Almost Invisible

by Mark Strand

Overview

From Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Strand comes an exquisitely witty and poignant series of prose poems. Sometimes appearing as pure prose, sometimes as impure poetry, but always with Strand’s clarity and simplicity of style, they are like riddles, their answers vanishing just as they appear within reach. Fable, domestic satire, meditation, joke, and fantasy all come together in what is arguably the liveliest, most entertaining book that Strand has yet written.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307957641
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/29/2012
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

MARK STRAND is the author of twelve earlier books of poems. He is also the author of a book of stories, three volumes of translations, a number of anthologies (most recently 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century), and monographs on the artists William Bailey and Edward Hopper. He has received many honors and awards for his poems, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize (for Blizzard of One), the Bollingen Prize, and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1990 he was chosen Poet Laureate of the United States. He teaches at Columbia University.

Read an Excerpt

A Banker in the Brothel of Blind Women

A banker strutted into the brothel of blind women. “I am a shepherd,” he announced, “and blow my shepherd’s pipe as often as I can,but I have lost my flock and feel that I am at a critical point in my life.”“I can tell by the way you talk,”said one of the women,“that you are a banker only pretending to be a shepherd and that you want us to pity you, which we do because you have stooped so low as to try to make fools of us.” “My dear,” said the banker to the same woman,“I can tell that you are a rich widow looking for a little excitement and are not blind at all.” “This observation suggests,” said the woman, “that you may be a shepherd after all, for what kind of rich widow would find excitement being a whore only to end up with a banker?”“Exactly,” said the banker.


The Everyday Enchantment of Music

A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music. Then the music was polished until it became the memory of a night inVenice when tears of the sea fell from the Bridge of Sighs, which in turn was polished until it ceased to be and in its place stood the empty home of a heart in trouble.Then suddenly there was sun and the music came back and traffic was moving and off in the distance, at the edge of the city, a long line of clouds appeared, and there was thunder, which, however menacing, would become music, and the memory of what happened af- ter Venice would begin, and what happened after the home of the troubled heart broke in two would also begin.


Poem of the Spanish Poet

In a hotel room somewhere in Iowa an American poet, tired of his poems, tired of being an American poet, leans back in his chair and imagines he is a Spanish poet, an old Spanish poet, nearing the end of his life, who walks to the Guadalqui- vir and watches the ships, gray and ghostly in the twilight, slip downstream.The little waves, approaching the grassy bank where he sits, whisper something he can’t quite hear as they curl and fall. Now what does the Spanish poet do? He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a notebook, and writes:

Black fly, black fly
Why have you come

Is it my shirt
My new white shirt

With buttons of bone
Is it my suit

My dark-blue suit
Is it because

I lie here alone
Under a willow

Cold as stone
Black fly, black fly

How good you are
To come to me now

How good you are
To visit me here

Black fly, black fly
To wish me good-bye

Table of Contents

A Banker in the Brothel of Blind Women 3

Bury Your Face in Your Hands 4

Anywhere Could Be Somewhere 5

Harmony in the Boudoir 6

Clarities of the Nonexistent 7

The Minister of Culture Gets His Wish 8

The Old Age of Nostalgia 9

Dream Testicles, Vanished Vaginas 10

The Students of the Ineffable 11

The Everyday Enchantment of Music 12

The Buried Melancholy of the Poet 13

Ever So Many Hundred Years Hence 14

Exhaustion at Sunset 15

Clear in the September Light 16

You Can Always Get There from Here 17

The Gallows in the Garden 18

Lose Silhouetted by Lamplight 19

The Triumph of the Infinite 20

The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter 21

Poem of the Spanish Poet 22

The Enigma of the Infinitesimal 24

A Dream of Travel 25

The Emergency Room at Dusk 26

Once Upon a Cold November Morning 27

Provisional Eternity 28

The Street at the End of the World 29

The Nietzschean Hourglass, or The Future's Misfortune 30

An Event About Which No More Need Be Said 31

A Short Panegyric 32

Hermetic Melancholy 33

A Letter from Tegucigalpa 34

Mystery and Solitude in Topeka 35

There Was Nothing to Be Done 36

No Words Can Describe It 37

In the Afterlife 38

Futility in Key West 39

On the Hidden Beauty of My Sickness 40

With Only the Stars to Guide Us 41

Trouble in Pocatello 42

Like a Leaf Carried Off by the Wind 43

The Social Worker and the Monkey 44

Nobody Knows What Is Known 45

Those Little Legs and Awful Hands 46

Not to Miss the Great Thing 47

Nocturne of the Poet Who Loved the Moon 48

In the Grand Ballroom of the New Eternity 49

When I Turned a Hundred 50

Acknowledgments 53

Editorial Reviews

…a witty collection of prose poems that throw the reader slightly off balance…the strongest pieces read like riddles you can't resist.
—Elizabeth Lund

The Washington Post