At the age of 75, poet and now Ivy League Professor Mark Strand still manages to travel for readings across the country and muster through unexpected questions from fans and critics.

However, after 50 years of writing and teaching at around 16 institutions in the country, he candidly said he is exhausted.

“I’d rather just sit on a chair and read — writing is work,” said the professor of English at Columbia University, who is taking a sabbatical this academic year to relax.

Fortunately for his admirers, there are still readings to be read and questions to be answered. At 7 p.m. today, Strand, as an Ida Beam Visiting Professor, will give a free reading in Van Allen Hall Lecture Room 2. At 11 a.m. Friday, he will participate in a free question-and-answer session in the Frank Conroy Reading Room of the Dey House.

Strand, who has written more than 11 books of poetry, children’s fiction, and other countless types of media, will read an unordered list of poems from old to new, emphasizing that he no longer plans ahead as to what he reads. His latest book, New Selected Poems, was released in 2007.

For him, today’s reading will mark the end of a many-year absence from Iowa. His attitude on writing, like any veteran scribe, has changed because of the hands of time.

“I find it difficult to get what I want at first,” he said. “I wish I could write it and never touch it again.”

Between 1980 and 1985, he did just that. While on leave from poetry, he wrote three children’s books, two art books, and a bounty of magazine and newspaper articles.

Writers’ Workshop poetry Professor James Galvin agrees that every writer needs to take a break at some point.

“Knowing when to stop is important,” he said, and a lack of conflict is usually a good sign.

Strand’s incalculable accolades include a Pulitzer Prize for his collection of poems A Blizzard of One, published in 1999, and an appointment as the U.S. poet laureate from 1990 to 1991 by the Library of Congress. He received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1959 to study at the University of Florence, Italy, and later received an M.A. in English at the UI. He taught in the Writers’ Workshop for three years, leaving in 1965 to be a Fulbright Lecturer at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Strand’s poetry has always been considered dark. His poetic voice has a preoccupation with anxiety and an intense concern with self and identity. In his recent works, though, his image of death is more joyous — he clings on to past themes of insecurity but has a new lack of self-consciousness and a hint of parody.

“He has always written in the same gloom, but he’s become more comfortable and even joyful,” Galvin said. “You can read a poem from him and not even know it.”

Strand says he doesn’t pick his subjects — rather, they come naturally. He finds his subjects amusing and essential for his expression, saying that life is actually more restrictive than death.

“Because we haven’t experienced death, we can imagine it to be anything,” he said.