Poet Laureate Mark Strand reads in Shriver Hall

The Writing Seminars warmly welcomed Mark Strand to Shriver Hall last night for a reading of his latest collection, “Almost Invisible.”

Strand is one of the foremost living poets in the United States.

He has won almost every major honor awarded to poets in the United States, including the Bollingen Prize, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Rockefeller Foundation Award, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the MacArthur Foundation.

He served as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1990 to 1991.

He currently teaches Comparative Literature and English at Columbia University, and has previously been on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and taught in the Writing Seminars department at Hopkins.

Strand splits his time between living in New York City and Madrid.

Professor Mary Jo Salter introduced Strand as a poet whose work unifies forms of poetry and fiction. She commended “Almost Invisible” for exploring “the border between self and not self, nothing and not nothing, writing and not writing, death and life and being and not being,” and noted that all 20 of the graduate students in the Writing Seminars program are studying his collection this semester.

Strand himself recognized the fact that his work unifies prose and poetry when he first stepped up the podium and explained, “My book is short. I can read from the beginning to end, skipping a few poems...I shouldn’t have said poems.” Strand made several statements similar in nature to this one over the course of the night. Strand’s work is written in a colloquial style in paragraph form, further blurring the line between the forms.

Though Strand is 78 years old, he continued to make self-deprecating jokes throughout his reading, pausing to comment, “I’m sorry I have nothing to say between poems. I don’t consider myself an entertainer. Maybe only in the most melancholy sense...”

His self-deprecation is even palpable in his work, such as in “Poem of the Spanish Poet,” in which he writes, “In a hotel room somewhere in Iowa an American poet, tired of his poems, tired of being an American poet, leans back in his chair and imagines he is a Spanish poet, and old Spanish poet...” In poems like this, Strand makes clear that he views his lifestyle in Madrid as an escape from his tired American one.

His poems tend to take on dark tones in a narrative structure, with titles ranging from the wistful “The Old Age of Nostalgia” to the witty “Love, Silhouetted by a Lavalight” and the whimsical “When I Turned One Hundred.”

A defining characteristic in Strand’s work (and personality) is his distinctive sense of humor.

As if an elderly man writing and reading a poem entitled, “Dreamed Testicles, Vanished Vaginas” isn’t enough to make you cringe, imagine being in the audience when he read the line, “I’ve heard that all vaginas up there, even the most open, honest and energetic, are shut down, and that all testicles, even the most forthright and gifted, swing dreamily among the clouds like little chandeliers.” If it were my own grandfather, I would have been disturbed; but since it’s Strand, it’s hilarious, especially when he tacked on, “I like the Spanish translation much better. ‘Testículos Fantaseamos.’”

The Writing Seminars will continue its Fall 2012 readings series this coming Tuesday, November 13. French Canadian fiction writer Heather O’Neill, whose original reading was rescheduled due to Hurrican Sandy, will read from her new novel, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in Remsen Hall Auditorium.