Every poem is a new start

Every poem is a new start
By Shiri Lev-Ari

It's hard to interview a poet, especially a poet like Mark Strand. Things are fluid, elusive, and there is no chunk of words you can bite into. However, even conversation with Strand sounds like poetry.

He speaks his poetry. Strand, 73, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada. His father was a traveling salesman, and his mother was an artist. He spent his childhood in various cities in the United States. When he was young, he wanted to become an artist and studied painting, but in the end he became a poet. Thus far, he has published 11 poetry books and has won many literary prizes. He also writes articles, short stories, art books and children's books, and has published translations and anthologies. He now teaches literature at Columbia University. He has been divorced twice, and has two grown children.

"I have a daughter who writes cookbooks, and a son who is a waiter - food is major topic for us," he says in a telephone interview from his home in New York.

The person who has brought Strand's poetry to Hebrew readers is writer Uzi Weill, who has been translating him for more than 15 years. This started with random translations for the "Back Page" feature that Weill wrote for the Tel Aviv weekly Ha'ir. The column is now being compiled into a book, Shirim ("Poems"), a selection of Strand's works, and is being published by Yedioth Books. The book brings together poems from several of Strand's books, including the most recent, "Man and Camel," and a few works of prose.

"To some extent," writes Weill in the preface to the book, "Mark Strand is a poet of the invisible. A poet of the information that surrounds us, the information that we are incapable of bringing into our consciousness because of the crudeness of the tool that is called the human conscious." Strand's poems resemble hallucinations, dreams. It is not clear where they take place and when, but they come from deep within the true nature of things. He writes a great deal about death - his own death - loss, separation, rare moments of fierce existence. He plays with being and non-being, presence and absence. He writes about a person whose father has died but returns and is revealed to him through all kinds of creatures, first through an annoying fly and in the end through his beloved.

He writes phrases like: "A man has been standing / in front of my house / for days. I peek at him / from the living room / window and at night, / unable to sleep, / I shine my flashlight / down on the lawn. / He is always there." (From "The Tunnel")

He writes about poetry: "1. If a man understands a poem, / he shall have troubles. // 2. If a man lives with a poem, / he shall die lonely. // 3. If a man lives with two poems, / he shall be unfaithful to one. // ... 18. If a man lets his poems go naked, / he shall fear death. // 19. If a man fears death, / he shall be saved by his poems. // 20. If a man does not fear death, / he may or may not be saved by his poems. // 21. If a man finishes a poem, / he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion / and be kissed by white paper" (from "The New Poetry Handbook").

Strand has been blessed with the ability to translate the experience of his life into words. What enables him to do this?

"I really don't know," he says, hesitating. "Maybe it's the fact that I think verbally. I amuse with language all the time, and when I write I try to be as clear and precise as possible. There is so much bad writing in the world, so I think that a poet is morally obliged to write as well as possible. It always surprises me that people can get excited about other people's thoughts. I don't know what the mechanism is that allows this to happen. I am not a psychologist, nor a philosopher."

Poetry as a state of mind

How did you start writing poems?

"I wrote poems when I was in high school, but those were typical poems of an adolescent who feels isolated and alienated, who thinks that the world is a shame and that he is the only one who can be honest. And then I stopped because I realized that it was what it was, totally worthless. Then I started to paint. I thought of being a painter and I discovered that people out there are much more gifted than I was, so I went back to poetry.

"I have always read poetry, and that is really the reason I became a poet. I've always picked up books by Wallace Stevens or Robert Frost, and later Pablo Neruda and Fernando Pessoa. It went slowly at first, but it got better with time. As a matter of fact, even to say that I improved is a mistake, because every time I sit down to write a new poem it isn't like I learned anything from my previous poems. Each poem is really a new start. Maybe my poems seem similar, but when I am writing them I have the feeling that what I am writing at that moment is different from what I had written before.

"And that's how poetry becomes a way of thinking. In the back of my mind I am always working on a poem, choosing phrases. I am always ready to catch the next butterfly or the next fish - whatever it is."

So being a poet is a state of mind?

"Yes, and more than that - it's a conditional being."

What does poetry promise? Is it possible to live more through it?

"It offers the possibility of living your life in a way that is maybe a bit more meaningful. I know that writing poetry has made my life richer. I pay more attention to what goes on around me and to what happens inside of me. Is this living more or not? I'm not certain. It seems as though the world offers more than poetry can put into words. In that sense, the experience of life can be richer than poetry. You are liable to become pretty poor if you are always looking for something to say, instead of experiencing things without an ulterior motive."

In many of your poems you write about death, and about your own death.

"Well, death makes you think about it. We experience it at a stage when it is already too late for us to learn anything about it or to talk about it. Death offers endless possibilities for the imagination. It is one of the absolute things in life, and it demands that we think about it and about life. But I don't take it too seriously. I know that it will happen to me. I hope it won't happen tomorrow or the next day. I can easily imagine the world getting along fine without me. When I die, the loss to the world will not be so great, but for me it will be the loss of the world."

Strand lives alone. "But I have a lot of friends," he says. As a child, he moved often with his family. "I grew up in different places," he says. "We started out in Canada, where I was born, and after that I lived in Utah, Iowa, Connecticut, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland. Maybe that's the reason there is no specific place that I write about in the poems. I gather from all kinds of places I've lived to create some inner landscape of my own."

He writes: "In a field / I am the absence / of field. / This is / always the case. / Wherever I am / I am what is missing" (from "Keeping Things Whole").

Your poems contain something of the Zen Buddhist experience.

"Yes, a lot of people tell me that," he says. "I don't consider myself religious of all, but I don't mind being considered a Zen Buddhist."

You play with presence and absence, existence and non-existence, being and non-being, with the reconciliation of opposites. Is that also how you have lived your life?

"I must do so, if this continues to emerge from my poems. But my everyday life and the life in my poems are not the same life. I live a life in which I drink coffee for breakfast and eat lunch and visit friends, and this isn't what happens in my poems. The life in my poems is altogether on a different plane."

No validation in the Pulitzer

In 1988 Strand won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

"I felt lucky," he says, "but it always depends on who the judges are - if there are judges who don't like your work, you don't win the prize. It isn't anything you can rely on. It always comes as a surprise. I enjoyed it for 10 minutes."

Ten minutes? Isn't a prize like that some kind of sign that you are on the right path?

"But so many bad poets have won the Pulitzer Prize. There are so many bad writers who win all kinds of prizes, so being proud of yourself for having won a prize is self-delusion. I don't think that prizes validate your work. In fact, I'm sure they don't. I think about all the great writers who never won the Nobel."

Strand began publishing poems in the 1960s, and says the status of poetry has changed since that time. "I think that poetry in the '60s and the '70s in America was a lot more popular, because they were writing a lot against the war in Vietnam and we had a huge audience of people who wanted to hear us. Today, you know, no one listens. People are writing poems against the war in Iraq and no one notices. Things have changed. I think that the big difference is that in the '60s and '70s, there was the draft. The war hit the middle class. Today there is no draft. And in addition, wars have become a lot more abstract than they were."

And you still keep writing.

"What else can I do? I read, I write, and if I don't do those two things I don't know what to do. I also go to a gym."

Thank you for the interview.

"I hope that I have said something. I am not sure that I have."

The translator of your poems into Hebrew writes that you know some secret, "something definite and clear, that can't be expressed in words at all."

Do you feel that you know a secret?

"I think so, but I don't know those secrets until I sit down to write."

FONTE: Ha'aretz - Tel Aviv,Israel - http://www.haaretz.com/