Mark Strand’s “Webern Variations”

Mark Strand was one of America’s most celebrated poets, a former US poet laureate and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He died November 29 at age 80, just a few months after the publication of his Collected Poems.

A little over a decade ago, Strand was approached by the Brentano Quartet to write poetry to be incorporated into a program of quartets by the early modernist composer Anton Webern. (They had previously collaborated on a Haydn program.) It was challenging, and Strand found himself uncertain whether the lines he was writing fit with Webern’s music. “What I finally decided was just to trust my instincts and write a poem in fourteen sections, each section fitting between a movement of the three quartets. I didn’t want the development of the poem to be linear, I wanted real variations — that is, each of the sections belongs, but each is different.” The poem was published in the one-off magazine The Final Edition in 2004.

“It was written in anticipation of fall,” Strand said of the work. “I’m always anticipating fall. I’m in the autumn of my life,” he remarked, half joking.

Poet and radio producer Pejk Malinovski set an excerpt of Strand’s poem “The Webern Variations” to selections from the quartets for the radio program The Next Big Thing in 2004.