150+ lucky ears this weekend. In advance of posting our new-and-improved Lighthouse podcast (with jingle*) of this weekend's incredible Inside the Writer's Studio with Mark Strand and Eli Gottlieb, I thought I'd tantalize with a little bit of what's what. First, on Saturday, 100-plus packed into the Jones Theater and learned that a young Mark Strand shared a glass of gin with W.H. Auden, each of them rotating the glass with each sip so that their lips never touched the same spot on the glass. (CORRECTION: Eli points out that Auden turned the glass so that their lips did touch the same part of the glass, where Mark gamely turned the glass for a clean spot. Thanks, Eli!) Second, Strand's good friend Brodsky could bring thousands of screaming fans out to venues across the world--like a veritable Mick Jagger of poetry. Third, when Strand gets together with the literati in New York, it's always for dinner or a dinner party (no more than 8 people), the topic of conversation: gossip or politics, and the meal? Well, let's just say those of us in the audience on Sunday's Tattered Cover event got recipes from the former Poet Laureate of the United States. One of them involved a raw egg yolk nestled in a bed of steaming pasta. Enough said.
Here's a tasty vittle from Herr Eli Gottlieb, who was our uberdexterous interviewer on Saturday at the Jones (and don't forget--podcast plus jingle* forthcoming!):
Mark Strand is that rarest of things, a great poet who's contitnued to get better over time. Everybody with a set of eyes and ears remembers his early books of poems: the stab of their ironies, their uncanny off-kilter relationship to the authorial self. They performed a kind of emotional chiropractry on readers, and were like the mysterious galleries in the paintings of Giorgio di Chirico in that they obeyed no known laws of physics and yet felt entirely actual and real. Their terseness hid a world of implication. And differently from the so-called "confessional poets" who were in vogue when Mark first began publishing, they seemed to take a more jaunty, European or Continental approach to worldly anxiety. If Wallace Stevens had been baked in the hard American daylight of Robert Frost, they might have produced the wry, sly confection that is Mark Strand.
Diligently, over 50 years, he’s continued to write, while—no easy feat—expanding steadily as a poet. Talent is one thing. Ongoing creative growth through a life of art is another thing entirely, and far rarer. I’ve seen his work process, with its scribbled notebook pages, its endless revisions. The
famously casual voice rests on an ocean of craft. The dream-like clarity of the diction as it meditates on the self-in-time, on light, landscapes, women, and the comedy of desire, is the product not only of a mind that thinks and lives in poetry, but of thousands of hours of grueling, solitary, plain hard work.
It's no accident that of all the cities of the world, Mark would be most comfortable in that one which perfectly represents both the light of the mind, and the mortality of the body: Rome. Mark has been coming to Rome for many years and is deeply at home in its cafes and streets. He's been beautifully translated into Italian, and is in fact a superstar poet in Italy, where they’re running out of medals to hang around his neck. I've had the good fortune to spend time with him there, and in the speeded-up rhythms of acquaintance that exile confers, we’ve become friends.
I remember that when the great Italian poet and filmmaker Pasolini was murdered, his friend the novelist Alberto Moravia attended his funeral and spoke to the crowd. “A major poet has gone,” he said. “There are only a few real poets alive at one time in the world. Perhaps only a handful in a century. They are each of them precious gifts to their home country.”
He was right. And we’re lucky to have one with us today.
Mark Strand.
*Jingle made possible thanks to Jennie Dorris, who knows every musician in Denver, including jingle musicians. I'll bet you can't wait to hear it! Or can you?
--AED
