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Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More

por Mark Strand

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Mark Strand, Former Poet Laureate, Pulitzer and MacArthur recipient "startles with his image evoking language" (Rain Taxi ) in these vivid kaleidoscopic one line meditations.
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Mark Strand writes oblique poetry. Though he would probably resent the term, he is one of the most academic of the “academic” poets of the 20th century. These are poets subsidized by colleges and universities—the academe—and published, appreciated, and recognized primarily by other poets, scholars, and critics subsidized and recognized in the academe.

In his lecture, “Poetry in the World,” he describes himself attempting to write a lecture on “Poetry in the World” and ultimately being unable to do so. In it, a “fictional” Mark Strand prepares meat loaf and a pot roast and interacts with “fictional” students, Dick and Jane. He makes clear his rejection of the “accessible” poetry recently touted by US Poet Laureate Billy Collins:

“Such poems . . . ,” he insists, talking to Dick while looking over Fritos at a grocery store, “Such poems say what they mean right away. And the poets who write that sort of poem . . . are usually talking about their own experiences. What happens when you read such poems is that they put you back in the world you know. . . . When they are read in front of an audience they often elicit a lot of head-nodding. They make the world seem friendlier, more comfortable, because they almost always imply that here is someone else who had an experience like yours. . . . I must admit I am not a fan of such poems. There is so much in our own experience that we take for granted, we don't need to read poems that help us to take those things even more for granted.”

So what DO we find in poems then, Dick asks. The rest of Strand’s non-lecture consists of alternative answers to that question. “I do know there's another kind of poetry from the kind I've described.”

He explores a number of ways of talking about poetry: poetry and experience (especially deep, unspeakable experience), the unique language of each poet, the alternate worlds (or other-worldliness) of poetry, poetry and the sense of loss, and the like. Along the way, he comments on what I have called the oblique nature of poetry—the kind of poetry most often produced and appreciated by academic poets of the 20th century..

“I do feel that people's expectations are misdirected when all they want is to understand a poem,” he asserts. “It is one of the exasperating things about the way poetry is taught. It is assumed that an understanding of the poem is the same as the experience of the poem. Often the experience of a poem—a good poem—will elude understanding. Not totally, of course, but enough, enough to have us be close to what lies just out of reach. . . . In my case . . . I trust the implication of what I am saying, even though I am not absolutely sure of what it is that I am saying.”

Obviously, Strand was having fun in his non-lecture, moving from Fritos to broccoli and yams to a “small meat loaf,” then ultimately to a filling meal of pot roast, potatoes, and an elegant salad. He is being playful with language, and with himself. Curiously, in his poetic alternatives, he does not talk about simple playfulness with language as one approach to poetry.

But it is this poet, the playful one, who right around the time of the non-lecture had come out with Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More (Turtle Point Press, 2000). Not quite nonsense poems, not at all, they are delightful ventures in playfulness. Oh, there are still elements of the oblique, lines to be experienced but not understood, at least not completely understood. After all, this is Mark Strand, and as he says of Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost, he must write in his own language, speak in his own identifiable voice. Here, for instance, is the first of “Shadow”:

The shadow of Naples
The shadow of stanzas waiting
The shadow of daylight is absence
The shadow of a mother includes another
The shadow of chaos is order

Asked to describe the book, he is quoted on the flap of the dust jacket as saying, “This book is comprised of lists. Each list is built upon the repeated use of a single word. Each can be read in part or in its entirety. . . . These lists are as easy to read upon falling asleep as they are upon waking.”

Asked to be more specific, he simply refuses. Each of his “lists” consists of twenty five lines (or so) of about the same length. The topics go all the way from shadow and paradise through sun and moon, hand and foot, dog and chicken, to lake and paintings, twenty-four of them in all. Some lines are sentences, others phrases. Some are playful: “The cosmic chicken is a lesson to us all.” Some are quite down to earth, perhaps alliterative: “What a comfort a chair in the kitchen can be.” Some are metaphorical: “Sorrow is the soul’s candy.” Occasionally, but not often, lines are in a definite sequence: “An actual journey is into the future / A reflective journey is into the past / A journey to Rome is both / A journey to Pittsburgh is probably neither.”

At the end of his non-lecture on “Poetry in the World,” the “fictional” Strand says to Dick, "I don't think I'll be giving the talk. I'm convinced that the best thing I could do would be to end it now, before I begin."

The last “list” in this book, “Paintings,” has twenty-six lines, one more than most. In it he plays around with one of his other roles, that of art critic: “The paintings of A were of rock piles / The paintings of B were influenced by A.” It ends, “The paintings of Z died of neglect the minute they were shown.” I suspect one line in the list is a bit of subtle self-criticism: “The paintings of S seemed to shrink as they were looked at.”

Give this little book a look. You’ll have fun. Like Fritos, you can't stop with just one.

And I’ll be willing to bet you can’t resist writing a few lists of your own.

One of mine is called, “Lists (after Mark Strand).” Here’s how it ends:

A pack of lies; a confusion of lists
Christopher Columbus? let me count the lists
The Spruce Goose carrying a cargo of lists
Heaven consists of lists you can’t see
The imagination is a sunrise of lists
The stars in December: lists without number.
  bfrank | Jul 11, 2007 |
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Mark Strand, Former Poet Laureate, Pulitzer and MacArthur recipient "startles with his image evoking language" (Rain Taxi ) in these vivid kaleidoscopic one line meditations.

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