Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know. — Mark Doty Depression Copy Share Image
I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing... — Mark Doty Breathing 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
And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath. — Mark Doty Body Copy Share Image
Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language. — Mark Doty 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 Fashion Copy Share Image
“Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?” — Mark Doty Poetry 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 Copy Share Image
Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading. — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes. — Mark Doty Copy Share Image
“under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts, must have wondered at my impulse to touch her, which was like touching myself, the… — Mark Doty Touching Copy Share Image
“Concerning Some Recent Criticism of His Work —Glaze and shimmer, luster and gleam; can’t he think of anything but all that sheen?… — Mark Doty Criticism 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 Aftermath 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
“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
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
To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though… — 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… — Mark Doty Ambition 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
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
“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
“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
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
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
Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what… — Mark Doty Allies 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
“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
“One last mystery: on one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They… — Mark Doty Beauty 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
“Desire I think has less to do with possession than with participation, the will to involve oneself in the body of the… — Mark Doty Desire 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 have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been… — 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
“The state of mind above which my distraction floats like fog is suddenly perfectly clear, though the right word for it is… — Mark Doty Death Copy Share Image
