As his reputation has grown, however, into that oxymoronic epithet “famous poet,” Strand has engaged that self, satirized it, and refashioned it as a subject for his poems. If Richard Howard is right when he says that “the poems . . . narrate the moment when Strand makes Rimbaud’s discovery, that je est un autre, that the self is someone else, even something else”—then in the early poems the Strand persona rejects itself.
And in the later poems the Strand persona mocks the persona of Mark Strand.
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