’s Poetry Essay, Research Paper
Richard Howard
The poems tell one story and one story only: they narrate the
moment when Strand makes Rimbaud’s discovery, that je est un autre, that the self
is someone else, even something else; "The Mailman," "The Accident,"
"The Door," "The Tunnel," even "The Last Bus" with its
exotic Brazilian stage-properties, all recount the worst, realizing every apprehension,
relishing the things possible only in one’s wildest fantasies of victimization, and
then with a shriek as much of delight as of despair, fall upon the fact–
It will always be this way.
I stand here scared
that you will disappear,
scared that you will stay–
that the victimizer is, precisely, the self, and that the victim is the other, is
others.
[. . . .]
Strand is both nervous and morbid, and a consideration of finality is his constant
project, sustained here by shifting the responsibility for the imminent wreck from
"the reaches of ourselves" to the ambiguity instinct in language.
[. . . .]
Strand’s work since Reason for Moving widens his scope, even as it sharpens
his focus; just as he had divided his body against itself in order to discover an
identity, he now identifies the body politic with his own in order to recover a division;
in a series of political prospects, "Our Death," "From a Litany,"
"General," and finest of all "The Way It Is," the poet conjugates the
nightmares of Fortress America with his own stunned mortality to produce an apocalypse of
disordered devotion:
Everyone who has sold himself wants to buy himself back.
Nothing is done. The night
eats into their limbs
like a blight.
Everything dims.
The future is not what it used to be.
The graves are ready. The dead
shall inherit the dead.
But what gives these public accents of Strand’s their apprehensive relevance is not
just a shrewd selection of details ("My neighbor marches in his room, / wearing the
sleek / mask of a hawk with a large beak . . . His helmet in a shopping bag, / he sits in
the park, waving a small American flag"), nor any cosy contrast of the poet’s intimeries
against a gaining outer darkness ("Slowly I dance out of the burning house of my
head. /And who isn’t borne again and again into heaven?"). Rather it is the sense
that public and private degradation, outer and inner weather, tropic and glacial decors
(Saint Thomas and Prince Edward Islands, in fact) are all versions and visions of what
Coleridge called the One Life, and that the whole of nature and society are no more than
the churning content of a single and limitless human body–the poet’s own.
From Alone With America: Essay on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950.
New York: Atheneum, 1980. Copyright ? 1980 by Richard Howard.
Samuel Maio
In his short collection of idiosyncratic musings in verse form, The Sargeantville
Notebook (1973), Strand included the following curious statement:
The ultimate self-effacement
is not the pretense of the minimal,
but the jocular considerations of the maximal
in the manner of Wallace Stevens.
Strand admittedly has long admired Stevens’s work, and read Stevens even before
beginning to write his own poetry. (He once remarked to Wayne Dodd: "I discovered I
wasn’t destined to be a very good painter, so I became a poet. Now it didn’t happen
suddenly. I did read a lot, and I had been a reader of poetry before. In fact, I was much
more given to reading poems than I was to fiction and the book that I read a lot, and
frequently, was The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens") Perhaps
Strand, in commenting on what constitutes the "ultimate self-effacement,"
regards Stevens as a belated Romantic poet, as does Harold Bloom, in that the oste
private reflection, which is the subject of the poem, expresses emotions or ideologies
that are in fact diffuse. I make this parallel by suggesting that Strand means "the
minimal" to be the private, or individual, concern so that a pretense of such occurs
when a poet argues for his own life experiences as reflective of a larger than personal
theme, and that his phrase "the jocular considerations of the maximal" means the
viewing of global concerns with some degree of wit, with a touch of the absurd. A poet
betrays his "pretense of the minimal" when he tries to be an impartial observer,
a chronicler of an event he has witnessed or of a landscape he has seen; his presence in
the poem–his personal "I" speaker–negates his intended impartiality, or
objectivity, towards his subject. . . .
Strand reads Stevens, however, as having successfully avoided such pretense by
constructing poems that begin about another’s concerns, then move outward to embrace
universal questions: "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Le Monocle de Mon
Oncle," and "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage" are a few examples
from his early work. These jocular titles lead us to poems of "maximal" subject
matter; in each, Stevens’s presence is not visible. Each poem concentrates on the
individual named in its title; consequently, Stevens’s discussion of universal matters is
filtered through his representation of these paltry and jocular characters. Yet these
poems of Stevens employ a particular individual–Peter Quince, the "Oncle," the
Nude–(and none acting as a persona) in order to achieve his measure of self-effacement.
In this sense, these figures are like dramatis personae. Yet Strand’s objective is
to achieve the same extent of impartiality, and impersonality, while using an
"I" speaker that is neither a persona (that is, a representative "I"
speaking in behalf of all) nor one that is entirely confessional.
[. . . .]
The resulting self-effacing voice aids Strand in his personal inquiry into the
constitution, the definition, of an individual in a contemporary world to which he feels
no relationship or role other than that of filling a void. Such an inquiry–and tentative
answers–could not have been effected without his use of the self-effacing voice, for, as
we have seen, this voice cannot be distinguished from the self portrayed–and defined–in
these poems, whoever it is Strand would have us believe is their author.
From Creating Another Self: Voice in Modern American Personal Poetry.
Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1995. Copyright ? 1995 by Thomas
Jefferson University Press.
Harold Bloom
The irreality of Borges, though still near, is receding in Darker, as Strand
opens himself more to his own vision. These poems instantly touch a universal anguish as
no "confessional" poems can, for Strand has the fortune of writing naturally and
almost simply (though this must be supreme artifice) out of the involuntary near solipsism
that always marks a central poetic imagination in America. An uncanny master of tone,
Strand cannot pause for mere wit or argument but generally moves directly to
phantasmagoria, a mode so magically disciplined in him as to make redundant for us almost
all current questers after the "deep image."
From Southern Review (1972)
Linda Gregerson
When Mark Strand reinvented the poem, he began by leaving out the world. The self he
invented to star in the poems went on with the work of divestment: it jettisoned place, it
jettisoned fellows, it jettisoned all distinguishing physical marks, save beauty alone. It
was never impeded by personality. Nor was this radical renunciation to be confused with
modesty, or asceticism. The self had designs on a readership, and a consummate gift for
the musical phrase.
From Parnassus: Poetry in Review (1981)