Strand's earliest influences, Donald Justice and Wallace Stevens, emerge in the new poems in Blizzard of One with misty, odd turns into abstraction, twists of language and musicality, and Strand's masterful weaving in and out from great distances, concrete and abstract, the elegiac tones, the thrum of movement. In Blizzard we are taken on a haunting trip into a person's aging while being spared the grapple for conclusions and life's meaning. In his earlier poem, "The Story of Our Lives" in Selected Poems (1991), he writes, "We are reading the story of our lives/ as though we were in it,/ as though we had written it." And tucked in later in the last section of the poem, "The book will not survive./ We are living proof of that."
Then comes Blizzard of One. In the poem "A Place in the Storm" we discover the title poem tucked in the second line, "...A snowflake, a Blizzard of One, weightless, entered your room." When I read words like this--a snowflake as a Blizzard of One--I want to rise up and shout how glad I am to be alive, how proud I am to read and speak and write in the same language as this poet.
A snowflake falls and disappears while someone is reading a book, a solemn waking to brevity, a flowerless funeral. But then the thing that turned to nothing returns; the air is ready, the sky has an another opening.
"Old Man Leaves Party" begins:
It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body.
These opening lines pull us into and through the poem as though we're somehow one in the experience, we are the ones looking into the "mirror leaning against a tree." Line 11: "I know what you are thinking. I was like you." Oh? When? But the poems in Blizzard of One aren't necessarily literal representations. A poem can show us something else in the universe, something more than ourselves or our own dilemmas and delights, things other-worldly, moments we have never encountered, never even imagined. When is the last time we saw a snowflake as a Blizzard of One? Strand writes from a place we have never been.
Strand doesn't pretend to have absolute clarity in his poems. We enter their verbal worlds for the sheer joyous experience. Poetry may include meaning or it may not, just as in real life. So maybe we don't get it; still the words resonate, and they're beautiful.
"I've been eating poetry" is a line from his poem "Eating Poetry"
(Selected Poems). Here is the opening stanza:
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth,
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
Reading poetry as a form of dining may be a new idea to us. Strand says when he reads other people's poems, he doesn't read them once or twice, but dozens of times, maybe more. This is natural; after all, the average church-going person in the Bible Belt will have read the same passages in the Bible hundreds of times, and more will be revealed each time. The joy of reading poetry is to read the poem again and again, entering its world again and again, until finally it becomes a part of us.
"I am writing from a place you have never been," writes Strand. The title of a poem from Selected Poems ends with the line, "And everyone staring, stunned into magnitude." Stunned into magnitude! The experience of reading those three words is an example of the joyous discovery in reading a poem on its terms, on entering its world. Strand feeds us such discoveries again and again, poem upon poem.
Number 2 of the five-part poem "Five Dogs" in Blizzard of One reads:
Now THAT the great dog I worshipped for years
Has become none other than myself, I can look within
And bark, and I can look at the mountains down the street
And bark at them as well. I am an eye that sees itself
Look back, a nose that tracks the scent of shadows
As they fall, an ear that picks up sounds
Before they're born. I am the last of the platinum
Retrievers, the end of a gorgeous line.
But there's no comfort being who I am.
I roam around and ponder fate's abolishments
Until my eyes are filled with tears and I say to myself, "Oh Rex,
Forget. Forget. The stars are out. The marble moon slides by."
This is somewhat reminiscent of his comedies collected in Mr. and Mrs. Baby and Other Stories, where a man reveals to his wife that he used to be a collie. In the above lines we see the metaphor of the dog as human, helpless, accepting finally a marble moon sliding by, until the last line of the quintet, "... And so, and so ... goodbye all, goodbye dog."
My personal favorite in the collection is the poem "Delirium Waltz." It's a long poem in a combination of forms. The poem opens with a prose poem and we read it like getting on a boat in choppy water. "--Now we were gliding over the floor, our clothes were heavy, the music was slow, and I thought we would die all over again." This is followed by three wonderfully dancing pantoums with Bob and Sonia and Chip and Molly and Joseph, dear Joseph (Brodsky?) and Tom and Em and Wally, Deb and Jorie and Jim (Wallace Stevens, Deborah Digges, Jorie Graham?): "Everyone moving everyone dancing" --which is followed by prose again, "And our shadows floated away towards sunset and darkened the backs of birds." Back to the pantoum, and the birds are dancing, flying, a golden haze is everywhere, "Angels must always be pale they said." Prose poem, pantoum, the years come and go, and we end with a five-line prose poem and the words, "I cannot remember, but I think you were there, whoever you were."
The pantoum form works particularly well with its repeated lines that tell us we haven't really gone anywhere, we're back again, we're rumbling away again and again, over and over. Every snowflake repeats itself, the body repeats itself, the architecture of our time will repeat itself, blindness lost and regained; a man turning and saying, "Although I love the past, the dark of it,/ the weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the all/ Of it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more."
Mark Strand is a visual artist as well as a poet. His drawings and prints--dense abstract leaps of richly layered hues and shapes--are at once intellectual and visceral, and he says he makes art to relieve some of the pressures he feels as a writer. And he doesn't teach creative writing. He'd rather teach literature he says, because he has more to offer as a teacher of literature and his poetry is too skewed in his own favor, his view too much his own. In other words, he does not encourage imitators.
Blizzard of One is a celebration of being and not-being and then being once again as a repeated leavetaking. "Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time/ Is becoming the architecture of the next time" he writes in "The Next Time." And, "How long the ruins would last we would never complain."
Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1934. He studied painting at Yale with Joseph Albers. He received a Fulbright scholarship and spent a year in Italy studying nineteenth century Italian poetry, attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop for a year and also taught there until 1965 when he went to Brazil. He has taught at Mt. Holyoke College, Brooklyn College and the University of Utah, and held visiting professorships at Columbia, the University of Virginia, Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins University. His books include nine volumes of poetry, books on the painter Edward Hopper and others, short stories, children's books, and several volumes of translations. He is a former Poet Laureate of the United States and currently teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
With Blizzard of One, Strand again swoops us into his complex world where we gladly surrender to that inner place between self and shadow, the otherworld place, and when we finally emerge, saturated, our own worlds can appear bigger, newer, fresher. He proves again and again the calling of the poet, not to reflect or describe our world, nor to take the voice of commentator, but to open to us the vast experience of his own world. Mark Strand proves he is a master.
