SOURCE: Miller, Christopher R. “Mark Strand's Inventions of Farewell.” Wallace Stevens Journal 24, no. 2 (fall 2000): 135-50.

In the following essay, Miller examines the connections between Strand's work and the poetry of Wallace Stevens.

Wallace Stevens has many and diverse poetic heirs—John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Charles Wright, and Mark Strand, to name a few—all practitioners of what Helen Vendler has called the “second-order poem” (12), or what Stevens himself called “The poem of the act of the mind” (CP [The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens] 240). As opposed to “first-order” poetry of statement or narrative, such a lyric translates the particulars of lived experience into an abstract language of meditation; its central actor is the large red man reading, a spirit storming in blank walls, the transparent man in a translated world. After Stevens, second-order poets, like the imagined future generations in “A Postcard from the Volcano,” inevitably speak his...