“And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
It's unsettling, to lose the safety of the familiar, even when what's disrupted is an ordinary routine. When I began this poem,… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
I've been moving a little to the music while I worked ...and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful,… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last,… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t know… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love. In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person.… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing,… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“The state of mind above which my distraction floats like fog is suddenly perfectly clear, though the right word for it is… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“I don’t know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
... the attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged here and… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“And now, a heap of roses beside the sea, white rugosa beside the foaming hem of shore: brave, waxen candles… And we talk as… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of the salt… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
In Judith Barrington's striking collection, Horses and the Human Soul, human emotions come ushered and accompanied by animal companions, especially the horses this speaker… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language. — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?” — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air.… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
