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| Image credit: www.nationalbook.org |
Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 - November 29, 2014) was a Canadian-born American poet and translator. He was born at Summerside, Prince Edward Island Canada and raised in a secular Jewish family. He earned his B.A. from Antioch College in Ohio in 1957 and studied painting under Josef Albers at Yale University, where he earned a B.F.A in 1959. While on a Fulbright Scholarship, Strand studied 19th-century Italian poetry in Italy (1960–61). In 1965, Strand spent a year in Brazil as a Fulbright Lecturer.
He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. 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. Until his death, he was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, since 2005. He received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Blizzard of One.
This year, the official 2015 National Poetry Month poster, designed by National Book Award finalist Roz Chast, was inspired by Mark Strand's poem Eating Poetry from his book, Collected Poems. Enjoy his poem Eating Poetry as we celebrate his birthday and National Poetry Month.
Eating Poetry
By Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
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