In the spring of 2021, a literary mystery arose at the 92nd Street Y. A galley proof of The New Yorker, dated from 1995, contained an unfamiliar poem by the late poet Mark Strand. Yet the work was never published.
. He described being “amazed and charmed” by Stevens’s ability to “encode the act of writing in his poems”—that is, to make them about their own making, as much as anything else. “Wallace Stevens Comes Back,” like much of Strand’s work, has a similarly reflexive quality, exploring the formation of ideas and foregrounding the mind’s movements. Meanwhile, the notion of the reading reminds us that poetry emerges, too, from the body.
interview, Shawn asked Strand, “Do you care whether you’re read after you’re dead?” Yes, Strand said, “but that’s projection. . . . I mean, I’d really like to beafter I’m dead. That’s all that is. I don’t think it will make much difference to me when I’m dead whether I’m read or not.” Strand treated his poems not as entries to immortality but as part of poetry’s eternal present, where language renders possible a simple yet rare magic, a moment of communion. “So much for the past.