Something to Say: About Life in The Netherlands: Mark Strand

Out and about on the World Wide Web, I was looking for something else entirely, when one of the first hits on my search list led me to Embassy of the United States, The Hague, The Netherlands. (Oh, yeah, try saying that five times fast!)
About halfway down the page I spotted this little blurb:

American Poet Mark Strand reads from Dutch-English collection of his works
May 22, 2007.
American poet Mark Strand, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate of the U.S., read his poetry at the residence of U.S. Ambassador Roland E. Arnall.
The recently published Dutch-English book Gedichten Eten (Eating Poetry) contains translations of select poems by Mr. Strand. Dr. Wiljan van den Akker, professor of Dutch Literature, and Ms. Esther Jansma, poet and archeologist, worked in close collaboration with the poet to translate works for the bilingual edition.

And I said out loud, "What are the chances?"

You see, I worked with this writer once. It was about a million years ago when I was a high school student in Salt Lake City, Utah. Mark Strand had received a grant from the Utah Arts Consortium and was an artist in residence at The University of Utah. I took a one-day writing workshop under his tutelage. I can't say that I remember all that much about his writing. Or much about him per se. But I do remember the creative exercise we worked on during the afternoon session.

The assignment was to write a fifteen line poem. Thirteen lines of the poem had to begin with the same phrase or had to reference the same color. So, I did my thing, dashed off a piece fifteen lines worth and declared it finished. It wasn't much. I am not really a poet. It was truly a mish-mash of images, and stuff. Not a thing more profound than that. Truly, nothing special. I am such an esoteric poet, usually my writing has very little meaning to others and I can live with that.
But the telling part was when we passed our poems around to one another and asked for feedback from the other participants. That's when my silly fifteen lines took on all kinds of depth and in its analysis became a completely different piece of writing.
I think the readers were grappling for meaning, but nevertheless they seemed to find imagery and substance in a piece that I thought was fluff.

I still think it was fluff.

But when you are in company of a POET, everyone sees something different.

I suppose.

Anyway, all of this is a long lead for today's post. In honor of this poet whom I met a quarter century ago, and who recently came to my town to promote his own work, now in Dutch, I sat down to grapple with the creative writing assignment once again. In half as many minutes, I have produced again a fifteen-lines poem.

Read into it what you will.