He's wined and he's dined with the best Washington, D.C., has to offer, and now he's coming home to Utah . . . to work.
Escaping the hot, humid summer months for which Washington is famous, Mark Strand - the 1990-91 U.S. Poet Laureate and professor of English at the University of Utah - says he is leaving his paper-strewn office in the Library of Congress three months early so he can "get back to Utah and do my own work."Although born in Canada, Strand looks like he fits the part of the rousing professor in "Dead Poets Society" more than Robin Williams ever dreamed to - dressed in old Levis, a blazer and a casual pair of flat leather shoes, sockless of course.
Strand says he left his comfortable eastern home in 1981 and headed out west to Salt Lake City to escape the hours of commuting he had to endure when he taught at universities such as Harvard, the University of Virginia and Yale.
"I just got tired of those endless commutes. I wasn't getting any work done," he said.
However, after nine years of teaching and writing in Utah, Strand was finally beckoned back to Washington last September to serve a year in the most prestigious position America has to offer to a poet - poet laureate.
The position was created 54 years ago by the Library of Congress. However, it wasn't until 1985 thatCongress passed a law making the position equivalent to that of poet laureate for the United States, which means Strand is only the fourth official U.S. Poet Laureate.
Some of Strand's predecessors include great American classic poets Robert Frost and Robert Hayden, with more recent ones including Richard Wilbur and Howard Nemerov.
"I've had a lot of fun, but I haven't done a stitch of work," Strand joked. "This year in Washington I haven't done anything except go out to dinner. I've had far too much to eat and drink - it's been a great year."
But Strand, somewhat of a mix between a nature lover and a culture-aholic, says he has had enough of culture and big cities for a while and he is ready for the hot desert climate of Utah.
"I like mountain biking," he said, adding that he and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, are planning a bike trip together sometime in the future. However, when it comes right down to it, he says his needs run less toward camping and more toward visiting museums.
"If I ever do leave Utah it's because I want to be closer to the culture centers of the East," said Strand, adding that he doesn't blame Utah for its relative lack of museums and cultural diversity.
"The West came late. I don't think there's been much interest in compensating for a late start, however. . . . But you know, you can't expect much because Utah doesn't have a large population - the whole state is the size of a small- or medium-size eastern city."
But its small population, rustic environment and mountains are some of Utah's redeeming qualities that, at times, help inspire Strand's poetry, which runs the spectrum of subjects and is classified by critics as surrealism. Poetry, however, is not what Strand ever imagined he would end up doing. In fact, he started off his career as a painter but quickly changed his artistic focus because he wasn't happy.
"I wasn't very good at art. Of course, my first poems were pretty bad, too. I don't know why I believed in my crummy first poems, but I sort of did," Strand said.
"It took me a little while to get published as a poet," he added. "You don't decide to be something or something else, you just sort of end up doing what you find yourself doing.
"I guess until I was 40, I kept thinking, `What am I going to do with my life,' until I realized, `Hey, I have been doing something with my life, I've been writing poetry.' "
And now, at age 57 - married and with a 7-year-old son - he's been writing poetry for quite some time, and writing it well.
"I like writing poetry, but that doesn't mean I don't like to teach. That's like asking me, do I like hamburgers or do I like ice cream? I like both."
When Strand teaches English he says his main goal is for his students to leave wanting to write instead of wanting to slit their wrists, and when he writes poetry his main desire is to find personal fulfillment.
"When you read poetry and you write poetry, you shape your inner life for yourself. When we talk about being fulfilled, it means we put something where there was nothing. We felt empty before, and we feel fuller, happier now."
Once he begins to explain poetry and how it fills a void in his life that other people fill with religion, Strand's face begins to settle, his body tilts forward on his chair and his eyes move about like a child at his first day of school.
"Part of our human obligation is to figure out what is right and true ourselves," he said. "I believe people should find their own answers to difficult questions. That is the purpose of life - not to be told by some stuttering old man what you believe.
"In a sense, poetry has taken the place of religion for me. So I guess I'm not an atheist; I believe in things and in doing things. If we're told all the time what to think, feel or believe we become lazy."
Writing poetry is hard work for him, said Strand, adding that he feels everyone isn't born a poet, but that it takes an ability to question and to feel life.
"It comes in spurts - poetry is sporadic. I'd be unbearable if I talked non-stop poetry all the time. I'd be a great bore."
Strand's favorite time to write poetry is in the morning and throughout the afternoon. "I'm a little groggy by evening," he said. Instead, when Strand has no other appointments, in the evenings he likes to read or watch a Utah Jazz game.
Following in Strand's footsteps as poet laureate is his friend and peer Joseph Brodsky, who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and who won the Nobel Prize in 1987.
"It's nice to have somebody who is a friend follow you because some of the things you weren't able to do, but had planned, can be carried out by your successor."
*****
(Quote)
"For us, too, there was a wish to possess
Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves,
Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless
In which we might see ourselves; and this desire
Came always in passing, in wandering light, and in such cold
That ice on the valley's lakes cracked and rolled..."