'Sleeping With One Eye Open'
Angela Kim
APRIL 5, 2008
- Poet Mark Strand
- (Courtesy Mark Strand)
- View the Slideshow
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Mark Strand: I wrote "Sleeping With One Eye Open" in 1962.
I can't remember what I was thinking of. I mean the poem really is... it speaks to a certain anxiety I experienced back in the early '60s. I was afraid the United States would go to war with Russia or the USSR. I think it's a poem surrounded by a great deal of silence.
I haven't written a poem in two years -- although I keep writing. I have hundreds of notes and stray sentences, lines, ideas jotted down. But no finished poem. It usually takes me a long time to get anything done.
I accumulate pages and pages and pages and then spend the next -- after I have that -- maybe a year sorting everything out and connecting one page to another. One line to another line. It's just the way I work. I write longhand so I'm very slow... terribly slow.
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- Music Bridge:
- Rider
- Artist: Takeshi Nishimoto
- CD: Monologue (Buro)
Comments
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From rexdale, ON, 04/12/2008
Rulez no commont and im mattt damon.
Dwvante mitchell, housin, shaine, melisa, ihab,
mustafa, abdullah, kyle alandra
From toronto, ON, 04/12/2008
can you plese submit the poem for sleeping with one eye open plese! i need it for my 6 grade class project.
From Sacramento, CA, 04/05/2008
Thank you for the poetry segment with Mark Strand. Hearing him read his poetry connected me to the sanctuary inside I find when I'm half awake or moved as I was today. I'm grateful for his poems, for poetry month and for NPR!
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