Mark Strand’s Man and Camel speaks to the difficulty of transforming experience and self into poetry. Strand documents with his poetry both his experiences, his struggles to make record of them through poetry, and the failures and successes of the poems to complete the task. Lacking a narrative arc, Strand relies on the concurrent theme to tie his poems together through the three sections of his work. The first two sections consist of Strand’s short poetry and showcase his quiet conversational voice, precise language and landscapes of surrealism. The third consists entirely of a longer poem, “Poem After the Last Seven Words” specially commissioned for performance in conjunction with Haydn’s quartet, “Opus 51”. The first section is easily the tightest, most adhering to the theme, while the second deviates somewhat, and the last poem moves in and out of theme at will. Though also pocked with ideas of death, filial love, and nothingness, the book nonetheless vibrates with discussion of expression and its difficulties, perhaps the truest subject of any poem.
In only the second poem Strand seems to address the difficulty of poetic expression. In “I Had Been a Polar Explorer”, after describing his trials as a traveler, the speaker recounts, “I filled page after page with visions of what I had witnessed.” With the excitement of the experience itself fading, the speaker finds his only recourse is to write about those experiences. Abruptly he finds, “with nothing more to say, I stopped/ and turned my sights on what was near.” It is the suddenness of the poem, the turn does not even merit its own line, that lends power to the notion. Strand seems to be saying that it is only once we write about what we have seen outside, far away, that we can write what about what is close to us. Indeed the speaker notices something new, a man, “Almost at once.” The speaker is then unable to contact the figure he thought he recognized, who vanishes. Perhaps Strand is capturing the frustration at an inability to truly understand oneself, the barely recognized man being Strand, as compared to our ability to see and record the larger world around us.
A pair of poems on opposite pages, “Error” and “Fire”, further examines the power of language. “Error” tells of a group who endures extreme conditions and ruin on their travels. The speaker bemoans the decision to keep going, eschewing “the garden where we started from.” He claims that the mundane but pleasurable sunlight of the house “would have been/enough, even if the…the clouds scudded seaward/ like the pages of a book on which nothing is written.” The speaker wishes to have stayed in, to stayed home and ignored the experiences that turned out to be mostly painful. He believes that the simplicity would have satisfied him, even if it meant he would not be able to write anything, to fill any pages of a book. His travel has been an error. “Fire” seems to pick up where “Error” left off. The speaker notes that they would encounter a fire and he would walk through it unharmed, “and for [him] it was just another thing to have done,” it was just another experience. But for his companions it has a much more profound effect. They are struck by the fire, and think themselves lucky to “have known the fragrance/ of burning paper, the sound of words breathing their last.” His companions have come to understand that words are not eminently powerful; they have limits and are vulnerable to erasure. Where, in “Fire,” the rest wished to go on and experience life that they might write on the pages of their books, the speaker did not and now the others understand his point of view.
The title poem, too, provides a significant glimpse of the book’s theme. The speaker in “Man and Camel” sits on his porch, on his fortieth birthday, when a man and camel come down the street, singing. He is ensorcelled by the song, but suddenly the pair come running back and accuse him of “ruin[ing] it.” It is a very challenging poem, without many clues for the seeker of meaning. However, there lies power in one sentence. This one sentence, “The wonder of their singing/…seemed an ideal image for all uncommon couples,” alone in the poem speaks of something greater the concrete happenings of the man and the camel. We are left to wonder what uncommon coupling can be on the speakers mind? Read as the pivotal poem of the entire book, perhaps the couple is the irreconcilable themes of “Error” and “Fire”. Perhaps the uncommon couple is experience and expression. The speaker, “wanted to believe,” that the man and the camel had somehow found a way to sing a song, to tell a tale, that so accurately matched the reality of the moment that it was possible for him to do so as well. But as he thinks this to himself, “the man/ and camel ceased to sing.” By assigning too much power to song and the singers, the speaker has “ruined it,” the song its expression, “forever.”
In the second section of the book, the poems tend to focus slightly more on experience and perhaps a longing for capable expression. Take, for instance, “Mother and Son.” In this poem, a son visits his dying mother. He “believes that she wants to tell him/what he longs to hear,” but she can say nothing. She has died before she could say what the boy needed to hear. She has been silenced. The poem ends with an emphatic pronouncement:
“If the moon could speak, what would it say?
If the moon could speak, it would say nothing.”
The poem seeks to illuminate the difficulty of words to express feelings. When the boy sees his mother is dead it states, “The burial of feelings has begun.” We do not always have words for how we feel, or words to make things better. That is the problem of the moon. It cannot speak, but even if it could, in all its ageless wisdom, it would have nothing to say for the death of a mother who could not say she loved her son. Sometimes, this poem seems to say, there simply are no words.
To be sure, this collection’s themes are fairly eclectic and not merely limited to that which this essay discusses. The themes of experience and expression, however, prevail through much of the work and seem most natural for Strand. Though it is undoubtedly a subject matter ripe for examination, it seems an unnatural one for a United States Poet Laureate. Why, we must ask, does Strand feel he cannot capture life with words? Of course it is an enormous task, but is there no irony in writing a book of poetry about one’s inability to effectively use language? There is no easy answer, but perhaps Strand finds that, like Churchill and democracy, poetry is the worst form of expression except for all the others. Perhaps Strand finds it necessary, after so many years of poetry, to admit he, one of America’s foremost poets, does not have all the answers, does not have a bottomless ability to craft verse to fit the world around him and within him. It can hardly devalue the way we read his work, but rather make it realer to us. For anyone who has put pen to paper has discovered that words are not perfect, words do not follow your orders like soldiers in the field. Strand means to reach out to us, to the poet in each of us, and remind us that poetry is imperfect.
Strand, Mark. Man and Camel. New York: Knopf, 2006
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