A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

- Mark Strand

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

- Mark Strand

I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.

- Mark Strand

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

- Mark Strand

And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life.

- Mark Strand

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

- Mark Strand

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

- Mark Strand

It's very hard to write humor.

- Mark Strand

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

- Mark Strand

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

- Mark Strand

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony.

- Mark Strand

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

- Mark Strand

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

- Mark Strand

The future is always beginning now.

- Mark Strand

I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality.

- Mark Strand

There's a certain point, when you're writing autobiographical stuff, where you don't want to misrepresent yourself. It would be dishonest.

- Mark Strand

Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler.

- Mark Strand

I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.

- Mark Strand

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.

- Mark Strand

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

- Mark Strand