TURNING A HUNDRED

I was much moved, reading this poem by the late Mark Strand, which I received yesterday as an email forward.  It's called

When I Turned a Hundred

I wanted to go on an immense journey, to travel night and day into the unknown until, forgetting my old self, I came into possession of a new self, one that I might have missed on my previous travels. But the first step was beyond me. I lay in bed, unable to move, pondering, as one does at my age, the ways of melancholy—how it seeps into the spirit, how it disincarnates the will, how it banished the sense to the chill of twilight, how even the best and worst intentions wither in its keep. I kept staring at the ceiling, then suddenly felt a blast of cold air, and I was gone. 

Readers might recall that I wrote a farewell note to Mark on The Buddha Diaries a few months ago, on learning of his death, expressing my gratitude for his recognition of my work as a poet and for bringing me to the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.  Reading "When I Turned a Hundred" some time after his death gave me that "blast of cold air" he describes so well in the poem.  I have shared his experience of the "melancholy" that "seeps into the spirit" and "disincarnates the will", and have observed in my own life how "even the best and worst intentions wither in its keep."  Mark is gone now, as he seems to have foreseen in this poem.  It seems like a cliché to say that "his work will live on", but his contribution was a real and lasting one.  I am once more grateful to him for having expressed in such precise, affecting and curiously comforting words a feeling with which I continue to struggle as the years mount up.

MARK STRAND

My friend Mark Strand died last week at the age of 80.  I say "my friend" not because we were close. We were not.  But because he was once a good friend to me at a moment when I needed one.  I can say without exaggeration that he changed my life.

This is not an obituary.  Others will do a better job of evaluating this Poet Laureate's life and work.  His contribution and his place in American literature is assured.  For me, it is the memory of a simple act of generous friendship that endures.

The year was 1963, and I was living in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  I had been drawn across the Atlantic for the first time by a job at a grammar school, teaching French and German, and Mark's mother was a colleague on the staff.  I was never happy as a teacher.  It's a profession I admire greatly, but for me it was not a good fit.  I have known since the age of twelve that I wanted to be a writer, a poet, and teaching was no more than a way of earning a living.

Mark came to spend that summer in Nova Scotia.  His sister and brother-in-law were there too.  Theatrical folk from Toronto, they opened the Neptune Theater in Halifax, bringing culture to the provinces, and hired me, during my summer break from teaching, as their house manager.  A new world began to open up.  And knowing Mark to be something of a poet---his first book, Sleeping With One Eye Open, was published the following year--I ventured to ask him to look at a handful of my poems.

Kindly, he read them.  And more kindly still, suggested I'd do well in the Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he had recently graduated and was teaching at the time.  He would help me.  I applied.  With his support, I was welcomed with a grant and a teaching assistantship, and moved to Iowa the following year.  Lived there for four years, and completed a doctorate in Comparative Literature before moving to Southern California to teach in academia.

I spent some time with Mark at Iowa, but he was already by then in a different league--one of the teachers at the workshop, and on the way to becoming the justly celebrated poet he became in later life.  I was in awe of him.  The man projected a self-confidence I had never felt.  His quiet, even gentle exterior belied, I knew, an inner strength that I could only aspire to.  His every move expressed a confidence and self-assurance I wished I shared.  It would be some time before I could begin to find my own path, and it would prove quite different from his.

We met once more in New York, years later.  I'm no longer sure quite how it happened, but, generous as ever, he invited me warmly to visit him in his apartment.  By this time, I had moved on from writing poetry to writing about art, and what I remember most about that visit was the impressive library of art books he had assembled.  The apartment, it seemed to me, was a true poet's lair, a place where inspiration lurked in every corner and on every tabletop.

That visit was a short one, and was not to be repeated.  But it was pleasure to follow his successes from a distance, and with gratitude for the change his generosity brought into my life.  I read of his death with sadness and, despite the fact that we never knew each other well, a very personal sense of loss.