“When I read poetry
I want to feel myself
suddenly larger…”
Tribute to Mark Strand by Anthony Wilson
I am sad because the great American poet Mark Strand has died.
Among the tributes to him in the last few days was this, from an interview with The Paris Review: The Art of Poetry No 77 (1998).
The words belong to Strand. I have merely reshaped them on the page.
When I read poetry
I want to feel myself
suddenly larger…
in touch with –
or at least close to –
what I deem magical,
astonishing.
I want to experience
a kind of wonderment.
And when you report back
to your own daily world
after experiencing the strangeness
of a world sort of recombined
and reordered in the depths
of a poet’s soul,
the world looks fresher somehow.
Your daily world
has been taken out of context.
It has the voice of the poet
written all over it,
for one thing,
but it also seems suddenly more alive…
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