“The state of mind above which my distraction floats like fog is suddenly perfectly clear, though the right word for it is less immediately available. Grief is too sharp and immediate; maybe it’s the high pitch of the vowel sound,… — 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
