Doty, Mark
Doty, Mark
What Is the Grass? Walt Whitman in My Life
- Publisher / Date: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020
Effortlessly blending biography, criticism, and memoir, National Book Award–winning poet and best-selling memoirist Mark Doty explores his personal quest for Walt Whitman.
Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, perennially new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty―a poet, a New Yorker, and an American―keeps company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work.
What is it then between us? Whitman asks. In search of an answer, Doty explores spaces―both external and internal―where he finds the poet’s ghost. He meditates on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet’s enduring work: a radical experience of transformation and enlightenment, queer sexuality, and an obsession with death, as well as unabashed love for a great city and for the fresh, rowdy character of American speech. In riveting close readings threaded with personal memoir and illuminated by awe, Doty reveals the power of Whitman’s persistent presence in his life and in the American imagination at large.
How does a voice survive death? What Is the Grass is a conversation across time and space, a study of the astonishment one poet finds in the accomplishment of another, and an attempt to grasp Whitman’s deeply hopeful vision of human possibility.
Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems
- Publisher / Date: Harper, 2008
Professor Mark Doty's Fire to Fire collects work from Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty's subjects—our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives—echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here, one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times.
Dog Years: A Memoir
- Publisher / Date: Harper Collins, 2007
Professor Mark Doty, an award-winning memoirist and poet, explores with compassion and intelligence the complicated, loving territory inhabited by devoted dogs and their loyal humans. In 1994, when the author's longtime lover was dying of AIDS, beloved pet Arden kept the surviving partner afloat. A new adoptee, the rambunctious Beau, in his "sloppy dog way," becomes a part of the tribe and carries some of the burden of grief. Doty says Beau "carried something else for me too, which was my will to live." In a time of devastating pain, as well as in happier times, Doty's two dogs are the "secret heroes of my own vitality." The dog characters in the book are irresistible and the arcs of their lives are delineated with the tenderness and passion of the truly smitten. Arden's quiet nobility and slow decline breaks the heart, while Beau's goofy enthusiasm peaks with youth and mellows in illness. With a marvelous ability to present the pain of mourning with a poet's delicate hand and an irrepressible instinct for joy, Doty delivers a soulful love story which illuminates no less than the big human mysteries: attachment, death, grief, loyalty, happiness. The book nimbly sidesteps sentimentality and lands squarely on a philosophical, inquisitive tone as intellectually evocative as it is emotionally resonant.
Atlantis
- Publisher / Date: Harper Perennial, 1995
In Atlantis, Professor Mark Doty claims the mythical lost island as his own: a fading paradise whose memory he must keep alive at the same time that he is forced to renounce its hold on him. Atlantis recedes just as the lives of those Doty loves continue to be extinguished by the devastation of AIDS. Set in the harbor village of Provincetown, whose charming, cluttered landscape Doty brings to life, the collection chronicles the illness and death of Doty's beloved partner, as well as many others whose worlds have been both ravaged and broadened by this disease. Doty's struggle is to reconcile with, and even to celebrate, the evanescence of our earthly connections—to those we love, to the shifting physical landscape, even to our strongest feelings—and to understand how we can love more at the very moment that we must consent to let go.
My Alexandria
- Publisher / Date: University of Illinois Press, 1993
Professor Mark Doty masterfully tackles themes of death, beauty and discovery in this collection. In "Days of 1981," he recalls the memory of his first gay lover—a sculptor he met in a bar. "Nothing was promised, nothing sustained / or lethal offered. I wish I'd kept the heart. / Even the emblems of our own embarrassment / become acceptable to us, after a while." My Alexandria, Doty's third collection of poetry, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1993.