In his short collection of idiosyncratic musings in verse form, The Sargeantville Notebook (1973), Strand included the following curious statement:

The ultimate self-effacement is not
the pretense of the minimal,
but the jocular considerations of the maximal
in the manner of Wallace Stevens.

Strand admittedly has long admired Stevens's work, and read Stevens even before beginning to write his own poetry. (He once remarked to Wayne Dodd: “I discovered I wasn't destined to be a very good painter, so I became a poet. Now it didn't happen suddenly. I did read a lot, and I had been a reader of poetry before. In fact, I was much more given to reading poems than I was to fiction and the book that I read a lot, and frequently, was The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens” [55].) Perhaps Strand, in commenting on what constitutes the “ultimate self-effacement,” regards Stevens as a belated Romantic poet, as does Harold Bloom, in that the ostensibly private reflection, which is the subject of the poem, expresses emotions or ideologies that are in fact diffuse. I make this parallel by suggesting that Strand means “the minimal” to be the private, or individual, concern so that a pretense of such occurs when a poet argues for his own life experiences as reflective of a larger than personal theme, and that his phrase “the jocular considerations of the maximal” means the viewing of global concerns with some degree of wit, with a touch of the absurd. A poet betrays his “pretense of the minimal” when he tries to be an impartial observer, a chronicler of an event he has witnessed or of a landscape he has seen; his presence in the poem—his personal “I” speaker—negates his intended impartiality, or objectivity, towards his subject. In chapter 2 we saw this “pretense of the minimal” in Lowell's “The Mouth of the Hudson,” where the speaker regards “the single man's” and “the Negro's” concerns as his own finally.

Strand reads Stevens, however, as having successfully avoided such pretense by constructing poems that begin about another's concerns, then move outward to embrace universal questions: “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” and “The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage” are a few examples from his early work. These jocular titles lead us to poems of “maximal” subject matter; in each, Stevens's presence is not visible. Each poem concentrates on the individual named in its title; consequently, Stevens's discussion of universal matters is filtered through his representation of these paltry and jocular characters. Yet these poems of Stevens employ a particular individual—Peter Quince, the “Oncle,” the Nude—(and none acting as a persona) in order to achieve his measure of self-effacement. In this sense, these figures are like dramatis personae. Yet Strand's objective is to achieve the same extent of impartiality, and impersonality, while using an “I” speaker that is neither a persona (that is, a representative “I” speaking in behalf of all) nor one that is entirely confessional.

Another phrase from The Sargeantville Notebook explains how such an “I” can function in personal poetry: “The poet could not speak of himself, / but only of the gradations leading toward him and away.” If the poet explores that which leads toward him and away from him, he will come to a better understanding of himself. Strand has written further about this in “A Statement about Writing”:

Ideally, it would be best to just write, to suppress the critical side of my nature and indulge the expressive. Perhaps. But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious—never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving. And because it has no power, let alone appetite, for self-scrutiny, it fits the reductive, dominating needs of the critical side of me. The more I think about this, the more I think that not writing is the best way to write.

Whether I admit it or not, I write to participate in the delusion of my own immortality which is born every minute. And yet, I write to resist myself. I find resistence irresistible.

(317)

His use of the phrase “which is born” is ambiguous; it could likely mean that his delusion of immortality is that “which is born every minute,” or, perhaps, that his immortality is born every minute that he writes.

Whichever is intended, his stated goal is to “resist” himself. Because his expressive part is blind to everything except that which is self-serving, his critical side is necessary for self-scrutiny, self-definition (which, according to Strand's notion, is reductive), and it is this side that “dominates.” The need for self-scrutiny, for self-definition, is separate from the self-serving impulses. It is this critical side that helps Strand control the tone of his poems which in turn contributes to the seeming absence of self, or rather, the impersonal voice, of the “I” speaker. Strand, in concentrating on self-scrutiny (the critical side of his nature), can resist himself; that is, he can resist the more personal, intimate tone which is expressive and self-serving. For this reason, that he writes to resist himself, Strand, as we shall see later in the chapter, mocks the extremely personal indulgences of poets like Adrienne Rich or Anne Sexton, to name but two. Although self-definition is reductive, and therefore mostly contrary to self-scrutiny—in that one should, presumptively, expand one's self-awareness through such scrutiny, not limit oneself to a single, finite, definition—it cannot be avoided since it is a “dominating need” of Strand's critical nature.

Consequently, he does attempt self-definition in his work, yet it is neither finite nor reductive. Strand's speaker defines himself by all that he is not. Consider this early poem, “Keeping Things Whole” from Reasons for Moving (1968)—this poem (with the title “A Reason for Moving”) was included originally in his first book, Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964), a limited edition—in which the “I” speaker defines himself by his absence:

In a field
I am the absence
of field. …
Wherever I am
I am what is missing. …
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Strand's sparse use of words, regular syntax, and simple prose sentences (six comprise the poem) are appropriate aesthetic choices; each helps to reflect the speaker's feeling of absence. The poem's content is the speaker's self-scrutiny which leads to his self-definition: “I am what is missing.” The speaker characterizes himself by a description of absence; he defines himself in terms of that which is not present: “In a field / I am the absence / of field.” Yet the poem enumerates particulars of the physical world: a field, the air. And although the speaker is part of physical reality, he considers himself a void. When standing in a field, he has no relationship to it other than using it to illustrate what he is not. The speaker is obviously alienated from the physical world; he represents a nothingness, someone unable to mark his presence: “the air moves in / to fill the spaces / where my body's been.” Of this self-definition, Harold Bloom has written: “Beneath the grace, this is desperate enough to be outrageous. This ‘I’ might wish he were asleep elsewhere as well as here, and so be no man rather than two. His absence seems a void that his presence could not fill, or a wound that his presence could not heal” (135).

In Strand's The Monument (1978), prose represented as the work of an anonymous author who addresses his future translator, giving him instructions how the work should be best represented in order to ensure the author's immortality, a particular passage (n9) explains further the concept of nothingness. It begins with an epigraph taken from Wallace Stevens's “The Man with the Blue Guitar”:

                                                  … Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.

It has been necessary to submit to vacancy in order to begin again, to clear ground, to make space. I can allow nothing to be received. Therein lies my triumph and my mediocrity. Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it is our commonness made dumb. I am passing it on. The monument is a void, artless and everlasting. What I was I am no longer. I speak for nothing, the nothing that I am, the nothing that is this work. And you shall perpetuate me not in the name of what I was, but in the name of what I am.

Since this passage suggests the absence of the author (“what I was I am no longer” and “the nothing that I am”), that which the author “passes on” in leaving behind his work—his monument—is a “void, artless and everlasting.” His work is artless because it is prose—uncomplicated, simple sentence patterns—and everlasting because the translator places it in the world's literary canon. Strand said in an interview with Frank Graziano that The Monument represents a notion of “the desire for immortality”:

That sounds rather grand … and making fun of it at the same time. I mean there are moments in one's life when one would like a guarantee that he will be read after he's dead. I thought this would be a clever way of doing it; writing a text for the translator who might … not be interested in the rest of one's work, or maybe just interested in the rest of one's work and telling him don't be, just do this. … [S]o I started writing The Monument and it became less and less about the translator of a particular text, and more about the translation of a self, and the text as self, the self as book.

(37)

The words in themselves may not require linguistic translation, but as representative of the author—his immortal self—they do require a translation (in much the spiritual use of the term) into the future, towards immortality. Strand, speaking from the point of view of The Monument's “author,” continued, in that interview: “[I]t's more than the things I've written, it's more than the text, it's my self that has to be continued. It's my self that has to be created again; the illusion has to be that I am doing it again, so that the translator in The Monument is my self, takes on an identity. It's not really being read in the future; that's what initiated The Monument. I mean I don't really care one way or the other, in truth” (37-8). What the author wishes to have translated, finally, is nothing: “I speak for nothing, the nothing that I am, the nothing that is this work. And you [he tells his translator] shall perpetuate me not in the name of what I was, but in the name of what I am”—nothing, whose work is a void. This is one way Strand is “making fun” of his fictional author's desire for immortality.

In a later passage (n22) in The Monument, the author more openly discusses the self's absence (and closely following this passage, the author insists on referring to himself only in the third person, thereby becoming in fact “absent” from his own text):

This poor document does not have to do with a self, it dwells on the absence of a self. I—and this pronoun will have to do—have not permitted anything worthwhile to be part of this communication that strains even to exist in a language other than the one in which it was written. So much is excluded that it could not be a document of self-centeredness. If it is a mirror to anything, it is to the gap between the nothing that was and the nothing that will be. It is a thread of longing that binds past and future. Again, it is everything that history is not.

The speaker attains self-effacement in that he removes himself from the restrictions of the present (“What I was I am no longer”) and attempts to become that which is expected in the future: “the nothing that will be.” In Stevens's terms, “you are yourself” when you have reached the “shape” after “the crust of shape has been destroyed.” That is, one understands a knowledge of self when the binding forces, which define oneself presently, are removed and a new shape for the future is created with anything left.

This is the speaker's purpose in “Giving Myself Up” from Darker (1970), in which the chantlike phrasing is incantatory and serves to simulate what might be an Eastern religious meditation of self-negation:

I give up my eyes which are glass eggs.
I give up my tongue.
I give up my mouth which is the constant dream of my tongue.
I give up my throat which is the sleeve of my voice. …
I give up my clothes which are walls that blow in the wind
and I give up the ghost that lives in them.
I give up. I give up.
And you will have none of it because already I am beginning again without anything.

This poem comprises a rather complete list and is indicative of many characteristics common to Strand's work of self-scrutiny we have discussed so far. It is “artless” because it is lengthy and repetitious (both tire our patience); the intentional craft—that is, his choice of simple prose statements—contributes to this. Richard Howard's remarks about Strand's “Elegy for My Father,” from The Story of Our Lives (1973), may help to explain the use of prose in “Giving Myself Up”:

Strand divides to conquer, divides the self to conquer the self. … [F]or the price of experience, experience which Blake has told us cannot be bought for a song, is negation. Which is why Strand writes his lament not in verse but in the very dialect of negation, in prose, the one linguistic medium out to eliminate itself, to use itself up in the irrecoverable rhythms of speech rather than in the angelic (or ecstatic) measures of repetition and return.

(599)

But Strand's aesthetic in “Giving Myself Up,” on closer examination, is one of luscious phrases, increasingly so as the speaker gives up more of himself, so that the very act of self-negation becomes celebratory of his existence. In this poem—as with many of Strand's—the clear images and language can lull the reader away from its more complex intentions. Thematically, then, the poem indicates the speaker's self-divestiture, but its craft can be suggestive of the contrary.

Still, the speaker of “Giving Myself Up” sounds like a programmed machine, or someone in a trance, devoid of emotional anguish or excitement, and with an unchanging, stoic personality. Although an “I” is indeed giving himself up in the poem, it is an impersonal one, betraying a subdued wit just once by a quip of sarcasm in the final line. That the speaker begins “again without anything” is his declaring a state of nothingness (which parallels similar declarations: “the nothing that I am,” and “the nothing that will be” from The Monument).

Finally, like the speaker of “Keeping Things Whole,” the speaker of “Giving Myself Up” is apparently alienated from the physical world because there is no mention of it except in relation to various parts of his body. In giving himself up, the speaker only considers physical reality in terms of his body; he only knows the world in this way. When he gives up his smell, he leaves behind “a stone traveling through rain”; giving up his clothes means relinquishing “walls that blow in the wind,” and his lungs are “trees that have never seen the moon.” It is a solipsistic perception of the physical world; his place in it is determined by his presence or absence. When Graziano asked Strand about solipsism in his work, he replied: “I think a lot of contemporary poetry is solipsistic in that reality is a subjective determination and that we write about our vision of the world as if it were the world” (32). So Strand's definition is close to the metaphysical theory of solipsism which is, succinctly stated, that all real entities (that which we see) are only modifications of the self, states of our mind. This seems reasonably applicable to the speaker of “Giving Myself Up,” who may have, in actuality, given up nothing more than his way of viewing himself in relation to physical reality. He therefore is ready to begin “again without anything,” which is to say from a fresh perspective, a new state of mind.

That Strand manifests his critical side, his nature for self-scrutiny—particularly his penchant for “resisting” himself through his themes of nullity and absence and by means of his aesthetics which include an impersonal speaker, one who is stoic and solipsistic—has led Linda Gregerson, in writing of “Giving Myself Up,” to remark:

When Mark Strand reinvented the poem, he began by leaving out the world. The self he invented to star in the poems went on with the work of divestment: it jettisoned place, it jettisoned fellows, it jettisoned all distinguishing physical marks, save beauty alone. It was never impeded by personality. Nor was this radical renunciation to be confused with modesty, or asceticism. The self had designs on a readership, and a consummate gift for the musical phrase.

(90)

Except for the suggestion that Strand's musical phrasing (that is, his chanting) is a “consummate gift,” I would think this assessment fairly describes Strand's intentions, primarily in Darker.

Another poem similar in meaning to “Giving Myself Up” is “The Remains,” from the first section of Darker (which section is also titled “Giving Myself Up”). In this poem, the speaker empties himself of his life, or continues his “work of divestment”:

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road. …
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

This is perhaps closer in content and tone to Stevens's lines from “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” used to introduce The Monument passage concerning the speaker's change to nothingness, which lines were: “When the crust of shape has been destroyed. / You as you are? You are yourself.” In “The Remains,” the speaker pronounces: “I change and I am the same.” Like Lowell in “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” Strand's speaker traces his “seedtime” attempting to determine, as he states, “what I am.” The tone of this poem, however, strikingly contrasts with that of the confessional mode of voice. Whereas Lowell's is immediately personal (as documented by the autobiographical content of the poem and by the urgency of the voice, the sense of personal drama evoked by the tone of the first person speaker), Strand's tone is controlled to the extent of making the speaker—again—stoic, and his words flat, neither urgent nor passionate. His rhetorical questions (which he proceeds subsequently to answer) and his self-revelations as simple pronouncements of fact make Strand's tone here, like that of “Giving Myself Up,” one reflective of the impersonality of the speaker. One level of absence has been reached in these poems, then, in that the personal has been removed from the “I.” Strand has invented a self “to star” in these poems of self-divestiture. The self invented by Lowell—or any poet of the confessional or persona modes—is one for public representation, to use Trilling's argument, but it remains a personal self that is closely connected to the poet.

Strand's poetic self, and the voice of that self, achieve for him the peculiar tone of the poems of Reasons for Moving and Darker, a tone so different from that of the speakers of the confessional or persona modes that it is at once bolting and impressive to most readers. Bloom has written:

The irreality of Borges, though still near, is receding in Darker, as Strand opens himself more to his own vision. These poems instantly touch a universal anguish as no “confessional” poems can, for Strand has the fortune of writing naturally and almost simply (though this must be supreme artifice) out of the involuntary near solipsism that always marks a central poetic imagination in America. An uncanny master of tone, Strand cannot pause for mere wit or argument but generally moves directly to phantasmagoria, a mode so magically disciplined in him as to make redundant for us almost all current questers after the “deep image.”

Others have commented on Strand's “uncanny mastery of tone”: Linda Gregerson writes, “Strand undoubtedly studied something of tone from Donald Justice, whose perfect elegance is always perfectly double. Justice has polished a surface in order to aggravate the discrepancies between manner and tone, has cultivated, in other words, the inherent ambiguity of perfect manners” (92). Peter Stitt, in his essay “Stages of Reality,” feels that the poems from Sleeping with One Eye Open “introduce us, inevitably, to the characteristic speaking voice of nearly all early Strand poems—the consciousness through which everything seen, thought, felt, is filtered. Undoubtedly, this character is very nearly identical to Mark Strand himself, and yet to equate him with Strand would be to deny the role the imagination plays in these, as indeed in all poems, however directly ‘confessional’ they may appear to the naive reader” (201-2). Of that first collection, Richard Howard, in Alone With America, writes: “By writing an existing language as if it were his own invention, by confiding his endurance of dissolution to traditional discourse, Strand achieves … the spooky sense that he is being written by someone else, by something else, an energy his own only in that it moves through him, for it does not proceed from him. … [These poems] register a collapse, a defeat, a disintegration of the identity they are concerned to disclose, they do so with the tenantless decorum of alienation, of otherness …” (591-2). And Stanley Plumly, in his review of Darker, observed, “If there is a poetry of the absurd, Strand is its present master. … [I]t is the artifice, the revelatory means of Strand's special madness, that defines his intention and achievement. ‘The Sleep,’ for example, reminds us of nothing really new. … What is profound, of course, is the execution of the perception, especially Strand's marvelous ability with timing and tone” (79).

Strand, too, is conscious of his voice—which ultimately determines tone—and felt that in Darker he had achieved some “mastery” of it. When Plumly, in an interview, commented: “I have a greater sense of speaking voice, say, direct to Mark Strand in Darker,” Strand replied: “I agree. … There are other voices in Reasons for Moving. There are other voices in Darker, too, but I think that I don't rely on them; I think I use them with—I don't want to say greater control—but I use them because I've chosen to” (61), which is to say in essence that in Darker Strand believes he achieved a control of voice. In choosing a voice, or speaker, for each poem, he has eliminated the possibility that his subject matter dictate to him which voice to use. (Some subjects—such as Lowell's from the Life Studies poems we have discussed—demand a particular, confessional voice appropriate to the poem's content.) Strand's Darker poems, however, begin with an impersonal self as its voice, regardless of the individual poem's subject. The voice is “direct to Mark Strand” because it reflects his personal inquiry of the self. His “uncanny mastery of tone” is a result of his poems' subjects: impersonality, self-negation, and absence. But if he is hesitant to “say greater control,” he is willing to label his voice as “restrained.” In attempting to determine the influence other poets have had on his work, Strand told Richard Vine and Robert von Hallberg: “… it has to do with a certain tone, a tone I associate with George Herbert: a kind of restrained, but not withheld, conversational tone, not inelegant, not elegant, and very hard to maintain” (130).

Strand's tone, then, is determined by the self he defines in his poems—the impersonal, the self of absence—who is also the poem's speaker. His craft, specifically his use of the impersonal “I,” and his subject, the quest for self-definition and thus fulfillment, function in tandem to effect the “restrained, but not withheld” tone. A detailed examination of this unique tone will better define the self-effacing “I.”

In Strand's early poetry, the speaker's purpose is to discover his place in the contemporary world and his relationship to it. Having found neither (as has been shown in such poems as “Keeping Things Whole” and “Giving Myself Up”), he alters himself—rather than the world—and strives for his other self, a void of a self, one of nothingness, for, as Octavio Paz has written of Strand's Selected Poems (1980): “To be alive is to be absent from oneself—or, an extreme and desperate means of being present to oneself. The poetry of Mark Strand explores the terra infirma of our lives. Fascinated by emptiness, it is not strange that he should conceive the poem as a description of absence; but at the same time his vision continually stumbles against the blunt, obtuse reality of things and beings irrevocably trapped in brute existence.” That one self, the one present in the physical world, who is paranoid and alienated, can transform into another self, the “other,” absent from any relationship to the world, was suggested by “The Remains,” or his poem “The Guardian” which concludes: “Guardian of my death, // preserve my absence. I am alive.”

Since tone is determined by the speaker (as I. A. Richards instructed us, it is the attitude the speaker adopts towards the poem's subject) and because the speaker in these early Strand poems defines himself in terms of absence, an impersonal “I”—which is to say the self-effacing voice—results. However, in Strand's poems, subject matter is not the sole determination of the voice's tone; the speaker's wit and sense of the absurd also contribute. In analyzing this tone, let us first consider the speaker's sense of alienation further, then the ensuing pursuit of his “other” or double self—a pursuit resulting from the speaker's alienation—and finally his notion of the absurd. Each operates towards formulating Strand's voice of self-effacement.

That Strand's “I” finds the world alien, and himself so afraid he is unable to cope with it, was evident in the poem “Sleeping with One Eye Open” in which the “I” expresses his abject paranoia, as this selection shows:

It's my night to be rattled,
Saddled
With spooks. …
                                                  Oh I feel dead,
Folded
Away in my blankets for good, and
Forgotten.
My room is clammy and cold,
Moonhandled
And weird. The shivers
Wash over
Me, shaking my bones, my loose ends
Loosen,
And I lie sleeping with one eye open,
Hoping
That nothing, nothing will happen.

Although the speaker's phobias keep him awake, he remains composed enough to tell us of them by way of rather clever, end-rhymed couplets (including slant rhymes and off rhymes), the last three lines comprising a closure rhyming “open,” “hoping” and “happen”—hardly the phrasing of an acutely paranoid insomniac. Strand's playful sense of the absurd—evident here by his attributing ingenious speech patterns to his speaker whose “bones are shaking”—informs this otherwise disturbing monologue of a frightened man.

The same fears are expressed more solemnly in “When the Vacation Is Over for Good” which concludes with the speaker wondering “just what it was / That went so completely wrong, or why it is / We are dying,” and in “Violent Storm” (both from Sleeping with One Eye Open) in which the speaker proclaims of the “long night sweeping over these trees” that:

                              for us, the wide-awake, who tend
To believe the worst is always waiting
Around the next corner or hiding in the dry,
Unsteady branch of a sick tree, debating
Whether or not to fell the passerby,
It has a sinister air.

Earlier in the poem, the speaker alludes to the “us” as “nervous or morbid,” and their unquieting considerations are held in contrast to “Those who have chosen to pass the night / Entertaining friends / And intimate ideas in the bright, / Commodious rooms of dreams.” These people are oblivious to the sinister air, apparently; they:

Will not feel the slightest tremor
Or be wakened by what seems
Only a quirk in the dry run
Of conventional weather. For them,
The long night sweeping over these trees
And houses will have been no more than one
In a series whose end
Only the nervous or morbid consider.

In this direful world, the speaker tries to define himself in relation to his place in it. Ultimately finding that he is alienated from any physical part of the world—in a field, he is nothing but the absence of field—the speaker chooses what he believes to be the last recourse: to absent himself from the world, but to do so without actually dying. Consider “The Guardian,” a short poem from Darker, the last lines of which we have already seen:

The sun setting. The lawns on fire.
The lost day, the lost light.
Why do I love what fades?
You who left, who were leaving,
what dark rooms do you inhabit?
Guardian of my death,
preserve my absence. I am alive.

Only in absence, freed of his former, confining, fear of night, does the speaker feel alive. He now loves the “lost light”; he now chooses to inhabit dark rooms in an effort to preserve his absence from the reality of the physical world. There is a spiritual sense, too, to the reference of the mysterious “dark rooms”; it is in them that the speaker believes he can retain life. The problem, therefore, is one of transcendence. The killing of oneself, or physical death resulting from any cause, would preclude discovering the life one finds in absence, in the dark rooms of nothingness.

In “The Remains,” a poem of self-divestiture as we have seen, the speaker encounters this problem, finds no solution, and finally realizes: “I change and I am the same. / I empty myself of my life and my life remains.” Bloom, in his essay “Dark and Radiant Peripheries,” has written of this poem that what “remains” is:

everything about the self that ought to have only posthumous existence, when the poet will survive only in the regard of other selves. But this dread (which is one with the reality of him) is that already he survives only insofar as he has become an otherness capable of extending such regard. … “The Remains” is a poem written by Strand's alastor or Spirit of Solitude, his true voice of feeling. Its despairing wish—to be delivered from the self's prison without abandoning a self that can be embraced only when it in prison lies—is repeated throughout Darker in many superb modulations. …

The mode is phantasmagoria, of which the American master will always be Whitman. … Closer to Strand … is the Stevens who charted the “mythology of self, / Blotched out beyond unblotching.” Strand's peculiar courage is to take up the quirky quest when “amours shrink / Into the compass and curriculum / Of introspective exiles, lecturing,” concerning which Stevens warned: “It is a theme for Hyacinth alone.” Throughout Darker, Strand's risk is enormous. He spares us the opaque vulgarity of “confessional” verse by daring to expose how immediate in him a more universal anguish rages. …

(138-9)

What Bloom calls “the opaque vulgarity of ‘confessional’ verse,” Strand feels is “the pretense of the minimal,” as suggested earlier. Instead, Strand's speaker becomes an “otherness”—which is his final achieving of absence—only after some struggle with his double, in various guises, or this other self, who seeks entrance to (what he calls in “The Guardian”) the “dark rooms” which will ensure his absence and thus his life. So afraid of the emergence of this “other” that, at one point, the speaker of “The Tunnel” (from Sleeping with One Eye Open) threatens suicide to scare it away:

A man has been standing
in front of my house
for days. I peek at him
from the living room
window and at night,
unable to sleep …
I weep like a schoolgirl
and make obscene gestures
through the window. I
write large suicide notes
and place them so he
can read them easily. …
I feel I'm being watched
and sometimes I hear
a man's voice,
but nothing is done
and I have been waiting for days.

Again the speaker is frightened, unable to sleep, yet again he retains his wit. He “weeps like a schoolgirl” hoping to discourage his pursuer, and the public display of his “large suicide notes” is a jest aimed towards the “tragic generation” of poets, those whom Berryman elegized in The Dream Songs, and whose verse Bloom criticized as “opaque vulgarity.” Strand, I would think, inclines to agree with Bloom, as evident by his contrasting style of voice and by these remarks to Plumly: “… one of the horrifying things about many poets is that they lost, somewhere along the line, in the fervor of the inner debate, the idea of poetry. … They become, in fact, ‘chroniclers’ or ‘notators.’ They write notebooks or leaflets or what have you” (59). The intent, certainly, of “The Tunnel” is not to chronicle a personal experience, but to explore the terror—here presented in a mildly surreal circumstance—of confronting one's otherness, which nevertheless must be faced eventually if (to use Bloom's phrase) one is to be “delivered from the self's prison without abandoning a self that can be embraced only when it in prison lies,” which is to echo Strand's line from “The Guardian”: “preserve my absence. I am alive.”

Strand's speaker, then, faces the challenge of transcendence, of absenting himself while still physically alive—what Bloom in referring to “The Remains” called becoming “everything about the self that ought to have only posthumous existence.” This transcendence is close to being the “ultimate self-effacement” for one escapes from oneself in order to fill the void of not knowing oneself, and thus not knowing—and, consequently, fearing—one's relationship to the physical world, as Paz wrote: “To be alive is to be absent from oneself—or, an extreme and desperate means of being present to oneself.” The world must be illuminated, made less threatening, before the speaker can complete the process of becoming “alive.” For Strand, who inverts the notion of one's presence (as one's absence), that which is dark is most illuminating. Darker, finally, traces the process of the speaker's transcendence to the other—a process that includes his abandoning fear and gaining confidence—and in doing so, he reaches an understanding of self-definition. “Mark Strand's vision of [the world] is something like a photographic negative,” writes James Crenner. That darkness is inviting to the speaker is shown in the seventh of “Seven Poems,” which also serves as Darker's epigraph:

I have a key
so I open the door and walk in.
It is dark and I walk in.
It is darker and I walk in.

Crenner has written of Darker: “It is as though your daily life has been translated into a haunted house, where the daylight is so bright you can barely make anything out, all bleached to a sameness; then the thunder rumbles and suddenly there is a bolt of darkness in which, for an instant, the heavy furniture and the corpse and the monster stand out clearly. The darker the clearer” (85). The analogy of the haunted house is a becoming one, for it suggests the witty and sometimes absurdly surreal vision of the speaker in many of these poems.

The process of becoming an “otherness” is that of disappearing into darkness, for in darkness lies life:

The present is always dark.
Its maps are black,
rising from nothing,
describing …
the black, temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.

(from “Black Maps”)

Or, the act of diminishing is one of becoming:

Out of breath
I will not rise again.
I grow into my death.
My life is small
and getting smaller. The world is green.
Nothing is all.

(from “My Life”)

Flowers bloom.
Flowers die.
More is less.
I long for more.

(from “The One Song”)

The double self, the other, is addressed in “My Life By Somebody Else.” The speaker, having tried various ways to lure the other out in the open, grows increasingly frustrated; the poem's concluding stanzas follow:

The days drag on. The exhausted light falls like a bandage
over my eyes. Is it because I am ugly? Was anyone
ever so sad? It is pointless to slash my wrists. My hands
would fall off. And then what hope would I have?
Why do you never come? Must I have you by being
somebody else? Must I write My Life by somebody else?
My Death by somebody else? Are you listening?
Somebody else has arrived. Somebody else is writing.

The two poems previous to “My Life By Somebody Else” in Darker are in fact “My Life” and “My Death”; all three are part of that book's final section which is also titled “My Life By Somebody Else,” as if Strand is implying that his speaker, having discovered the means of transcendence earlier in the book (that is, by seeking darkness, by diminishing), has now become “somebody else,” the otherness he sought. Here Strand has achieved self-effacement on at least three levels: Mark Strand is not projecting himself in this grouping of poems (collectively as “My Life By Somebody Else”), as the confessional or persona poet does. If we can continue to assume that Strand's work has been towards self-divestiture, then the life referred to in these poems is strictly invention, and Strand frequently injects moments that are not quite believable, or which are surreal or absurd, to emphasize the difference between the life presented in the poem by the speaker and the poet's actual (public) life. Further, the speaker of the poems is suggesting that that life is not really his either, but that it is controlled—it is being authored—by somebody else. And still another level of self-effacement is reached when, within the individual poem “My Life By Somebody Else,” a separate presence takes over that which the speaker has been writing. If it is necessary, as the speaker wonders, for “My Life” and “My Death” to have been written by somebody else before the otherness can appear, then that otherness, by appearing at the end of “My Life By Somebody Else,” has taken control of not just that one poem, but the entire grouping.

Both Strand and his speaker have been effaced from these poems. Crenner gives his perspective of the speaker's confrontation with his otherness as he writes of “My Life By Somebody Else,” in which Strand, Crenner argues, has “dramatized, with characteristic mastery of tone (‘You must have hated me for that’ … ‘Was anyone / ever so sad?’) the self/self dichotomy,” and continues that:

One is reminded of Borges' “Borges and I,” in which the narrating “I” speaks of the Borges to whom everything real happens and in whom the “I”—rather than in itself—has its being. The “I” concludes the piece with, “I do not know which of us has written this page.” But Strand here goes even Borges one better, beginning with two selves and ending with three (or maybe one)! The process of recording the cat-and-mouse game between the I and the missing self leads to the arrival of a third party, a “someone else” who by the end of the poem is writing the poem. We might recognize this “someone else” as the only possible union of the other two, a union which takes place only in the act (“writing”) of the poem. This is poetry as revelation.

(88-9)

Strand wants us to think of Borges. In his previous collection, Reasons for Moving, Strand takes as his epigraph Borges's phrase: “[W]hile we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.” There are several poems following that concern Strand's notion of a double self—one is “The Tunnel” (originally appearing in Sleeping with One Eye Open) which we have already seen. Others are “The Whole Story” (also first included in Sleeping with One Eye Open) and “The Man in the Mirror”; none, however, is a “dramatization” in the manner of “My Life By Somebody Else.” Instead, each considers the notion of otherness accompanied by Strand's sense of amusement.

Strand, when giving a public reading of “The Whole Story,” will often tell of the poem's genesis, that as a young poet he showed his work to a much older (and famous) poet who told Strand not to repeat himself in his poems; that advice forms the poem's epigraph: “I'd rather you didn't feel it necessary to tell him, ‘That's a fire. And what's more, we can't do anything about it, because we're on this train, see?’” A selection from the poem follows:

How it should happen this way
I am not sure, but you
Are sitting next to me,
Minding your own business
When all of a sudden I see
A fire out the window.
I nudge you and say,
“That's a fire. And what's more,
We can't do anything about it,
Because we're on this train, see?”
You give me an odd look
As though I had said too much.
But for all you know I may
Have a passion for fires,
And travel by train to keep
From having to put them out.
It may be that trains
Can kindle a love of fire.

The poem does not exist solely for its humor although some is rather revealing of human behavior. The speaker, for example, repeats verbatim, in the context of the poem, the dialogue already quoted in the epigraph. That is, the speaker cannot cease repeating himself even in a poem that attempts to justify such refrains, claiming that they are useful in recovering “the whole story.” But the large theme operative here concerns the dialogue the speaker has with himself—with his other self, specifically, as the last lines of the poem indicate. He has been talking to his reflection he sees in the window. In his oral introduction to this poem, Strand tries to make us believe the dialogue is between the speaker and the older poet who, thinking the speaker has said “too much,” gives him an “odd look.” Yet the speaker is attempting to understand his immediate situation of helplessness, and so considers all the possibilities in order to justify his not being able to “do anything about it, because we're on this train.” The “we” therefore would be the rational self and the emotional, or impulsive, self.

Further, the poem is in part a response to the older poet, informing him not to assume that repetition is unintentional and valueless. The speaker comes to some tentative understanding—if that understanding is only an awareness of the endless possibilities of the situation—by conducting this dialogue, complete with the repetitive thoughts and words to which any of us is prone, particularly when thinking to ourselves.

The personal “I” has been effaced by confusing its identity; it has two selves in this poem (maybe several more in a poem like “My Life By Somebody Else”). The controlled tone—without lineation, the prose is even, unemotional, matter of fact, as these lines near the end of the poem show: “And then again / I might be wrong. Maybe / You are the one / Who loves a good fire. Who knows?”—and the speaker's sense of the absurd (“I may have lied about the fire”), that the entire poem has been a hoax, also contribute to the self-effacement of the voice. What Strand would have us believe initially is that a poem of personal experience becomes yet another type of self-divestiture poem.

“The Man in the Mirror” presents another “self/self” confrontation. This long (five pages) poem—the final one in Reasons for Moving—is seemingly a “dialogue” between the selves, but since we never hear directly from the other self, the man actually “in the mirror,” it is more a slow, quiet monologue of the “I” addressing his reflection as “you.” Still, the speaker's reflection alone is insufficient for a self-confrontation because earlier in the poem, the speaker says “the mirror was nothing without you,” then adds later:

I remember how we used to stand
wishing the glass
would dissolve between us,
and how we watched our words
cloud that bland,
innocent surface,
and when our faces blurred
how scared we were. …
You never spoke
or tried to come up close.
Why did I want so badly
to get through to you? …
It will always be this way.
I stand here scared
that you will disappear,
scared that you will stay.

The speaker here is not “scared” in the same way as the paranoiac in Sleeping with One Eye Open, but is afraid of losing contact with his otherness and of that which the otherness has to reveal about the speaker's self-identity. In “The Tunnel,” the speaker urges the other self to leave; here the speaker is weary of the ensuing consequences if the other does so. The speaker has matured; his tone, not comically absurd, but serious (and without the emotional urgency of the confessional voice), is indicative of the surreal content: “we watched our words / cloud that bland, / innocent surface” of the mirror, rather than the speaker's physical breath, which in turn causes the reflection to blur.

Strand's aesthetic, his technique of craft, is enmeshed with his themes of self-discovery. To be is to be nothing—which, of course, echoes Stevens's final line from “The Snow Man”: the listener, “nothing himself,” stands watching the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” The self-effacing mode of voice serves to define Strand's speaker's growth from alienation to achieving absence from the physical world without physically dying, and it mirrors each poem's content. As the speaker becomes less afraid of his otherness, his tone becomes less comic. The speaker's reaction to his estranged world was that of humor, but as he began to better understand his relationship to it, the world seemed less strange, and his place in it more definite (“In a field / I am the absence / of field.”), no longer befitting a humorous response.

Strand told Richard Jackson that “the act of writing is itself a metaphor for the way we relate to the hidden resources of our lives. A truly exciting poem has something evasive or mysterious at the core, and it succeeds in suggesting to us that the core is essential to our being. But that core's absence reminds us of how precariously we exist in the universe that evades us, that is always beyond us” (13-14). The speaker of “The Man in the Mirror” ends his monologue by articulating this precariousness. That Strand's craft informs his poems' subject matter is stated best by Strand himself when writing of Donald Justice's work for Contemporary Poets:

From the very beginning Justice has fashioned his poems, honed them down, freed them of rhetorical excess and the weight, however gracefully sustained, of an elaborate diction. His self-indulgence, then, has been with the possibilities of the plain statement. His refusal to adopt any other mode but that which his subject demands—minimal, narcissist, negating—has nourished him. …

If absence and loss are inescapable conditions of life, the poem for Justice is an act of recovery. It synthesizes, for all its meagreness, what is with what is no longer; it conjures up a life that persists by denial, gathering strength from its hopelessness, and exists, finally and positively, as an emblem of survival.

(818)

Strand well could be assessing his own work here; he said to Plumly of Justice: “I've learned a lot from him. And I think he's learned some things from me, too. We share some of the same subject matter and give each other poems—that is, ideas for poems” (66-7). It is true of Strand's technique, too, that he refuses “to adopt any other mode but that which his subject demands—minimal, narcissist, negating,” and the mode to convey such subjects is the self-effacing voice, which Strand achieves, as we have seen demonstrated by his poems so far discussed, by his themes of self-definition and his tone. The self-effacing “I” is a matter of technique, but it is a technique available only for use in certain poems whose content allows for it. In “Keeping Things Whole,” the “I” is self-effacing because the speaker's definition of himself—the subject of that poem—is one of effacement, or absence from his presence in the physical world. In “My Life By Somebody Else,” the “I” is self-effacing because the poem's subject suggests a confusion of personal identity, an indefiniteness of the speaker-composer of the poem. And in “The Whole Story,” the comic tone becomes the subject; the ultimate joke of the poem is the speaker's disavowal of the subject of the fire—that is, his effacement from the poem's original subject.

Strand achieves the truly “ultimate” self-effacement in some of his translations, however. In something of the reverse of the intention of the speaker of The Monument, who desires immortality by being spiritually “translated” through his work which survives him, Strand at times leaves behind the author whose poem Strand literally translates. Consider “The Dirty Hand” from Reasons for Moving. Following the poem's title, in parentheses, is the inscription “after Carlos Drummond de Andrade,” yet we can assume it is Strand's own composition because he does not indicate otherwise. The poem is, however, neither a response to Drummond, an engagement of poetic dialogue with him, nor an adaptation in, say, the manner of Lowell's Imitations (1961) as might be thought considering the inscription. In 1976, Strand published the following translation of “The Dirty Hand” in Another Republic, in which he presented the poem as a translation of Drummond's. Strand's is very closely a literal rendering; I have compared it to John Nist's literal translation of it found in Nist's In the Middle of the Road (1965). Here is a selection of Strand's translation from Another Republic:

My hand is dirty.
I must cut it off. …
I used to keep it
out of sight,
in my pants' pocket.
No one suspected a thing.
People came up to me,
wanting to shake hands.
I would refuse
and the hidden hand
would leave its imprint
on my thigh.
And I saw
it was the same
if I used it or not.
Disgust was the same. …
It is impossible
to live with this
gross hand that lies
on the table.
Quick! Cut it off!
Chop it to pieces
and throw it
into the ocean.
With time, with hope
and its intricate workings
another hand will come,
pure, transparent as glass,
and fasten itself to my arm.

The following is the text of what Strand implies is his own poem, “The Dirty Hand” (“after Drummond”), published eight years prior to the appearance of his translation we have just seen:

My hand is dirty.
I must cut it off. …
I used to keep it
out of sight,
in my pants pocket.
No one suspected a thing.
People came up to me,
wanting to shake hands.
I would refuse
and the hidden hand,
like a dark slug,
would leave its imprint
on my thigh.
And then I realized
it was the same
if I used it or not.
Disgust was the same. …
It is impossible
to live with this
gross hand that lies
on the table.
Quick! Cut it off!
Chop it to pieces
and throw it
into the ocean.
With time, with hope
and its intricate workings
another hand will come,
pure, transparent as glass,
and fasten itself to my arm.

Strand makes his claim of authorship based on four changes in Drummond's text: In line three of the second stanza, “Strand's” poem reads “in my pants pocket,” his translation of Drummond is “in my pants' pocket” (the poems were published by different presses; I am discounting the allowance for “house style”); in line nine of the same stanza, Strand includes “like a dark slug,” which was omitted from his translation; in line twelve, also of that stanza, Strand writes “And then I realized” instead of the “And I saw” of his translation; and the last change, in the penultimate line of stanza three, reading “lethargic and crablike” in Strand's “The Dirty Hand,” was omitted from his translation.

If these differences are slight, they are enough to alter (however slightly) the tone and emphasis of the poem. The voice of Strand's translation of Drummond betrays a Christian sensibility. That is, Drummond clearly means to suggest, in part, “if thy hand offend thee, cut it off” from the Gospel of St. Mark, 9:43. Strand's poem is different—that is, taken from, or “following” Drummond—because Strand now emphasizes, by adding two more lines of description to the hand (making it more definitely metonymic), the slothfulness of the human condition, and, by implication, the desire for something supernatural to replace it.

But this is mere justification. Strand has implied that his early version of “The Dirty Hand” is his own poem, not Drummond's. (And such a claim is almost believable given that Strand's flat style—the result of his careful and complete tonal control—makes all his early poems read as though they were themselves translations.) Nothing could be more self-effacing than to remove oneself nearly entirely from the poem—from conceiving it, from actually writing it. Strand uses Drummond to author Strand's poem: the ultimate, and most absurd, act of self-effacement.

Strand freely admits to “basing” some of his poems on his reading of others' work. “Reading,” he said to Graziano, “is as much a part of experience as walking down the street or talking to people or anything. It's part of life. … [S]ometimes I don't know whether I read something or experienced it” (39-40). Strand's “jocular consideration” is to subvert the essence of the confessional and persona poets who rely so greatly on personal experience. Strand's personal experience of reading others' work—and taking their ideas, that is, their experiences—becomes the subject of his work. He continued in the same interview:

… the first of the “Night Pieces” [from The Late Hour (1978) is] a version of a paragraph toward the end of Bleak House. Of course I changed it a lot; turned London and the Thames into New York and the Hudson and I changed a lot of details to make it more contemporary, and I added things of my own.

(35)

Perhaps, then, Strand's acknowledgment—“after Dickens” follows the poem's title—is enough to suggest the affinity to the paragraph in Bleak House; its having been altered significantly makes it a genuine Strand poem. But consider our next example, something of “a third ‘Night Piece,’” Strand says, “that was based on a reading of Leopardi.” That poem, first published in Antaeus (Spring 1978) under the title “Poem after Leopardi,” but appearing as just “Leopardi” in his Selected Poems—leaving the reader without much of a clue to the meaning of the one word title—follows in excerpted form:

The night is warm and clear and without wind.
The stone-white moon waits above the rooftops
and above the nearby river. Every street is still
and the corner lights shine down only upon the hunched shapes of cars.
You are asleep. And sleep gathers in your room
and nothing at this moment bothers you.
Jules, an old wound has opened and I feel the pain of it again.
You are asleep and I have gone outside to pay my late respects
to the sky that seems so gentle
and to the world that is not and says to me:
“I do not give you any hope. Not even hope.”
Down the street I hear the voice of a drunk
singing an unrecognizable song
and I hear a car a few blocks off. …
Once when I was a boy, and the birthday I had waited for
was over, I lay upon my bed, awake and miserable, and very late
that night the sound of someone's voice singing down a sidestreet,
wounded me, as this does now.

Here is my literal (as closely possible) translation of Leopardi's “La Sera Del Di' Di Festa”; I have chosen to translate a bit more than just the lines Strand retains for his “Leopardi,” omitting but a few lines from Leopardi's Italian text:

The night is sweet and clear and without wind,
And the moon poses quietly over the roofs
And in the middle of the gardens, and reveals
In the distance the serenity of every mountain. Oh, my woman,
Now every path is silent, and from the balconies
Only a rare night lamp is shining.
You are asleep, crouched in easy sleep
In your quiet rooms, and no care eats at you,
And, of course, you have no thoughts of how you have
Opened the wound in the middle of my chest.
You are asleep: I look towards the sky, which seems benign,
And I salute it, and salute nature which wounded me once.
“Hope?” nature said to me. “Hope I deny you …
Only tears will shine in your eyes.”
This day was a holiday: but all its fun
You have ended with sleep, remembering perhaps
In your dreams how many took to you today,
How many you took to: it is not my name
That comes to your mind. So here I ask
What life can I look for …
Where today are our famous ancestors crying,
And the great power and armies and roar of Rome
That covered land and sea?
All is peace and silence; the world rests,
Our passions have subsided.
When I was very young, the holiday
For which I anxiously awaited came and went,
Leaving me in pain, awake, pressing my pillow;
And in the late night, a song that rose from the streets,
Dying little by little into the distance,
Pained my heart, as now.

Strand eliminates some of Leopardi's verbiage (accouterments of the early nineteenth century), changes some of the diction to make the poem's sound and setting more contemporary, and ensures that the poem evokes an American, rather than Italian, evening after a holiday. Still, the situation here in “Leopardi” is remarkably that of Strand's-Drummond's “The Dirty Hand”; there is but slight difference in content, and none in meaning, between Leopardi's piece and what Strand calls his own poem, one “based on a reading of Leopardi”—a very close reading, obviously. Strand's inclusion of this poem in his “New Poems” section of Selected Poems simply as “Leopardi,” giving no clear acknowledgment to the poet whose work it is, can be justified if considering that Strand added his personal mark to the poem by addressing “Jules,” his wife. (Leopardi wrote, “Oh, my woman.”) Yet this makes Leopardi's “La Sera Del Di' Di Festa” appear to be Strand's, in the confessional mode of voice—particularly since it is placed in his Selected Poems following a grouping of his confessional poems about his childhood in Nova Scotia—when, in fact, it is Strand at his self-effacing best.

In another instance, Strand more subtly seduces us into believing that his poem “For Jessica, My Daughter” from The Late Hour is confessional—he does have a daughter named Jessica (and his Selected Poems is dedicated to her and to Jules)—until we realize that the poem's opening in a wind storm and its theme of a father's contemplating his daughter's future are too similar to Yeats's “A Prayer for my Daughter,” although the actual phrasing and specific lines of the two poems are dissimilar.

Nothing could be more jocular than to claim authorship of poems one has translated; indeed, the true author has been lost in the translation—as Drummond and Leopardi were, having been supplanted by the Strand who is actually effaced from these same poems. He could well title these: “My Poems By Somebody Else.”

For Strand, such a claim of authorship is a final display of the absurd, of phantasmagoria, which helped inform the controlled tone, a tone necessary in establishing the voice of an impersonal “I,” one defined by the degree to which he can achieve absence—from himself, from the physical world. The resulting self-effacing voice aids Strand in his personal inquiry into the constitution, the definition, of an individual in a contemporary world to which he feels no relationship or role other than that of filling a void. Such an inquiry—and tentative answers—could not have been effected without his use of the self-effacing voice, for, as we have seen, this voice cannot be distinguished from the self portrayed—and defined—in these poems, whoever it is Strand would have us believe is their author.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. “Dark and Radiant Peripheries: Mark Strand and A. R. Ammons.” Southern Review (New Series) 8.1 (1972): 133-49.

Crenner, James. Rev. of Darker, by Mark Strand. Seneca Review 2.1 (1971): 84-9.

Graziano, Frank. In Memory of Michael Morgan. Bryan, TX: Cedarshouse P, 1986.

Gregerson, Linda. “Negative Capability.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 9.2 (1981): 90-114.

Howard, Richard. “Mark Strand: ‘The Mirror Was Nothing Without You.’” Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. Enlarged ed. New York: Atheneum, 1980. 589-602.

Jackson, Richard. “Charles Simic and Mark Strand: The Presence of Absence.” Rev. of Charon's Cosmology, by Charles Simic, The Late Hour and The Monument, by Mark Strand. Contemporary Literature 21.1 (1980): 136-45.

Plumly, Stanley. “From the New Poetry Handbook.” Rev. of Darker, by Mark Strand. Ohio Review 13.1 (1971): 74-80.

Strand, Mark. “A Conversation with Mark Strand.” Interview with Richard Vine and Robert von Hallberg. Chicago Review 28.4 (1977): 130-40.

———. “A Conversation with Mark Strand.” Interview with Wayne Dodd and Stanley Plumly. Ohio Review 13.2 (1972): 55-71.

———. “Donald Justice.” Contemporary Poets. Third ed. Ed. James Vinson. New York: St. Martin's P, 1980. 816-18.

———. “An Interview with Mark Strand.” With Cristina Bacchilega. Missouri Review 4.3 (1981): 51-64.

———. “An Interview with Mark Strand.” With Frank Graziano. Strand: A Profile. Ed. Frank Graziano. Iowa City: Grilled Flowers P, 1979. 29-48.

———. “Notes on the Craft of Poetry.” Antaeus 30-31 (1978): 343-47.

———. Preface. The Contemporary Poets: American Poetry Since 1940. Ed. Mark Strand. New York: World Publishing, 1969. xiii-xiv.

———. “A Statement about Writing.” The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets. Ed. William Heyen. Princeton: Ontario Review P, 1984. 317.

———. “Untelling the Hour.” Interview with Richard Jackson. Jackson, Acts of Mind 13-18.