‘I was never much good with language as a child,’ Strand admitted during an interview with Bill Thomas for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. ‘Believe me, the idea that I would someday become a poet would have come as a complete shock to everyone in my family.'”
In the middle of his [url=http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/page/TMQWeekThirteen141202/game-survivor-reach-wild-card-slots-tuesday-morning-quarterback]weekly football column[/url], Gregg Easterbrook has this short eulogy:
[blockquote]Mark Strand, 1934-2014: Mark Strand, one of the great poets of the post-war generation, passed away over the weekend at age 80. Your columnist knew Strand slightly and once had the honor of arguing with him. An agreeable assignment: In prose he was bleak, in person lovable. Strand’s philosophy can be summed up in the lines below from his 1990 work “The Continuous Life,” among the most important American poems. In the verses, the speaker advises parents to teach children the bittersweet nature of existence:
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
with an ending, the second without one. That the luckiest
thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
of hours and days, months and years, and believe
it has meaning despite the occasional fear
you are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
to prove you existed.
I disagree with this view, and for anyone who may be interested, detailed my disagreement with Strand in my 1998 book “Beside Still Waters.” But the power of the verses is undeniable, and that statement was true of the full body of Strand’s poetry. He left proof he existed.[/blockquote]