Mark Strand

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 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.

Biography

Strand was born in 1934 at Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, to Robert Joseph Strand and Sonia Apter. Raised in a secular Jewish family, he spent his early years in North America and much of his adolescence in South and Central America. Strand graduated from Oakwood Friends School in 1951 and in 1957 earned his B.A. from Antioch College in Ohio. He then studied painting under Josef Albers at Yale University, where he earned a B.F.A in 1959. On a U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission scholarship, Strand studied 19th-century Italian poetry in Florence in 1960–1961. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa the following year and earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1962. In 1965, he spent a year in Brazil as a Fulbright Lecturer.

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. In 1998, 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. From 2005 to his death, Strand taught literature and creative writing at Columbia University, in New York City.

Strand received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Blizzard of One. Harold Bloom included three volumes of Strand's poetry in his list of works defining the Western Canon.

Strand died of liposarcoma on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York.

Poetry

Many of Strand's poems are nostalgic in tone, evoking the bays, fields, boats, and pines of his Prince Edward Island childhood. He has been compared to Robert Bly in his use of surrealism, though he attributes his poems' surreal elements to an admiration of the works of Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, and René Magritte. Strand's poems use plain and concrete language, usually without rhyme or meter. In a 1971 interview, he 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."

Academic career

Strand's academic career took him to various colleges and universities, including:

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, 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

University of Washington, 1968, 1970

Columbia University, 1980

Yale University, 1969–1970

University of Virginia, 1976, 1978

California State University, Fresno, 1977

University of California, Irvine, 1979

Wesleyan University, 1979

Harvard University, 1980

Awards

Strand was awarded the following:

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