“But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough… — 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 why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John of the Divine,… — 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
