Mark Strand
the Story behind the Poetry
Mark Strand was born on April 11, 1934, in Canada’s Prince Edward Island in the town of Summerside. His father was a salesman and therefore, the family moved around a lot, wherever his father could get a job. By the time he was a young man, Strand had lived in Halifax, Montreal, Philadelphia, Cleveland, New York, Croton-on-Hudson, Columbia, Peru, and Mexico. He spent his summers with his aunt in Nova Scotia.
While he was growing up, Strand’s mother said he would become a painter. His parents encouraged him to create art, hoping it would not distract him from a more stable career. He went to Yale in 1959 and received his BFA. Here he also studied painting. He soon after realized that he wasn’t cut out to be a painter, so he traveled to Italy to study nineteenth-century poetry. There he met his wife, Antonia Ratensky. They had a daughter named Jessica. In 1962, he returned to America and attended the University of Iowa. Later divorcing his first wife, he married Julia Runsey Garretson in 1976 and had a son named Thomas Summerfield.
Strand is famous for his dream like poetry that is characterized by distinct and vivid images. He is said to be influence by Latin American surrealism and European writers like Franz Kafka. He often writes about a darker side of human psyche . His first book, Sleeping with one eye open, was published in 1964. Strand has received many awards including3 grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bollingen Prize, A National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, a Rockefeller Foundation award, a fellowship from the Academy of American poets, and grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
Strand has taught at many schools such as Brandeis, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, the University of Virginia, and the University of Chicago. He joined the University of Chicago’s faculty in 1997 and currently teaches in the Committee on Social thought at the University of Chicago.
Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)
Dark Harbor (1993);
The Continuous Life (1990);
Selected Poems (1980);
The Story of Our Lives (1973);
Reasons for Moving (1968)
The Golden Ecco Anthology (1994)
, The Best American Poetry (1991),
Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers