Mark Strand

I always feel slightly guilty about writing poetry while I am not an enthusiastic reader of poetry. On our last trip to America, three months ago by now, I went into a huge bookstore in a shopping center near our daughter's house, and browsed through the poetry section. Compared to the number of books about achieving salvation through better orgasms, there were relatively few books of poetry. I ended up picking out four, including David Ferry's translation of Gilgamesh and New Selected Poems by Mark Strand.
I have only begun to browse through that rich volume, and I expect to stay with it for a while. I am enjoying the way Strand brings out the strangeness of experience and his almost plain, almost clear language: "Nothing will tell you/ where you are./ Each moment is a place/ you've never been."
Last week my friends' twenty-year-old son died in a diving accident, a meaningless and devastating stroke of terrible misfortune. I have a good idea how heavy the burden of grief will be for them, year after year. Such tragedies make it impossible to find meaning in life, just as they make it imperative to do so. Poetry dwells in the chasm between impossibility and necessity.
In a poem of my own I wrote:

The Company of Misery, March 2011

I watched a dying hedgehog stagger on short legs.

Troubled by that sick animal, whose pain
Was nothing to the pain of Japan at that moment –
Earth heaving like water,
Water pounding harder than rock.

Japan is distant,
The hedgehog is right here at my feet,
Too feeble to flee.

I could no more help the being near me
Than the people dying far away.