English E-learning lesson 2

I chose Mark Strand as my favourite poet is because he can communicate his feelings through poems exceptionally well. You can feel what he is feeling through his poems. Something like sleeping could mean a lot to him. An example is "Sleeping with One Eye Open". He expresses his feelings through the fear of war breaking out again. Many other poets all speak about things that do not mean much and are "bland".Now i will talk about his biography.
Mark Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada. His early years were spent in North America, while much of his teenage years were spent in South and Central America. In 1957, he earned his B.A. from Antioch College in Ohio. Strand then studied painting under Josef Albers at Yale University where he earned a B.F.A in 1959. On a Fulbright Scholarship, Strand studied nineteenth-century Italian poetry in Italy during 1960-1961. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop the following year and earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1962. In 1965 he spent a year in Brazil as a Fulbright Lecturer.[citation needed] Strand has since taught at many universities and published eleven books of poetry, in addition to translations from the poetry of Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others. In 1997, 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. Since 2006, Mark Strand teaches literature and creative writing at Columbia University, NYC.
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. Strand has received numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999 for Blizzard of One.
[edit] Awards
• Fulbright Fellowship (1960-1961)
• Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (1979)
• MacArthur Fellowship (1987)
• Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1990-1991)
• Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry (1992)
• Bollingen Prize (1993)
• Pulitzer Prize (1999)
• Wallace Stevens Award (2004)
• Here are the 3 poems made by him:
• Blizzard of One
• It could be said, even here, that what remains of the self
Unwinds into a vanishing light, and thins like dust, and heads
To a place where knowing and nothing pass into each other, and through;
That it moves, unwinding still, beyond the vault of brightness ended,
And continues to a place which may never be found, where the unsayable,
Finally, once more is uttered, but lightly, quickly, like random rain
That passes in sleep, that one imagines passes in sleep.
What remains of the self unwinds and unwinds, for none
Of the boundaries holds – neither the shapeless one between us,
Nor the one that falls between your body and your voice. Joseph,
Dear Joseph, those sudden reminders of your having been – the places
And times whose greatest life was the one you gave them – now appear
Like ghosts in your wake. What remains of the self unwinds
Beyond us, for whom time is only a measure of meanwhile
And the future no more than et cetera et cetera ... but fast and forever.
Black Sea
•
One clear night while the others slept, I climbed
the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky
strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it,
the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming
like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long
whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach
of a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer,
the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea,
and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light.
The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stood
on that lonely height watching the slow swells of the sea
break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear ...
Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with all
that the world offers would you come only because I was here?
• Extracted from: http://waywiser-press.com/strand.html
• Biography from :www.wikipedia.org/Mark_Strand/
• Chenyang