Observations placeholder
Mark Strand - The secret to flow
Identifier
015322
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 – November 29, 2014) was a Canadian-born Jewish American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990.
He was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.
Many of Strand's poems are nostalgic in tone, evoking the bays, fields, boats, and pines of his Prince Edward Island childhood. Strand has been compared to Robert Bly in his use of surrealism, though he attributes the surreal elements in his poems to an admiration of the works of Max Ernst, Giorgio de
A description of the experience
Source Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow, the secret to happiness
Mark Strand 1996
It’s like opening a door that’s floating in the middle of nowhere and all you have to do is go and turn the handle and open it and let yourself sink into it. You can’t particularly force yourself through it. You just have to float. If there’s any gravitational pull, it’s from the outside world trying to keep you back from the door