Having said that I prefer my poets dead and that I don’t like to meet my poets, I am now going to contradict myself. This will not be a huge self-betrayal. To say that I have “met” Mark Strand is true only in the briefest and most literal sense. He gave a reading at my undergrad alma mater, and I was momentarily introduced to him by my advisor.Mark Strand is not a young man. The incident to which I refer was around a decade ago, by which time he was already plenty old, especially from the perspective of a college student. I knew he was old, and I went to the reading expecting your typical geriatric shuffler.
That he was not. Mark Strand has charisma in such overwhelming superabundance that I felt vaguely elated within the space of ten seconds of meeting him – which is a good thing, since that’s pretty much all I saw of him.
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