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

Bibliography

Poetry Source: 1964: Sleeping with One Eye Open, Stone Wall Press 1968: Reasons for Moving: Poems, Atheneum 1970: Darker: Poems, including "The New Poetry Handbook", Atheneum 1973: The Story of Our Lives, Atheneum 1973: The Sargentville Notebook, Burning Deck 1975: From Two Notebooks, No Mountains Poetry Project 1976: My Son, No Mountains Poetry Project 1978: Elegy for My Father, Windhover 1978: The Late Hour, Atheneum 1980: Selected Poems, including "Keeping Things Whole", Atheneum 1990: The Continuous Life, Knopf 1990: New Poems 1991: The Monument, Ecco Press (see also The Monument, 1978, prose) 1993: Dark Harbor: A Poem, long poem divided into 55 sections, Knopf 1998: Blizzard of One: Poems, Knopf winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for poetry 1999: Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More, with illustrations by the author, Turtle Point Press 1999: "89 Clouds" a single poem, monotypes by Wendy Mark and introduction by Thomas Hoving, ACA Galleries (New York) 2006: Man and Camel, Knopf 2007: New Selected Poems 2012: Almost Invisible, Random House, 2014: Collected Poems, Knopf

Prose Source: 1978: The Monument, Ecco (see also The Monument, 1991, poetry) 1982: Contributor: Claims for Poetry, edited by Donald Hall, University of Michigan Press 1982: The Planet of Lost Things, for children 1983: The Art of the Real, art criticism, C. N. Potter 1985: The Night Book, for children 1985: Mr. and Mrs. Baby and Other Stories, short stories, Knopf 1986: Rembrandt Takes a Walk, for children 1987: William Bailey, art criticism, Abrams 1993: Contributor: Within This Garden: Photographs by Ruth Thorne-Thomsen, Columbia College Chicago/Aperture Foundation 1994: Hopper, art criticism, Ecco Press 2000: The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention, Knopf 2000: With Eavan Boland, The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, Norton (New York)

Poetry translations 1971: 18 Poems from the Quechua, Halty Ferguson 1973: The Owl's Insomnia, poems by Rafael Alberti, Atheneum 1976: Souvenir of the Ancient World, poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Antaeus Editions 2002: Looking for Poetry: Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti, with Songs from the Quechua 1993: Contributor: "Canto IV", Dante's Inferno: Translations by Twenty Contemporary Poets edited by Daniel Halpern, Harper Perennial 1986, according to one source, or 1987, according to another source: Traveling in the Family, poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, with Thomas Colchie; translator with Elizabeth Bishop, Colchie, and Gregory Rabassa) Random House

Editor 1968: The Contemporary American Poets, New American Library 1970: New Poetry of Mexico, Dutton 1976: Another Republic: Seventeen European and South American Writers, with Charles Simic, Ecco 1991: The Best American Poetry 1991, Macmillan 1994: Golden Ecco Anthology, Ecco Press 1994: The Golden Ecco Anthology 2005: 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century, W. W. Norton

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