Mark Doty

Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.     In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center: there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure.   Mark Doty (1996). “Heaven's Coast: A Memoir”, Harpercollins  

Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.  Mark Doty (2009). “Dog Years: A Memoir”, p.8, Harper Collins   

We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.  Mark Doty (2002). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy”, p.7, Beacon Press    

Here and gone. That’s what it is to be human, I think—to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention.     Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)    

Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know. 

Mark Doty    

There are those fortunate hours when the world consents to be made into a poem. 

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 preceded the poem.     Mark Doty         "The lessons of objects: an interview with Mark Doty". Interview with Andrew David King, www.kenyonreview.org. December 12, 2012.    

The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone. Mark Doty   

Even sad stories are company. And perhaps that's why you might read such a chronicle, to look into a companionable darkness that isn't yours. Mark Doty 

Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what matters to you. The world will break your heart. So I think we’d better look at what grief might offer us. It’s like what Rilke says about self-doubt: it is not going to go away, and therefore you need to think about how it might become your ally. Mark Doty    

The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing what we have lost. 

Mark Doty    

To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation, a mutual agreement though the human being holds most of the cards.     Mark Doty (2009). “Dog Years: A Memoir”, p.1, Harper Collins   

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    

Desire can make anything into a god. Mark Doty (2012). “Paragon Park: Turtle Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, Early Poems”, p.111, David R. Godine Publisher  

This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets; all that flesh hungering, coming together, separating, continuing, accumulating, relinquishing, aging and breaking down. Bodies as tulips bent to the demands of light, colored into blossom, spent.    Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)  

We love disasters that have nothing to do with us    Mark Doty (1993). “My Alexandria: Poems”, p.1, University of Illinois Press        

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 grieving for the loss of my old barbershop in Manhattan, and wondering at the strangeness of my new one. I didn't have any idea the poem would break into the underworld, opening a deeper subject: the continuing force of the old griefs routine helps to mediate, and my strange, sheer wonder at my own survival. Where's home now? In the contingent present, in which anything can disappear, and where we're sometimes granted some form of grace.     Mark Doty  

Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me     Mark Doty (2012). “Paragon Park: Turtle Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, Early Poems”, p.100, David R. Godine Publisher   

What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?    Mark Doty, “Visitation”      

Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.     Mark Doty    

All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes.        Mark Doty (2009). “Heaven's Coast: A Memoir”, p.4, Harper Collins    

We learn to treasure words that people call us;     we learn to live by words that hurt. We cannot toss     them aside, so in time they become our dignity.     Mark Doty   

Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or heroism, or altruistic acts, or work in the cause of social change? What about wealth or accomplishment? And yet something about it rings true, finally—that what we want is to be brought into relationship, to be inside, within. Perhaps it’s true that nothing matters more to us than that.        Mark Doty (2002). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy”, p.6, Beacon Press   

 ...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.     Mark Doty    

What is healing, but a shift in perspectives?     Mark Doty