Mark Strand’s The Continuous Life (1990) was a significant work in many regards. Not only was it published in the same year he became Poet Laureate of the United States, it was also the first book of poetry Strand had written in ten years, since Selected Poems (1980). Strand said in the late 1970s that he “didn’t like what [he] was writing” and “didn’t believe in [his] autobiographical poems” (“Mark Strand: The Poetry Foundation”). As a result, he departed from poetry after Selected Poems and spent the 1980s writing short stories and prose, critiques of art, and even several children’s books. In this regard, The Continuous Life was not only a reflection of Strand’s time off, but perhaps more importantly a potential opportunity to reinvent himself as a poet and author.
At first glance, The Continuous Life offers quite a lot in the way of poetic diversity, including several types of literature: short poems, longer and less formally structured works, and multi-part narrative pieces that blur the lines between poetry and prose. However, although Strand shows much variety of form, style, and subject matter in the book, he also continues to draw from many of the same themes and literary devices that his poetry was known for. In this way, the book is not so much a reinvention of himself as a poet as much as a demonstration of how he is developing and broadening his range as an author. Furthermore, the book is not only a return to the world of poetry, but a work in which Strand simultaneously embraces his writing style and pushes the boundaries of how contemporary poetry can and should be defined.
One way Strand shows new methods of poetic expression is demonstrated in the short lyric poem Luminism. The poem is presented in a modern, first-person lyric style with no perceptible rhyme scheme and minimal meter, and written out almost matter-of-factly, a single stanza with line breaks that seem to aim mainly for continuity. However, this simple presentation is in marked contrast with the poem itself, as Strand writes with a nuanced and chosen language of aesthetic beauty and emotion that clearly marks the piece as poetry versus a simple retelling of a past event.
Throughout the poem, Strand displays remarkable conciseness in his descriptions and word choice. With his combination of his focus on the sunset’s brevity and his laconic writing, he perfectly reflects Ezra Pound’s ideas from the 1918 essay “A Retrospect” and “A Few Don’ts” of what an image in poetry should be - an “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” free of superfluous words and phrases (“A Retrospect…”, 2011). Luminism describes a memorable sunset that the author experiences with some friends in the city one evening and in doing so captures a beautiful moment in time, using the metaphor of a “golden fire” for the sun’s all-encompassing rays. The poem seems to focus on overall aesthetics and light in its descriptions and content, and reflects the essence of Luminism: an American landscape painting style of the 1870s, centered on the often sublime effects of light in landscapes. Strand seems to be using ekphrasis in this poem: he is translating a visual painting style into a verbal medium and maintaining his poetry’s stylistic trademarks while doing so (Merriam Webster, 2011). Luminism’s initial description of the sunset is one great example of Strand’s ability to be concise and beautiful at the same time:
“Sunlight / Flooded the valley floor and blazed on the town’s / Westward facing windows. The streets shimmered like rivers, / And trees, bushes, and clouds were caught in the spill, / And nothing was spared…”
Through this beautiful metaphor of sunlight as a flood, Strand urges us to pay attention and give due importance and respect to the brief fragments of beauty and power in our lives, no matter how fleeting or minute they seem. In this poem, Strand continues to use the concise and vivid language that his poetry is famous for. However, at the same time its focus on light and aesthetic beauty challenges his reputation as an author of poems with traditionally darker themes (“Mark Strand: The Poetry Foundation”). Additionally, this poem is an ekphrasic foray into translating the Luminist style of painting to the literary form of a poem. Luminism is an opportunity for Strand to try out new poetic devices, and while doing so he simultaneously explores a new function of contemporary poetry.
The prose poem Travel exemplifies another type of literature featured in The Continuous Life: the narrative. The work is utterly devoid of any rhyme or line breaks, and is written almost as a soliloquy. It might be a man’s entry into a diary, or perhaps simply a glimpse into his thoughts as he reflects on the past. In the piece, the speaker ruminates on a past lover, trying to match old memories of her with the cities in which they occurred. “When she kissed me, when she took off her clothes and begged me to take off mine, we might have been in Prague,” he muses. However, he has a very difficult time squaring things away in his mind, lamenting that “there was nothing to remind me of where I was” and later realizing that he “can’t be sure. So much has happened. So many days have lost their luster.” Perhaps the most powerful part of the poem is its abrupt ending, where it becomes clear that the speaker, still traveling, is saddened by his past: “None of the old merriment is here, none of the flash and vigor, none of the pain that kept sending me elsewhere.” The physical form and style of this prose poem may be different from many of The Continuous Life’s other poems, but its subject matter is well-trodden ground: loss, longing, and regret play their well-established roles as central emotions.
Orpheus Alone is another example of Strand combining classic themes with a new approach to presenting lyric poetry. This work is the first of the longer, less structured poems in the volume, and appears after four shorter poems that focus on themes of loss and longing. In it, he maintains the thematic elements of the collection’s previous poems while introducing some of the new elements the book begins to explore.
The poem’s title is a reference to the story of the Greek mythological character Orpheus, who famously failed to recover his wife Eurydice from Hades and the Underworld. The piece itself is a hypothetical foray into Orpheus’ creative process and psyche after his failed expedition. In this presentation, Strand envisions an epilogue to the Orpheus myth. He tells of Orpheus writing three great poems and describes the content of these poems, as well as providing insight to the unique creative processes and emotions that drive the creation of each one. This is accomplished by describing in chronological order the fictitious poems that Orpheus writes.
First, Orpheus’ original poem is described - a poem that focuses on the physical beauty of Eurydice and his anguish over losing her. Orpheus dwells on “Her forehead where golden light of evening spread…” and dreams that his words can bring back the lover he so desperately misses. Strand’s description of this poem is presented in a single, impressive sentence; it is more than 15 lines long, and his use of fragmented, detailed images effectively wrap the reader in the whirlwind of painful emotion that is engulfing Orpheus.
Next, the creative process surrounding his second poem is detailed. Orpheus writes this poem spontaneously - he has wandered aimlessly around the countryside in an attempt to forget Eurydice and recreate his world without her, and the poem comes forth with “…such speech of newness that the world [is] swayed…” In this second poem, Orpheus is trying to cast aside his feelings of loss instead of embracing them: he writes the poem in an effort to shake from his head “The image of love and put in its place the world / As he wished it would be…” However, Strand downplays this second poem’s importance, commenting that this second great poem is one that “…no one recalls anymore”. By devaluing this second poem, Strand is telling us that denial is not the way to cope with these feelings. Instead, he presents a method for dealing with loss by introducing the creation of Orpheus’ third poem, which is described as the greatest of the three.
Interestingly, the content of this third poem is not mentioned at all; instead, Strand describes only the emotions accompanying the formation of the work, and does so with the incredible vividness that has often been an element of his poetry writing, according to critic Jay Parini ("Mark Strand's Life and Career"). The third poem, Strand says, comes out as a physical extension of a world “Where death is reborn and sent into the world as a gift, / So the future, with no voice of its own, nor hope / Of ever becoming more than it will be, might mourn.” In an interview, Strand describes the poem as “giving loss a contour or a form that makes the actual experience of loss bearable” ("Poetry Archive"). Orpheus Alone puts a new spin on Strand’s poetic theme of loss with the introduction of a hope for dealing with that loss.
The themes present across Luminism, Travel, and Orpheus Alone demonstrate that this volume should be looked at as more than a simple opportunity for Strand to expand his writing style. Yes, Strand chooses to try out a diverse array of poetic forms in this collection of works, but he also has clearly not abandoned the themes and content matter that his poetic career is known for, maintaining elements of loss, regret, powerful imagery, and a mastery of concise language. As such, The Continuous Life is just what its title claims: a continuation of Mark Strand’s life and career in which he embraces his past and current style while striving to move onward and explore new emotions and forms in his poetry.
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