Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

Mark Strand was one of my professors back in the day (I cross-registered in one of his semester-long poetry workshops for advanced undergrads back when I was a second-year medical student), but this is only the second poetry collection of his that I've read from cover to cover. (Goodreads helpfully reminds me that the first was Strand's Man and Camel, which I read and reviewed here in 2010.)

The slim 2012 volume Almost Invisible, which clocks in at a modest 48 pages in length, was Strand's last published collection before his 2014 death (not counting his Collected Poems). It consists almost entirely of prose poems of the wryly humorous, absurdistly surreal, often domestically situated, narrative kind that Strand himself, alongside his contemporaries Russell Edson and James Tate, pioneered in the mid to late 20th century. (My understanding is that these three men formed a sort of mutual admiration society; Prof. Strand one day informed my workshop classmates, in an air of indisputable factual authority, that "Russell Edson is the funniest living American poet.")

In his introduction to the indispensable anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, editor David Lehman singles out Strand's 1978 collection The Monument as a milestone in the history of American prose poetry: according to Lehman, The Monument was the first collection of prose poems by an U.S. poet to be seriously considered for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, although it was ultimately passed over for that honor because Pulitzer judge Louis Simpson was too old-fashioned to countenance the idea that a prose poem could ever be a "real" poem. Well, now it's 2016, and the mainstream definition of poetry has irreversibly expanded to include prose poems (and more -- congrats again to Bob Dylan on his Nobel!). In the years since Mark Strand's 1978 Pulitzer snub, many books rich in prose poems (beginning with Charles Simic's 1991 The World Doesn't End) have won Pulitzers, and just two years ago, a book heavy on prose poems, Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, was simultaneously a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism (it won the former).

Almost Invisible, then, provides us a view of the dying master of prose poetry continuing in the craft that he himself had pioneered and nigh perfected, a craft that once went unrecognized and snubbed and lonely. In the last years of Strand's life, it no longer went unrecognized and snubbed, but, if the general tenor of these poems can be taken as evidence, it continued to bear a strain of loneliness in it. These are the poems of an old, sick man realizing he is sick and old and in pain, attempting to come to terms with his impending demise, his impending confrontation with an eternity we must all confront alone. Earlier this year, I read and reviewed the poetry of Max Ritvo, another U.S. poet who recently fell victim to sarcoma (Ritvo died of Ewing sarcoma in 2016, Strand of liposarcoma in 2014), and in my review I mentioned how Ritvo's poetry collections sometimes read like a modern version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a sort of secular tutorial to help prepare us for our deaths to come. Strand's Almost Invisible struck me similarly, full of glimpses of unearthly dark morbid wisdom from someone on the verge of the ultimate metamorphosis.

This is not to say the poems are not funny, and funny in a way that is clearly distinct from the ways in which Tate and Edson are funny. After all, the once "deadly handsome, tall and rugged" Strand winkingly cultivated the persona of a dandy and gourmand all his life, and the poems in Almost Invisible are wittily strewn with the kind of stage props beloved by men who style themselves dandies and gourmands: flawlessly cooked pot roasts, ballrooms lit by sparking chandeliers, castle moats full of swans, etc. And the contrast that these kinds of deliberately overblown trappings makes with the bleak condition of our real lives can often be quite funny, as we see every day in the works of contemporary poets like, say, Austin Allen and Frederick Seidel.

In Almost Invisible, does Strand ever reach the heights he achieved in the best poems that he wrote at the peak of his career, poems like, say, my always-favorite, "The Tunnel"? My personal answer would be "Not quite," but still, there are a few poems here that remind me strongly of "The Tunnel" in their uncanny fabulistic power -- poems like "Futility in Key West" and "Clear in the September Light". In these poems, complete with Edvard-Munch-esque little men flapping their arms in Edward-Hopper-esque front yards, Strand re-presents and represents us with what may be his most indelible, most iconic image: that of the modern man lacking in self-awareness, unable to see that the Other whom he spies on and judges harshly is no Other at all, but is merely himself.

What in interesting review. I had no idea that Strand was one of the pioneers of American prose poetry and would never have thought to throw Edson in with Strand and Tate. So thank you for that poetry culture background.

I have to confess that among the 5 poems quoted in your link to "Clear in September Light" I preferred the ones involving discussions of sex/genitals.

Lovely review. I'm grateful for it. This has become, somewhat strangely, one of my favorite books in the last year. Precisely because of that spare loneliness the infuses so many of the poems, even (and especially) the funny ones. The grave not only takes us, it de-sexes us, universally humanizes us, and the combined absurdity & transcendence of that can make for some very good poetry. The Ritvo connection is a useful one.

Thanks for reading and leaving your thoughtful comments on this review of mine, Jen and Charles. I like Charles's point about how the sex humor that Jen (and I) liked is in some ways a defense mechanism against the de-sexing power of the grave.