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Photo credits: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images as posted on https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mark-doty
"Since the publication of his first volume of verse, Turtle, Swan, in 1987, Mark Doty has been recognized as one of the most accomplished poets in America. Hailed for his elegant, intelligent verse, Doty has often been compared to James Merrill, Walt Whitman and C.P. Cavafy. His syntactically complex and aesthetically profound free verse poems, odes to urban gay life, and quietly brutal elegies to his lover, Wally Roberts, have been hailed as some of the most original and arresting poetry written today."
Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mark-doty
Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mark-doty
Live Readings
Live Readings
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Poems
Poems
Heaven for Helen
Helen says heaven, for her,would be complete immersionin physical process,without self-consciousness—
to be the respiration of the grass,or ionized agitationjust above the break of a wave,traffic in a sunflower's thousand golden rooms.
Images of exchange,and of untrammeled nature.But if we're to become part of it all,won't our paradise also involve
participation in being, say,diesel fuel, the impatience of truckson August pavement,weird glow of service areas
along the interstate at night?We'll be shiny pink egg cartons,and the thick treads of burst tiresalong the highways in Pennsylvania:
a hell we've made to accompanythe given: we will joinour tiresome productions,things that want to be useless forever.
But that's me talking. Helen would take the greatest pleasurein being a scrap of paper,if that's what there were to experience.
Perhaps that's why she's a painter,finally: to practice disappearinginto her scrupulous attention,an exacting rehearsal for the larger
world of things it won't be easy to love.Helen I think will master it, though I may not.She has practiced a long time learning to seeI have devoted myself to affirmation,
when I should have kept my eyes on the ground.
-from School of the Arts (2006)
Helen says heaven, for her,would be complete immersionin physical process,without self-consciousness—
to be the respiration of the grass,or ionized agitationjust above the break of a wave,traffic in a sunflower's thousand golden rooms.
Images of exchange,and of untrammeled nature.But if we're to become part of it all,won't our paradise also involve
participation in being, say,diesel fuel, the impatience of truckson August pavement,weird glow of service areas
along the interstate at night?We'll be shiny pink egg cartons,and the thick treads of burst tiresalong the highways in Pennsylvania:
a hell we've made to accompanythe given: we will joinour tiresome productions,things that want to be useless forever.
But that's me talking. Helen would take the greatest pleasurein being a scrap of paper,if that's what there were to experience.
Perhaps that's why she's a painter,finally: to practice disappearinginto her scrupulous attention,an exacting rehearsal for the larger
world of things it won't be easy to love.Helen I think will master it, though I may not.She has practiced a long time learning to seeI have devoted myself to affirmation,
when I should have kept my eyes on the ground.
-from School of the Arts (2006)
Brian Age Seven
Grateful for their tourof the pharmacy,the first-grade classhas drawn these pictures,each self-portrait tapedto the window-glass,faces wide to the street,round and available,with parallel lines for hair.
I like this one best: Brian,whose attenuated namefills a quarter of the frame,stretched beside impossiblelegs descending from the ballof his torso, two long armsspringing from that samecentral sphere. He breathes here,
on his page. It isn’t craftthat makes this figure come alive;Brian draws just balls and lines,in wobbly crayon strokes.Why do some marksseem to thrill with life,possess a portionof the nervous energyin their maker’s hand?
That big curve of a smilereaches nearly to the rimof his face; he holdsa towering ice cream,brown spheres teeteringon their cone,a soda fountain gifthalf the length of him—as if it were the flag
of his own country held highby the unadorned black lineof his arm. Such naked supportfor so much delight! Artless boy,he’s found a system of beauty:he shows us pleasureand what pleasure resists.The ice cream is delicious.He’s frail beside his relentless standard.
-from Fire to Fire (2009)
Grateful for their tourof the pharmacy,the first-grade classhas drawn these pictures,each self-portrait tapedto the window-glass,faces wide to the street,round and available,with parallel lines for hair.
I like this one best: Brian,whose attenuated namefills a quarter of the frame,stretched beside impossiblelegs descending from the ballof his torso, two long armsspringing from that samecentral sphere. He breathes here,
on his page. It isn’t craftthat makes this figure come alive;Brian draws just balls and lines,in wobbly crayon strokes.Why do some marksseem to thrill with life,possess a portionof the nervous energyin their maker’s hand?
That big curve of a smilereaches nearly to the rimof his face; he holdsa towering ice cream,brown spheres teeteringon their cone,a soda fountain gifthalf the length of him—as if it were the flag
of his own country held highby the unadorned black lineof his arm. Such naked supportfor so much delight! Artless boy,he’s found a system of beauty:he shows us pleasureand what pleasure resists.The ice cream is delicious.He’s frail beside his relentless standard.
-from Fire to Fire (2009)
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