Poet adds Pulitzer to his prizes

April 13, 1999

NEIL STEINBERG STAFF REPORTER

While the Pulitzer Prize is the capstone of many a career, it is one of a string of baubles in the tribute-strewn life of the University of Chicago's Mark Strand, honored Monday for his volume of poetry Blizzard of One.

Here The sun that silvers all the buildings here Has slid behind a cloud, and left the once bright air Something less than blue. Yet everything is clear. Across the road, some dead plants dangle down from rooms Unoccupied for months, two empty streets converge On a central square, and on a nearby hill some tombs, Half buried in a drift of wild grass, appear to merge With houses at the edge of town. A breeze Stirs up some dust, turns up a page or two, then dies. All the boulevards are lined with leafless trees. There are no dogs nosing around, no birds, no buzzing flies. Dust gathers everywhere--on stools and bottles in the bars, On shelves and racks of clothing in department stores, On the blistered dashboards of abandoned cars. Within the church, whose massive, rotting doors Stay open, it is cool, so if a visitor should wander in He could easily relax, kneel and pray, Or watch the dirty light pour through the baldachin, Or think about the heat outside that does not go away, Which might be why there are no people there--who knows-- Or about the dragon that he saw when he arrived, Curled up before its cave in saurian repose, And about how good it is to be survived. From Blizzard of One

Strand, 65, has won a Guggenheim fellowship, in 1975, and two National Endowment of the Arts fellowships, in 1977 and 1986. In 1987, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. From 1990 to 1991, he was the fourth U.S. poet laureate. In 1994, he won the Yale Library's $10,000 Bollingen Prize.

All that tends to rub off on a person.

``Strand's poems resonate with a shimmering sense of the infinite that befits his stature,'' a New Yorker editor wrote last year in the New York Times review of Blizzard of One, calling the book ``masterly.''

The title refers to an image typical of Strand's poetry, infused with a sense of sadness and the passing nature of things: ``A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room/And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up/From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all/There was to it.''

Not that the rugged, 6-foot-3-inch poet ever showed signs of becoming inflated by his success,

``I'm surprised by anything that comes my way,'' he said in 1991. ``Life is a crap shoot. If you're smart, I suppose, you learn that pretty early in the game and don't anticipate getting anything. If you don't, you'll be very disappointed.''

Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and earned undergraduate degrees in art and writing from Antioch and Yale and a master's from the University of Iowa.

Blizzard of One is his ninth book of poetry. He published his first, Sleeping With One Eye Open, in 1964, and supported himself by teaching at colleges, including Mount Holyoke College, the University of Washington, Columbia, Yale, Brooklyn College, Princeton, Brandeis, the University of Virginia, Wesleyan and Harvard.

Upon the publication of his 1970 collection, Darker, Robert Penn Warren said of Strand: ``The moment is always exciting when a true poet finds the secret self that is the wellspring of his inspiration.''

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The University of Chicago, where Strand joined the Committee on Social Thought last year as a full professor, said that he could not be reached for comment about the Pulitzer, though he was expected to teach a scheduled class today.

In addition to his collections of poetry, he has written three children's books, a novel, a collection of stories and three art monographs, edited four anthologies and translated several Spanish works.

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