was awarded the Cook Prize and the Bergin Prize. After receiving his BFA degree in 1959, Strand spent a year studying at the University of Florence on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1962 he received his MA from the University of Iowa.
Strand was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Man and Camel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Dark Harbor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); The Continuous Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1980); The Story of Our Lives (Atheneum, 1973); and Reasons for Moving (Atheneum, 1968).
Strand also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century (W. W. Norton, 2005); The Golden Ecco Anthology (Ecco, 1994); The Best American Poetry 1991; and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, co-edited with Charles Simic (HarperCollins, 1976).
Strand’s honors included the Bollingen Prize, a Rockefeller Foundation award, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the 2004 Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1979, the 1974 Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets, as well as fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.
Strand served as poet laureate of the United States from 1990 to 1991 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1995 to 2000. He taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City.
Mark Strand died at eighty years old on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York.
-bio via Academy of American Poets
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0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, August 27th, 2004. Today's poem comes from Mark Strand, the 1990 U.S. Poet Laureate, who once aspired to be a painter before the art program at Yale changed his mind and put him on the |
0:25.2 | scent of poetry instead. After graduating from college, he went to Italy on a Fulbright scholarship, |
0:31.1 | where he discovered an enduring love for poetry. In 1962, he took his MFA from the famed Iowa Writers Workshop and published his |
0:39.5 | first collection of poems two years later, and the rest is history. The poem we'll read today |
0:46.9 | is called The Prediction. I'll read it once, say a few things about it, and then read it one more |
0:52.3 | time. |
0:55.0 | The prediction. |
1:02.4 | That night the moon drifted over the pond, turning the water to milk, and under the boughs of the trees, the blue trees, a young woman walked, and for an instant the future |
1:07.5 | came to her, rain falling on her husband's grave, rain falling on the |
1:12.2 | lawns of her children, her own mouth filling with cold air, strangers moving into her house. |
1:19.1 | A man in her room writing a poem, the moon drifting into it, a woman strolling under its |
1:24.4 | trees thinking of death, thinking of him, thinking of her, and the wind |
1:28.9 | arising and taking the moon and leaving the paper dark. |
1:37.7 | This is a lovely poem that has something of a painterly sensibility about it. |
1:43.4 | It reads to me a bit like a haiku even. |
1:48.0 | It's slightly atmospheric, just barely, ever so slightly disjointed, |
1:55.0 | moving instead of from one complete thought to another, |
1:59.0 | instead moving from one image to another, one sensation |
2:04.3 | to another. There's this sense of mystery, maybe even of foreboding as the poem begins to unfold, |
2:12.0 | and we learn or we see enter the scene, this young woman. But then when we come to the final lines of the |
2:20.4 | poem, we discover what it's really about. That strand, the poet, is in some ways the true subject of |
2:30.0 | this poem, although he doesn't emerge until the end, as perhaps the man who has moved into |
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