Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet, Mark Strand, Dead at 80

Pulitzer prize-winning poet Mark Strand (Sleeping With One Eye Open, Man and Camel) has died yesterday morning at his daughter’s home in New York. He was 80.

From The Guardian:

“He was a funny, elegant, generous and brilliant man,” [Jessica Strand] said of her father. “A man who lived to work and to be with his friends and the people he loved.”
A distinctive presence even at the end of his life, with his lean build, white hair and round glasses, Strand received numerous honors, including the Pulitzer in 1999 for Blizzard of One, a gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a National Book award nomination this fall for Collected Poems. He was appointed US poet laureate for 1990-91, although he did not count his time in Washington among his great achievements.
“It’s too close to the government. It’s too official. I don’t believe that poetry should be official ... there are poets who aspire to such positions; I never did.”
Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and several works of prose, Strand was haunted by absence, loss and the passage of time from the beginning of his career, sometimes peering just beyond the contents of the page and wondering what, if anything, was out there.

See the full piece here. The New York Times does Strand honor here.