And you wonder, The poem seemed so natural at the beginning, how did you get where you ended up?

“Mocked and generally brutalized by my classmates,” Strand learned English fast. He was a shy dreamy child, and claims not to have been very bright at school. You’ve got it all wrong. However, the ending of the story did make me think about. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. He flirts with her, offering to take her out on date, offering her a romantic getaway, he even asks her to marry him. Strand says that “I owe my professional career as a poet to Harry Ford.”. Photo © Olivier Roller (detail); Manuscript image courtesy of Galaxia Gutenberg.

You know, it was really totally up to you to sort of create this world in your own head, and whether what was in your head was what was in Heidegger’s head—who could possibly guess? And I’m not sure I could articulate a view of nothingness, since nothingness doesn’t allow a description of itself. When we read your poetry, we are enticed by the voice—and then led into a world that you have created. Well, your poetry is obviously very much in this category. His parents were from the United States. I started reading that thing that that guy wrote about you. - John Bay ley, The New York Review of Books, 1998 Mark Strand has developed over the years an aesthetic much his own: the discursive, easy surfaces of his quiet, gently surreal poems accumulate into a complex metaphysic, a notion of time and space that permeates his … Soon after, some of his own poems began to be published in The New Yorker, and he began to feel that he was going to devote his life to poetry.

According to the terms of Vila-Matas’s thinking, the real can only fully acquire a luminous existence when inserted into a prior network of words— even, for instance, a conversation. She shows him what he should have in life to enjoy it! I like to be mystified. You don’t read poetry for the kind of truth that passes for truth in the workaday world. Strand has published eleven books of poetry, a book of sui generis short stories called Mr. and Mrs. Baby, and a disturbing meditation on immortality in the form of a prose poem, The Monument. I inadvertently lend an air of implausibility to things that really have taken place. That’s about it.” Asked if he ever writes in a less tranquil spot, such as on a train, he replies that he does, but usually only prose, because it’s “less embarrassing. And, well, when the book was published, the eminent literary critic for El País wrote that I was a promising young writer but obviously suffered from an “overactive imagination,” as demonstrated by “the implausible story of the bread collector.” That critic has since died, but when he was alive I used to keep an eye out for him at bookish parties and receptions in order to explain that story really had happened to me and even disclose to him that funny collector’s name. ... That space, I began to think, was the visual form of Vila-Matas’s literary philosophy—fragile, futuristic, and infinitely valuable: an idea of writing as a singular, patient process that can absorb and create the hyper world outside it. I warn you—no one believes what I say. Well, when I read poetry I can’t imagine that what’s in the reader’s head is ever what was in the poet’s head, because there’s usually very little in the poet’s head. The two conversations, one fictional, one real, could therefore gradually infiltrate each other—this was his hope—and reach their own separate level of truth. You don’t read a poem to find out how you get to Twenty-fourth Street. A man witnesses a suicide by chance and is able to say a few words to a woman before she jumps off a building. I don’t think I really get the concept of “themes.” So I’m not going to ask you questions like, What is your view of nothingness?

Since 2005–06, he has been a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. The show opens with excerpts of Toni Morrison’s 1993 Art of Fiction Interview, scored live by some of the musicians that created the score for Seasons 1 and 2. Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 – November 29, 2014) was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. I don’t know, but perhaps what confused that interviewer was my “way of saying things.” Could that be it? An experience of total immersion in mystery that I once had was reading the first half of Heidegger’s Being and Time. I mean, we live with mystery, but we don’t like the feeling. His father did many different things—you could call him a businessman—and his mother was at different times a schoolteacher and an archaeologist. And aren’t we all thieves? Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness. I mean, I like that, I like it in other people’s poems when it happens.

Mark Strand, I see you. He is currently teaching at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where this fall he is giving a course on Plato’s Symposium with the philosopher Jonathan Lear. Twentysomething me liked you well enough, thought your poems OK; twentysomething me probably glossed right over “Space.” But fortysomething me read the story and stopped and said aloud, in the softly lit bedroom with the traffic running like a … Mark Strand was recognized as one of the premier American poets of his generation as well as an accomplished editor, translator, and prose writer. Born in Barcelona in 1948, he published his first novel—a single, sternly uninterrupted sentence—in 1973. When I tell people that story no one ever believes me, but I was there! In real life, I’d visited various cities of Poland, Egypt, and Greece with that woman, and in every one she’d made a point of buying some bread, even if she had no intention of eating it. This vignette illustrates the same story that was told in “Its a Wonderful Life.” The woman is his inner consciousness. [Laughs]. In 1960 he was given a Fulbright Scholarship to Italy to study nineteenth-century Italian poetry. When he was four years old, they moved to Philadelphia. The book poses as a history of a secret society of twentieth-century artists and writers, including Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, Kafka, and others. That space, I began to think, was the visual form of Vila-Matas’s literary philosophy—fragile, futuristic, and infinitely valuable: an idea of writing as a singular, patient process that can absorb and create the hyper world outside it. I feel more like an editor than a poet after that.” Often, after reading what he has typed, he’ll “go back to longhand for a few weeks.”. I should really be on the beautiful woman’s side. You know, this is extracting from everyday experience a statement about life, or a moral. Its reckless linking of real names to imaginary quotations and vice versa, its mingling of fiction with history, made him notorious—and represented a new moment in European fiction. Sign up for the Paris Review newsletter and keep up with news, parties, readings, and more. Sometimes, though, in your poems—quite often, really—we reach a point that is almost, one could say, Zeno-like, in which we’re asked to imagine things that are either almost self-contradictory or literally unimaginable. Of course, none of those offers move her in any way and she still jumps off the building in the end. She shows him what he doesn’t have. He has also translated the poetry of Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade and written monographs on the paintings of William Bailey and Edward Hopper. The girl is unmarried. But do you suggest something that you yourself have already pictured? I think the poem would be, finally, a reducible item.

Way to go for starting a story with “A beautiful woman stood at the roof-edge…” “I moved around so much, and went to so many different schools, that I never found my own place,” Strand has said. Reality can only be apprehended through a comical, dazzling network of texts—that was the book’s basic proposition, and its implications and complications are what Vila-Matas has continued to explore in wildly deconstructive novels like Bartleby & Co. (2000, 2007), Montano’s Malady (2002, 2007), and Never Any End to Paris (2003, 2011), as well as in a series of what Vila-Matas calls critical fictions, including Chet Baker piensa en su arte (Chet Baker thinks about his art, 2011), The Illogic of Kassel (2014, 2015), and Marienbad électrique (Electric Marienbad, 2015). A man witnesses a suicide by chance and is able to say a few words to a woman before she jumps off a building. But then, there’s nothing that sounds like a Frost poem, either. This is a wonderful story which explains why we should enjoy life for what it is – nature, food, literature. This week, the staff of ‘The Paris Review’ stays up late to read, unlearns English, and dances to Róisín Murphy in the living room. Another friend and poet who played an important role in his life was Joseph Brodsky, whom he met in the seventies.

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