A Croton-on-Hudson Pulitzer-Winner

a review of Mark Strand's Blizzard of One: Poems

Editor’s Note: The staff of The 914 is past its confidence-level in matters of contemporary poetry. Some of us graduated from Briarcliff High School a class ahead of Jordan Davis and were babysat by the children of Robert O’Clair, editor of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, and presumably a professor of the subject at Manhattanville College in Purchase.

It’s not just that we are self-conscious about our lack of expertise with the subject, it’s that we understand that poets and poetry-appreciators are a literally vanishing portion of the population, even in these elite precincts. Just try finding somebody at a pool party who knows who Diane Wakoski or Jon Silkin was. And then let us know so we can put a reminder on our 2028 calendar to ask how it’s going.

All of which is to say we wish to accord the few poets that remain the dignity and distance due any endangered species—like ivory-quilled woodpeckers, perhaps.

Plus, on the off-chance any are in earshot, poetry people tend to be skilled language-slingers and might hurl something painful our way.

Despite these reasoned hesitations, when we learned from our local library survey that a bonafide Poet Laureate of the United States—and a Pulitzer-prize winner to boot—was a long-time resident of Croton-on-Hudson, we knew we could not remain silent.

We assigned the following piece to our marketing director, a publishing industry refugee, who at least claims to be the three-time winner of a corporate limerick contest at one of the Big 5 houses and to once having have had a sestina published by the McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

But they admit to not reading any poetry themselves. And their C.V. says they studied chemistry in school.

So, to any verse-lovers who chance upon the following piece, we beg pardon for the heavy-footed, commercially tainted prose it contains. And for likely being wrong in at least several of its conclusions. We simply don’t know enough about the subject to judge, and are taking some comfort in the fact that it appears not to be so much about the poetry, really, as about other things.

Review:
A Blizzard of One: Poems
by Mark Strand (Croton-on-Hudson)

Mark Strand was white-hot. Well, white-guy hot. Take equal parts Daniel Day Lewis and Clint Eastwood and add a few drops of Willem Dafoe. Then add tweed, a dress shirt, horn-rimmed glasses, a scarf, and . . . Ecco vates.

And we’ll take under advisement the last century’s judgment that his poetry was excellent. I mean, back when money and purpose were still coursing in the veins of the Academy—when Harvard and Vassar still had professors of English who were allowed to be functional alcoholics whose careers didn’t perish if they didn’t publish, when Little, Brown and FSG still had editors who could not decipher a P&L if their lives depended on it, and when there was not a whiff of DEI over-promotion emanating from the endowment organizations—there simply had to have been a degree of purity to the thing.

Right?

Published in Strand’s 65th year, Blizzard of One (Knopf 1999) isn’t—in our humble opinion—the volume of his poetry to prove it.

Generally the poems in this collection have as much subtlety, whimsey, and surprise as you can get off a marble (not a Greek) urn. The sort you can find at a contemporary memorial supply company.

That’s not to say there’s nothing of merit in here.

“Some Last Words” opens

It is easier for a needle to pass through a camel

Than for a poor man to enter a woman of means.

Just go to the graveyard and ask around.

That’s pretty awesome. Maybe not Amanda Gorman awesome but we can imagine, if we had been on the Pulitzer board, that might have been enough to secure our vote right there. The poem peters (St. Peters, perhaps) a bit into grandiosity and funerealism—two of the poet’s favorite modes here—but it’s a pretty awesome turn, and people are already hating on us for dropping that last line, the poem’s refrain, whenever anybody expresses doubt about, well, anything.

“Do you have a soup of the day?”

“Just go to the graveyard and ask around.”

“Do you think it’s a good time to visit Mexico City?”

“Just . . . ”

It's just one of those perfect expressions. And to consider that it might well have been first hewn right here in northern Westchester . . .

Our other favorite poem is the next in the book, “Five Dogs,” based on the strength of “walks freckled with leaves,” and planets entirely “covered with hair.” But—like so much of the rest here—there’s a lot of marble urn to it.

If we had an intern, and it wasn’t the library’s copy, I’d have them try redacting the following words from the book—light, dark, rain, dust, random, utter, air, mirror, marble, wood, shadow, bird, wake, year, rainbow, tree, leaves, ballroom, waltz, violet, sleep, sweep, sky, snow, glass, and moon.

I believe this would result in two things. First, the intern would come back asking for a fresh Sharpie because the first one ran dry. And, second—not that any worthy poem should be decipherable—there would be almost no semantic sense left upon any page.

Still, we enjoyed this assignment in Croton Free Library’s dustiest aisle and, if nothing else, it inspired us to write some verse ourselves.

There once was a poet named Strand

Whose lines were stentorially grand

He wrote of shadows and self

And you’d find his work on our shelf

But Grisham and King, we find, are more in demand

Anyhow, for what it’s worth, Strand appears to have died in 2014. Several of his volumes—all with the LOCAL AUTHOR sticker upon them—are currently available the Croton Free Library.

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2nd Editor’s note—
This review has been published here on its own, and will ultimately be archived within the North County Book Report. We are still meeting about whether to add the limerick to the (North) County Limericks section.