Mark Strand died today at the age of 80. The Montreal-born writer, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1990-1991, was also a brilliant translator. When I was a junior editor at Ecco Press in the late 80s, Strand used to visit the editor in chief, also an excellent poet, Daniel Halpern, to work on a number of projects translating and promoting international poets, especially from Latin America and Central Europe. The women in the office swooned since Strand was far and away the most ruggedly handsome man in all of poetry, the New Yorker set’s Clint Eastwood. And it was the fact of his attractiveness that made it especially odd Strand became one of the comic masters of contemporary American poetry. People that good looking are almost never funny, in part because they don’t have to be or know how to be—and sometimes it is because they don’t want to risk undermining this thing that the world often believes, because the poets often say so, is a kind of genius: beauty. 

Strand’s wit is often attributed to the fact that he started his professional career as a visual artist, whereby his poetry famously drew on visual influences like the surrealist movement. However, I’m not convinced that’s the best way to read Strand’s work, or even that he saw his work primarily in this context.