Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it. — Mark Doty Gateways Copy Share Image
I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing... — Mark Doty Breathing Copy Share Image
Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading. — Mark Doty Broken Copy Share Image
“Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?” — Mark Doty Poetry Copy Share Image
Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language. — Mark Doty Knowing Copy Share Image
It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language. — Mark Doty Aspect Copy Share Image
Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that… — Mark Doty Business Copy Share Image
All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes. — Mark Doty Constantly Copy Share Image
To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though… — Mark Doty Agree 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… — Mark Doty Flowers Copy Share Image
Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah,… — Mark Doty Animal Copy Share Image
... the attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged… — Mark Doty Accurate 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… — Mark Doty Ambition Copy Share Image
'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in… — Mark Doty Air Copy Share Image
The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just… — Mark Doty Concrete Copy Share Image
This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses,… — Mark Doty Aging Copy Share Image
Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold… — Mark Doty Attention 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 Afternoon 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… — Mark Doty Accomplishment 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… — Mark Doty Affection Copy Share Image
“And something else, of course; there’s always more, deep in art’s pockets, far down in the chiaroscuro on which these foodstuffs rest:… — Mark Doty Art Copy Share Image
“I’d write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself- like a stairway down into a… — Mark Doty Caretaking 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… — Mark Doty Grief 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 Aids 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 Aids 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… — Mark Doty American Copy Share Image
“In the museums we used to visit on family vacations when I was a kid, I used to love those rooms which… — Mark Doty Death 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 Barbershop 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 Being in love Copy Share Image
There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem. — Mark Doty Consent Copy Share Image
Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know. — Mark Doty Depression Copy Share Image
“(I know, lacquer and tumble and glow , burnished and fired and hazed ) it’s because what else Lord to wear? Every… — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
We learn to treasure words that people call us; we learn to live by words that hurt. We cannot toss them aside,… — Mark Doty Dignity Copy Share Image
