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Air Quote by Mark Doty

“'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena…” quote by Mark Doty — Download Open image

“'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa's poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. Horse Dance Underwater is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut.”

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More by Mark Doty

One ambition of poetry, certainly, is to create a reverberant silence in its wake, one that means more or differently than the silence that…

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... the attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged here and…

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“And now, a heap of roses beside the sea, white rugosa beside the foaming hem of shore: brave, waxen candles… And we talk as…

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“Doesn’t rain make a memory more intimate?”

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“I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of the salt…

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“And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding…

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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…

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Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.

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We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

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“Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?”

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Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or…

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It's unsettling, to lose the safety of the familiar, even when what's disrupted is an ordinary routine. When I began this poem, I was…

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Explore all 59 Mark Doty quotes

More Air quotes

I will be a tireless advocate for our District's defense priorities including Sheppard Air Force Base, Pantex, Bell Helicopter, universities conducting important research, and…

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I have lifted my plane . . . for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the Earth…

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If U.S. air, naval, missile, and ground forces were not in and around Korea, and if we were not treaty-bound to fight alongside South…

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The cooler days have brought a wistful mood upon him. The smell of coalsmoke in the air at night. Old times, dead years. For…

Cormac McCarthy

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It's easy to say, let's go in and get the bad guys. But you have a divided country of Sunnis and Shias. The United…

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I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.

Nadine Gordimer

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It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it…

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Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]?... I…

Lawrence Summers

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After a few mouthfuls of moon-flavored air, even the stubbornly drowsy can find themselves wide-eyed.. All the normal noises of life were gone, leaving…

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There was a little nook on Air Force Two that contained the vice presidential seal, and I would sort of wedge myself in there…

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Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another's ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense…

Dan Beachy-Quick

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[A]s you partake of the world's bill of fare, that's darned good advice to follow. Do a lot of spitting out the hot air.…

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