Sincere Surrealism

Mark Strand’s poems fascinate me because they are at once accessible and strange. They are written in what you could call a “plain style.” I do not have to wrap my head around elaborate metaphysical conceits, figure out numerous allusions, or make sense of an experience or story through fragments that are meant to resist cohesion. However, the events, people, and images in these poems are anything but plain and simple.
When I read “The Mailman,” for instance, I understand the sequence of events being presented. A mailman comes to the speaker’s door at midnight. He is upset about the bad news he brings the speaker and begs forgiveness for bringing it. The speaker invites him to the house, where he ends up falling asleep. As the mailman sleeps, the speaker writes some disturbing letters, apparently the kind that upset the mailman. The scene being described is clear enough, but I am left wondering why the mailman comes at midnight, why he cares about the news he brings, why he would sleep in the speaker’s house, and why the speaker is writing himself disturbing letters. Of course I immediately assume that the speaker in this poem, and in any others like it, is recounting a dream. Strand has just done away with any references to a reality outside the dream. He has not even included the word “dream” in the title.
Strand is an expert at blurring the distinction between dream and “reality.” “The Last Bus,” for example, appears to be based on an actual bus ride through Rio de Janeiro. It is dated “(Rio de Janeiro, 1966).” However, the speaker sees “[t]he ghosts of bathers” at night. Similarly, he describes how the city sleeps and how “the sea is a dream / in which it [the city] dies and is reborn.” What at first appears to be a rather imaginative description of a foreign city at night subtly blurs into the speaker’s own dream, in which people and objects from Rio, even the very bus driver, appear. Towards the end of the poem, the speaker looks out of a window in an apparent attempt to find his bearings in reality, but he sees nothing like the Rio he knows. I am left wondering whether he is trapped in his own dream, his dream has merged with Rio’s, or Strand is trying to depict the experience of entering one of the less touristy sections of Rio.
I would argue that more often than not Strand uses—perhaps while also resisting-- what Altieri calls “the scenic style” (11). Many of these poems have certain of the characteristic scenic elements that Altieri finds in Stafford’s “Ceremony.” Both “The Mailman” and “The Last Bus” “plac[e] a reticent, plain-speaking, and self-reflective speaker within a narratively presented scene evoking a sense of loss” (10-11). However, the “narratively presented scenes” in Strand’s work are often surreal. He seems to be one of those poets who “attempt to transfor[m] the [scenic] mode from within.” As Altieri explains, “[a]lthough they do not deny prevailing ideals of personal sincerity and the impact of resonant silence, . . . [they] try to acknowledge the pressures and opportunities for imaginative play afforded by self-consciousness about the motives in rhetoric” (17). I get the sense that Strand is coming to some deep realizations about himself and his experiences in “The Milkman” and “The Last Bus,” even though I know he is engaging in some “imaginative play.” I also recognize how Strand pushes the envelope, so to speak, in poems like “The Prediction,” “The Story of Our Lives,” and “The Unsettling.” In these poems, the poet writing the scene enters the scene and becomes part of the narrative. Even so, like the less playful poems, they are sincere mediations on death, loss, and nostalgia.