SOURCE: Maio, Samuel. “The Self-Effacing Mode.” In Creating Another Self: Voice in Modern American Personal Poetry, pp. 163-224. Kirksville, Mo.: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Maio explores Strand's handling of issues of poetic voice and tone involving absence and self-negation in individual poems from Sleeping with One Eye Open, Reasons for Moving, and Darker.

In his short collection of idiosyncratic musings in verse form, The Sargeantville Notebook (1973), Strand included the following curious statement:

The ultimate self-effacement is not the pretense of the minimal, but the jocular considerations of the maximal in the manner of Wallace Stevens. 

Strand admittedly has long admired Stevens's work, and read Stevens even before beginning to write his own poetry. (He once remarked to Wayne Dodd: “I discovered I wasn't destined to be a very good painter, so I became a poet. Now it didn't happen suddenly. I did read a...