Mark Strand

STRAND:

When I write my own poems, I read them hundreds of times to myself. But when I read other people’s poems, I will read them dozens of times, sometimes more than dozens of times. I don’t know why this should seem strange. The average churchgoing person who lives in the Bible Belt will have read the same passages in the Bible hundreds of times, and they will have revealed to him more each time.

SHAWN:

An actor in a play goes through a similar process, really, and acting could in a sense be seen as a form of reading, I suppose. The actor goes over the text hundreds of times, seeing more and more implications and different possible meanings inside each individual line, and at the same time seeing through the various clichés of interpretation with which he has at first mistakenly overlaid each line.

- Mark Strand, Paris Review