Mark Strand

Mark Strand
Strand at Georgetown University, 2012
Born	(1934-04-11)April 11, 1934 Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada
Died	November 29, 2014(2014-11-29) (aged 80) Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Poet, translator, novelist, essayist
Nationality	American, Canadian
Education	Antioch College; Iowa Writers' Workshop

Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 – November 29, 2014) was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990.^[1] He was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.

Strand was born in 1934 at Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada.^[2] Raised in a secular Jewish family,^[3][4] his early years were spent in North America, while much of his teenage years were spent in South and Central America. In 1957, he earned his B.A. from Antioch College in Ohio. Strand then studied painting under Josef Albers at Yale University where he earned a B.F.A in 1959. On a Fulbright Scholarship, Strand studied nineteenth-century Italian poetry in Italy during 1960–1961.

He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa the following year and earned a Master of Arts in 1962. In 1965 he spent a year in Brazil as a Fulbright Lecturer.^[5]

His academic career has taken him to numerous colleges and universities to teach. A partial list:

Teaching positions

• University of Iowa, Iowa City, instructor in English, 1962–1965
• University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Fulbright lecturer, 1965–1966
• Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, assistant professor, 1967
• Columbia University, New York City, adjunct associate professor, 1969–1972
• Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, New York City, associate professor, 1970–1972
• Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, Bain-Swiggett Lecturer, 1973
• Brandeis University, Hurst professor of poetry, 1974–1975
• University of Utah, Salt Lake City, professor of English, 1981–1993
• Johns Hopkins University, Elliot Coleman Professor of Poetry, 1994–c. 1998
• University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, 1998 – ca. 2005
• Columbia University, New York City, professor of English and Comparative Literature, ca. 2005–2014

Visiting professor at

• University of Washington, 1968, 1970
• Columbia University, 1980
• Yale University, 1969–1970
• University of Virginia, 1976, 1978
• California State University at Fresno, 1977
• University of California at Irvine, 1979
• Wesleyan University, 1979
• Harvard University, 1980

In 1997, he left Johns Hopkins University to accept the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professorship of Social Thought at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. In 2005–06, Strand began again to teach literature and creative writing at Columbia University, in New York City.

In 1981, Strand was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress during the 1990–1991 term. Strand has received numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999 for Blizzard of One.

Strand died of liposarcoma on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York, according to family.^[6]

Many of Strand's poems are nostalgic in tone, evoking the bays, fields, boats, and pines of his childhood on Prince Edward Island. Strand has been compared to Robert Bly in his use of surrealism, though he attributes the surreal elements in his poems to an admiration of the works of Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, and René Magritte.^[7] Strand's poems use plain and concrete language, usually without rhyme or meter. In a 1971 interview, Strand said, "I feel very much a part of a new international style that has a lot to do with plainness of diction, a certain reliance on surrealist techniques, and a strong narrative element."^[8]

• 1960–1961: Fulbright Fellowship
• 1979: Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets
• 1987: MacArthur Fellowship
• 1990–1991: Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress
• 1992: Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry
• 1993: Bollingen Prize
• 1999: Pulitzer Prize, for Blizzard of One
• 2004: Wallace Stevens Award
• 2009: Gold Medal in Poetry, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters^[9]

• Perkins, George and Barbara Perkins, Ed. (1988) Contemporary American Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill
• Galgano, Andrea, Ed. (2013) Mark Strand. L'assenza e l'ombra in Mosaico Roma: Aracne

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• Wallace Shawn (Fall 1998). "Mark Strand, The Art of Poetry No. 77". The Paris Review.
• Mark Strand reading at the 2010 Key West Literary Seminar (audio / 33:53)
• Footage of Strand reading poems at the Erotikon Symposium, University of Chicago
• "Poetry in the World," essay by Mark Strand
• Profile and poems of Mark Strand, including audio files, at the Poetry Foundation.
• Modern American Poetry Web site biographical page on Mark Strand
• Strand's Academy Of American Poets page
• Mark Strand reading and interview on Weekend America
• Ernest Hilbert Interview with Mark Strand for Random House on the Publication of Blizzard of One and The Weather of Words
• Watch Mark Strand read poems and give writing advice at Open-Door Poetry
• 'Mark Strand's Words and Weather', review of New Selected Poems in the Oxonian Review
• L'assenza e l'ombra: Mark Strand an Italian article

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