A Chicago Journal Poetry Center Event Review
Originally Published April 22, 2004
By Lydialyle Gibson

Killing time with the Grim Reaper:
A self-described 'humorous poet,' Mark Strand is serious, spellbinding, heartbreaking--and outright funny


Mark Strand is kidding. Dryly, wryly, drolly kidding. Grimly kidding. Well, maybe just a little. You can see it in his eyes and in the corners of his mouth--always a little askance and amused--and in his low, measured voice, which seems perpetually to be resisting a chuckle.

"Some people were alarmed when '2002' appeared," the 70-year-old literary luminary told an audience of adherents two weeks ago at Metro. He'd just finished reading a recent poem imagining a joyful rendezvous between himself and a lovestruck Grim Reaper.

"People thought I was dying," Strand said. Looking up into the crowd, he almost grinned.

"Obviously I wasn't. Clearly it's just a fantasy about my own value to Death."

"I am not thinking of Death, but Death is thinking of me," Strand's "2002" begins, striking a note that seems solemn enough at first. Then it takes a delicious turn.

He leans back in his chair, rubs his hands, strokes
His beard and says, 'I'm thinking of Strand, I'm thinking
That one of these days I'll be out back, swinging my scythe
Or holding my hourglass up to the moon, and Strand will appear
In a jacket and tie, and together under the boulevards'
Leafless trees we'll stroll into the city of souls.

"O let it be soon. Let it be soon," the poem closes.

"I've always thought of myself as a humorous poet," Strand told listeners, who'd gathered in the darkened Wrigleyville club for a for an hour or so of wit and wisdom and recited verse. The Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate obliged them with all manner of poetical offerings, as many of them unpublished as anthologized. One presented a harrowing, if glancing and blunted, description of the mythological satyr Marsyas flayed alive by Apollo--"Screams could be heard/ A storm was coming/ It was cold/ And the screams were piercing." Another saw a man going out in search of ... cake. Still another envisioned Death's withering demise:

It is evening in the town of X
Where Death, who used to love me, sits
in a limo with a blanket spread across his thighs,
waiting for his driver to appear. His hair
is white, his eyes have gotten small, his cheeks
have lost their luster.

Sponsored by the Poetry Center of Chicago, whose usual digs lie a couple dozen blocks south at the School of the Art Institute's cavernous ballroom, the April Fool's Day reading at Metro was a somewhat experimental event. Security staffers in black T-shirts hovered near the exits, and a sign on the club's wall warned, "Attention: Moshing, slam dancing, body surfing, & stage diving are strictly prohibited."

By the time Strand took the stage--wearing jeans and a red plastic bracelet certifying that he'd been cleared to buy drinks at the bar--a rapturous and reverent mood had already been set by a crooning jazz singer in a black lace cocktail dress and her amiable guitarist. Strand simply stepped roguishly into it.

"Thanks for believing in poetry and live music, even though it's the 21st century," singer Stephanie Browning called out, before launching into a gliding version of "Cheek to Cheek." Guitarist Henry Johnson smiled.

"I love Mark Strand!" Browning said.

Still waiting by the bar for his turn onstage, Strand offered a nod. Eight years ago, when I was an underclassman at Northwestern and Strand was still teaching poetry at Johns Hopkins--these days he's down in Hyde Park in front of a blackboard at the University of Chicago--Strand dropped by the campus for a question-and-answer session with students. What did he think of traveling to Rio with Elizabeth Bishop?

"It wasn't like a city; it was like a resort," Strand said. "I was dazzled by it and very unhappy."

What about his stint as the nation's poet laureate? "Ten minutes for four lines at the base of a statue at a courthouse in Newark. I love being paid so much for so little."

Someone asked Strand to explain just what poetry is. It's a mystery, he said. "The problem with defining poetry is that it puts it away," he said. "And at the heart of poetry is the unknown. Serious people don't go around giving definitions of things." Poems, Strand said, retreat from complete comprehension. Don't try to corner them--they'll find a crack in the wall and slip through it.

"Understanding a poem is often reductive," Strand told us that day. "It is more important to experience the poem. Many poems are not paraphrasable--you must read it again and again and again. ... Poetry speaks to parts of ourselves, levels of experience that nothing else does--what it's like to be alive, to live in time, about loss and mortal life. It's almost narcotic. Rhyme and meter are so delicious that you want to do it again and again. There is retrieval in the poetry of loss. And poetry keeps time. It provides what we are denied--time." Strand's work is similarly cagey, similarly spellbinding.

At once cool and distant, yet intimate and emotional, Strand is working a kind of magic. He spends more than one stanza poking fun at himself and others, puncturing one absurdity or another--or creating a few of his--with an almost invisible twist of understatement. "When the light poured down through a hole in the clouds,/ We knew the great poet was going to show. And he did," Strand writes in "The Great Poet Returns."

But Strand's lifelong project is finality, loss, the search for retrieval. And understatement guides him there, too. In "The Great Poet Returns" Strand ends with a question directly to the reader as poetical conceit falls away for. His question lingers in the vacuum opened by the great poet's exit:

"Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?/ Can anyone die without even a little?" Meanwhile, in a poem called "Nights in Hackett's Cove," Strand offers a lilting description of a darkened seaside: "... the sea wore a tarnished coat of silver./ The black pines waited. The cold air smelled/ of fishheads rotting under the pier at low tide./ The moon kept shedding its silver clothes/ over the bogs and pockets of bracken." Then, loss: "...nothing hinted that I would suffer so late/ this turning away, this longing to be there."

Winding toward a climax earlier this month at his Metro reading, Strand read "The Delirium Waltz"--a seemingly endless tangle of names and images and verbs repeated across page after page and line after line.

Strand prefaced the poem, naturally, with a little levity, and a little solemnity. "It's full of the names of friends and family," Strand said. "And it saddens me to read it--although clearly I'm going to read it--because some of the people mentioned are dead or divorced." He paused, and smiled. "Well, being divorced is not as bad as being dead. Well, when I wrote this, I did not know what was ahead for some of the people I mention."

In the end, "The Delirium Waltz" collapsed into its own entrancing and unpunctuated movement, and as he read it, Strand brought more than one listener to tears: "And one room led to another/ And birds flew back and forth/ People roamed the veranda/ Under the limbs of trees// And birds flew back and forth/ A golden haze was everywhere/ Under the limbs of trees/ And Howie was there with Francine// A golden haze was everywhere/ And Jeannette and Buddy were dancing/ And Howie was there with Francine/ Angels must always be pale they said..."