Poet Mark Strand dies at 80

NEW YORK – Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Strand, an Oakwood Friends School graduate who was widely praised for his concentrated and elegiac verse, died Saturday at the age of 80, his daughter, Jessica Strand, said.

The former U.S. poet laureate died at her New York home from cancer. Strand had liposarcoma that had spread throughout his body.

Strand was a 1952 graduate of the Poughkeepsie-based Oakwood school and visited the area to help dedicate the school's library in 1990, according to Journal archives.

A distinctive presence even at the end of his life, with his lean build, white hair, and round glasses, Strand received numerous honors, including the Pulitzer in 1999 for Blizzard of One and a National Book Award nomination this fall for Collected Poems.

He was appointed poet laureate for 1990-91 but did not count his time in Washington among his great achievements.

"It's too close to the government. It's too official," he said in 2011.

He was born in Prince Edward Island in Canada, his mother a painter, his father a salesman whose work led to the family's living in many locales from Peru to Cleveland.

During a half-hour speech dedicating the Oakwood library 24 years ago, Strand told the 200-member audience of faculty, alumni and students about how he first told his family of his career plans.

"It is 1957 — five years after graduation; I am on vacation from arts school," Strand said then. "My mother feels I have picked a difficult profession ... she thinks I should be a doctor or a lawyer.

"It is then that I tell her that although I've just begun arts school, I'm really interested in poetry," Strand continued, to laughter from the crowd.

Strand praised an ability in poetry to capture experiences and feelings, and said he believed his late mother would feel the same.

"Without poetry, we would have either silence or banality," Strand said to the Oakwood audience.

The school, established in 1859 as the Quaker community's first coeducational boarding school, moved to its Poughkeepsie location in 1920

Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and several works of prose, Strand was haunted by absence, loss, and the passage of time from the beginning of his career. Some of his most famous lines appear in "Keeping Things Whole," a poem from "Sleeping With One Eye Open," his 1964 debut:

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

He wrote children's books and art criticism, helped edit several poetry anthologies, and translated the Italian poet Rafael Alberti.

He was a committed doubter, even about poetry. He went through occasional periods when he stopped writing verse.

"I don't make the same demands of prose as I do with poetry," he told the Associated Press. "You don't have to worry about the specific creativity of each word."

Journal staff reporter Nina Schutzman contributed to this report.