The American Poet Laureate Mark Strand is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and confessed that teaching creative writing requires a lot of lying. "You have to make a student believe that their work is worthwhile which sometimes isn't easy. You cannot tell anybody that they lack talent."

Strand's Dark Harbour was recently translated into Bulgarian and was presented to a large audience last Wednesday at the American Centre in Sofia.

He currently teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. The Continuous Life, Selected Poems, The Story of Our Lives and Reasons for Moving are some of the American poet's books. He has also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation, several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He is the author of 10 books of poems, the most recent of which are Blizzard of One, Chicken Shadow, and Moon and More. He has received many honours and grants for his poems, including the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and a Mac Arthur Fellowship. In 1990 he was chosen as Poet Laureate of the U.S.

He considers his poetry to be situated on a volatile fault line between what we accept as reality and what is just beyond our grasp. Indebted to Wallace Stevens, Strand encloses the fluid course of time and action in a discursive framework that disturbingly provides as many questions as answers. "I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful. I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me. I like elaboration, but I am often taken by simplicity. Cadences move me, but flatness can also seduce. Sense, so long as it's not too familiar, is a pleasure, but so is nonsense when shrewdly exploited," he said.

In Strand's earlier books, most notably Dark Harbor, there is an atmosphere of changing light and weather that reflects changing perceptions and emotions. Figures seem to exist in a perpetual twilight, waiting for the fullness of night. In one poem he writes: "I am writing from a place you have never been, where the trains don't run, and planes don't land, a place to the west."

In 1973 Strand published The Story of Our Lives, more explicitly autobiographical than anything he had written before. It includes a striking elegy for the poet's father. "The death of my father made me sit down and write. Mourning and grieving were central for me then. Life is a dark business. It is funny, it is like a riot."

One of the sections of Blizzard of One consists of a series of poems entitled Five Dogs. It is a very strong and touching series of poems written from the viewpoints of five dogs grieving for something they seem to have lost. "The first dog, Spot, is me," said Strand. "They're all poets. A spot is a mark, a mark is a spot. I've always tried to be both humourous and serious at the same time. You can get away with a lot more if a dog is speaking in the poem. If the dog is talking, the dog can say anything, things that a human being might be embarrassed to say. When creating Rex, I was thinking of myself, but that's really too self-aggrandizing," said Strand.

He explained that if it were not for the Bulgarians in Chicago he would never have come to Bulgaria. He is currently working on a book that is half memoir and half fiction. "I am the narrator until my dead father takes over the talk and writes me letters," he said.

Plato, Samuel Becket and Kafka are some of Strand's influences. He finds comparisons between his poems and how they influenced him. "That is an invitation to another world. That is why beginnings of poems are important because they take you from this world and put you into the world of the poem and then poems let you back into the world more gently then they take you out of it."