"Lines for Winter" by Mark Strand

Lines for Winter by Mark Strand : The Poetry Foundation

We talked a bit about Mark Strand's poem last January, but it deserves more than one look.

Also, almost a year later, "Lines for Winter" is reminding me of a question I try to put to myself every once in awhile, regarding honesty:  if I weren't going to tell anyone I did this, would I still be doing it?  Do I really want to go to the Bach concert, or do I want to be able to say I was there?

I'm pretty sure we're all guilty, maybe once per decade, of undeserved self-congratulation, self-promotion, self-aggrandizement. Maybe it's like tobacco, and we should cut back on it.

Isn't Strand's poem about that, at least a bit, maybe a little sideways?  In any case, I welcome comments on "Lines for Winter" or other, related ideas.

Last January, Barbaro wrote here in visitor comments:  "You and your poems keep trying to make me hate winter, but I won't do it. So desperately do I love it that I got mildly depressed today because I did notice afternoons clawing their way back, which means those beautiful dark white days near the solstice are behind us for a whole other year. For all its intensity of cold and snow and impatience, Februrary can't touch that sweet spot in late December."

As I walked yesterday and visualized it again today, I realize I failed to endorse that view with sufficient enthusiasm.  Hence these photos.

Barbara Kruger, Mark Strand, Ways of Being

Right: Alex Katz, "Ann and Billy," 1981

Below: Yves Tanguy, "Shadow Country," 1927


barbara kruger - Google Search

I cannot find the post where I was first clued in to Barbara Kruger's work, so I offer the above link for a sampling.

Everyone liked a Mark Strand poem I posted a long time ago:

Keeping Things Whole by Mark Strand : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


So here's another one, by still another of our Poets Laureate. As destiny or some such would have it, Strand's "Lines for Winter" is very much about a way of being in the world, first Winter's way, then in the conclusion, the way each of us sees our own Way (which is left open-ended).

Lines for Winter by Mark Strand : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

If you're not chilled by the last two lines, read it again. Or move north, or remember North-ness. At least the days are 18 seconds longer now than they were two weeks ago, or some such myth. Who's measuring that? (And what's his way of being in the world? Is there a Way for all the measurers? What's the opposite of a measurer? A scatterer?).

Strand's style is quite spare, arguably minimalistic. Maybe the same can be said of Barbara Kruger. At any rate, neither is a Whitmanesque, prolix Romantic. But how similar are the ways of being that Strand the poet and Kruger the artist propose? If they're at all similar, how so, and what differentiates them, whether it's major or minor?

"Anxious Mom, Anxious Baby," Time Magazine, January 10, 2011: "Chicks seemed to acquire their mother's stress . . . , showing more fearful behavior in novel situations." The article is talking about species other than chickens, if you get my drift. Ways of being are contagious, it seems.

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Lines for Winter by Mark Strand : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

This Mark Strand poem is a little darker than Grace Paley's "Walking in the Woods" (December 9 here), but don't you think it offers a similar challenge?


Lines for Winter by Mark Strand : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Poem for a Day: "Keeping Things Whole" by Mark Strand

Field




















and things in fields






http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177001



One of the most youthful, most basic of our philosophical ponderings is, "Who am I?" For most of us, it probably remains relevant for a lifetime, though we might blush to admit it.

But maybe our most sophisticated add-on makes it just a bit less narcissistic: "What am I?" -- as if we can know. But we should want to; we should be Sisyphus rolling our rocks up that hill.

I don't know Mark Strand's poetry as well as I intend to, but I stumbled onto "Keeping Things Whole" a couple of years ago, and this or that cue keeps me coming back to it. The poem strikes me as simple and playful on the one hand, but as profound as subatomic particles on the other. It is as self-important as its conclusion, "I move to keep things whole." But it's also humble--literally self-effacing: "I am the absence" . . . . That is, absence of field. And who doesn't like a field? A field is an intuitively good thing unless added information convinces us this is one of those rare malevolent fields.

The other day (Dec. 9), in talking about Grace Paley's "Walking in the Woods," I mentioned the uses of white space in poems. In "Keeping Things Whole," notice the way Mark Strand's trail of words is much thinner than the white space surrounding it, as if the poem is a thing like its speaker, moving into and out of spaces in a mysterious, ineffable way. And the inked words are not loud or bellicose or imperialistic; they are not bombs, but small, soft-spoken shapes, wondering about themselves and space and matter, as they wind and sneak along.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177001

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