Discussing the title poem with the radio program, Weekend America, Strand said the poem “speaks to a certain anxiety I experienced back in the early ’60s. The volume is characterized by a pervasive sense of anxiety and restless foreboding. Strand’s first book, Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), introduced his distinctive approach to poetry. I rather liked the uncertainties of my life then.” “Poets were underground pop stars, and when we made the campus circuit, girls would flock around. “Groupies were a big part of the scene,” he told Thomas. Strand admitted there were some benefits to being a poet during the turbulent 1960s. He spent a year in Brazil in 1965 as a Fulbright lecturer. “Believe me, the idea that I would someday become a poet would have come as a complete shock to everyone in my family.” Strand earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1962 and began teaching at various colleges, including Yale University, Princeton University, and Harvard University.
“I was never much good with language as a child,” Strand admitted during an interview with Bill Thomas for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Following his graduation, he went to Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship and studied 19th-century Italian poetry. His interest in painting waned while at Yale, and he then decided to become a poet instead. He earned a BA from Antioch College in 1957 and a BFA from Yale University in 1959, where he studied with the painter Josef Albers. Strand originally expressed interest in painting and hoped to become an artist. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection Blizzard of One.īorn on Prince Edward Island, Canada, Strand grew up in various cities across the United States and in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Named the US poet laureate in 1990, Strand’s career spanned five decades, and he won numerous accolades from critics and a loyal following among readers. The hallmarks of his style are precise language, surreal imagery, and the recurring theme of absence and negation later collections investigate ideas of the self with pointed, often urbane wit.
Mark Strand was recognized as one of the premier American poets of his generation as well as an accomplished editor, translator, and prose writer.
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