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Articles by Mark Doty
Experimentation in motion: CoLab ushers student choreography center stage in ‘CoLabaret’
The show opened with “mimesis,” choreographed by Marisol Ramirez-Buckles, BC ’26. Set to music by Angelina Gargano, BC ’26, the piece featured dancers dressed in muted yet colorful costumes, shifting between dreamy, meditative movements and tense moments of conflict—reminiscent of a scene in nature. Emphasized by lighting design and Gargano’s music, the choreography incorporated animal motifs, such as claws and swanlike arms, that evoked the progression from day to night.
August
Find and share the perfect poems. Opened between void and recognition. The not vivid. Color empty, casual. Unlike memory, bliss in dark- ness, an announcement. Movement outlined not contained —a small feeling, I can’t, like happiness outlived. A month. The trim clock. The same indignity: elevator, groceries, an armload of August wildflowers. My friend, nowhere. Duration. To this collapsing hall, this charging late gold in summer, my color. —Eyes close, the answer between everything. Peony. Chamomile. Marigold.
Poetry Please, Sean Hewitt
Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, Now the Rose (From The Princess) By Alfred Lord Tennyson From: Alfred Lord Tennyson – Selected Poems Published by Penguin Classics Mosaic of the Emperor’s Dream By Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin From Collected Poems - Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Published by Wake Forest University Press be/cause By Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe From Auguries of a Minor God Published by Faber & Faber Tiara By Mark Doty From Bethlehem in Broad Daylight: Poems Published by David R.
Six Books That Will Jolt Your Senses Awake
Our minds these days are so easily distracted that noticing what’s right in front of us can be hard. Yes, the sun might be glancing off the snowdrifts, and the birds may be chirping away with blithe exuberance. But stress, grief, and anxiety—or, alternatively, excitement for the future—can make us tune out the images, fragrances, and noises at the edge of our consciousness. But being attentive to the world is both possible and crucial.
Sunday Poem - 3 Quarks Daily
Messiah (Christmas Portions) prepares to perform Messiah, pouring, in their best blacks and whites, onto the raked stage. Not steep, really, Who'd have thought they'd be so good?
One Poem by Victoria Chang
Spring Planting Today I plant bougainvillea and hyacinth. Tomorrow, crocus and candied pansies. I am gardening, but my mind is tilling. The crows enter my yard. They remind me of ink slabs Chinese calligraphers used—not until mixed with water did their black ink breathe and broth. Each morning, goat hairbrush in hand, they sat near willows, against a dropping moon, drew all they knew of mist, of hillocks, of lightning behind mulberries.
Spring 1999
The Spring 1999 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Mark Doty. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles.
Homo Will Not Inherit
Downtown anywhere and between the roil of bathhouse steam—up there the linens of joy and shame must be laundered again and again, all night—downtown anywhere and between the column of feathering steam unknotting itself thirty feet above the avenue’s shimmered azaleas of gasoline, between the steam and the ruin of the Cinema Paree (marquee advertising its own milky vacancy, broken showcases sealed, ticketbooth a hostage wrapped in tape and black plastic, captive in this zone of blackfronted...
Snail-Picking by Onyedikachi Chinedu - Poems | Academy of American Poets
Onyedikachi Chinedu is a queer Nigerian poet. sign up for poem-a-day Receive a new poem in your inbox daily Email Address About This Poem “Poems come quietly to me. When they do, it requires a lot of rewriting to find clarity, even after months of letting the poem ‘sit’ on the page. This one is about a memory that is dear to me. I think it was from snail-picking that I got money to buy by Chinua Achebe and by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at a young age, in a small, rural town in Benin, Nigeria.
Winter 2022-23
Duplex (I Will Tell You) POEM CHAMBER MUSIC, SATURDAY MORNING, THE TRURO PUBLIC LIBRARY [It is like a long tunnel] Polar Sight Book of Dolls 47 Book of Dolls 50 Between Epithalamion Cornfield with Doves First House Pentimento Pieta The Underneathedness Cut Self-Portrait with IUD Failure THE HOLIDAYS Love letter to the jar of Q-Tips in my bathroom in eighth grade Listening to a Podcast about Death, I Walk into a Coffee Shop LEFTOVERS Speechless A Man I Didn’t Sleep with Asked What Word Defined...
Winter 2004-05
The Winter 2004-2005 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Joy Harjo. Ploughshares, a journal of new writing, is guest-edited serially by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles. Guest-edited by Joy Harjo, the Winter 2004-2005 issue of Ploughshares contains poems and stories from notable authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Martin Espada, and Donald Hall.
Charlie Howard’s Descent
Between the bridge and the river he falls through a huge portion of night; it is not as if falling is something new. Over and over he slipped into the gulf between what he knew and how he was known. What others wanted opened like an abyss: the laughing stock-clerks at the grocery, women at the luncheonette amused by his gestures. What could he do, live with one hand tied behind his back?
Shelter by Ada Limón (Audiobook)
Audiobook1 hour Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars 4.5/5 () About this audiobook So many of us have a tree we treasure in our lives or a preferred stretch of woods to retreat to, especially during these long and confining pandemic years.
WHAT IS THE GRASS by Mark Doty Read by Jonathan Yen
A combination of deep critical analysis and deeply personal meditation, this audiobook presents an image of Walt Whitman as icon, man, poet, and queer activist. It is also, to a large extent, an autobiography of the highly acclaimed contemporary poet Mark Doty, who explores his life in terms of Whitman's life and poetry. Narrator Jonathan Yen is unobtrusive, letting the text carry the considerable emotional weight of two lives and some of the greatest--and most revolutionary--of American poetry.
Scaling Mount Whitman
He contained multitudes: the poet Walt Whitman, photographed by Napoleon Sarony in 1879. Through years of research and introspection, an author asks, How did Walt Whitman write the poetry that we remember him by? February 3, 2021 Reading Time: 4 minutes Just last year, I’m amazed to say, Norton published a new book of mine, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life.
Later
A stunning portrait of community, identity, and sexuality by the critically acclaimed author of The Narrow Door. When Paul Lisicky arrived in Provincetown in the early 1990s, he was leaving behind a history of family trauma to live in a place outside of time, known for its values of inclusion, acceptance, and art. In this idyllic haven, Lisicky searches for love and connection and comes into his own as he finds a sense of belonging.
"What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman In My Life" By Mark Doty
Rhett Miller is the frontman for rock band Old 97′s, a solo singer-songwriter, an essayist and a podcaster. And he’s also a father of two, which indirectly led to his newest gig of picture-book writer - his book is “No More Poems! A Book in Verse That Just Gets Worse.” He started writing poems to share with his kids on the phone while he was on tour so he could talk with them longer.
A Second Plague: Poet Mark Doty on the Echoes of AIDS in the COVID Era
I’m living in the molten center of a crisis, in an apartment in Chelsea, on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. Until just a couple of weeks ago, when new deaths sharply declined, New York City was the shellshocked epicenter of America’s nightmarish pandemic. It’s odd to dwell in the heart of a catastrophe and feel at a distance from it too.
School of the Arts
The spring the Methodist church lost its steeple—no pointy tip but a kind of cupola, octagonal, with eight unglazed arches, and on its top a carved scroll finial signaling the tip of the builders’ skyways ambitions—a huge crane plucked the tower like an ornament from a cake, and lowered it to the grass lightly. A minor revelation, after looking up at it all these years; who expects to get that close to what points to heaven?
David Wheatley - Turning the Leaves
Academic critics of Dryden or Pope were not in the habit, the last time I checked, of interspersing their monographs with reminiscences of sex clubs in Manhattan. An affectionate excursus on that subject in Mark Doty’s What is the Grass announces that this is no ordinary piece of literary criticism. ‘And your very flesh shall be a great poem,’ wrote Doty’s subject, Walt Whitman, who, one suspects, wouldn’t have minded a bit.
Poet Mark Doty's Sexual Experience With Walt Whitman's Ghost
Excerpted from What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. Copyright (c) 2020 by Mark Doty. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. For a long time I lived at least a part of each year in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, one of those places at the end of a road, or the tip of a promontory, that seem not quite attached to the rest of the country.
Diva Atonement Tour #1
Last night I decided again to be a maniac, risking brain fever, like my father, whose temperature once rose to 108: impressive. In our house, only the sick were great.
The Worlds We Find Ourselves In: Mark Doty and Jane Hirshfield in Conversation
Jane Hirshfield (photo by Curt Richter) and Mark Doty (photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths). In late February, 2020, friends Mark Doty and Jane Hirshfield, both poets with new books then on the verge of publication—Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, and Hirshfield’s Ledger: Poems—began exchanging emails exploring each other’s work and the relevance of poetry in today’s chaotic and frightening times.
Review | In ‘What Is the Grass,’ Mark Doty looks at Walt Whitman through an autobiographical lens
Walt Whitman was as far from “social distancing” as you can get. As a young man, he worked a variety of public jobs as schoolteacher, journalist, bookseller, carpenter and house builder; his long, intense and breathless poems often take readers through the crowded New York streets, where he observed his fellow citizens living and working; and when the Civil War erupted, he volunteered as a nurse in Washington, D.C., hospitals where horribly wounded soldiers went to recover and die.
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Revising
Walt Whitman in 1891. Photo: Samuel Murray. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. There are poets who find their strength in brevity, who use as few words as possible, arranged in the minimum number of lines, to evoke sense perception, emotion, and idea. Walt Whitman, it goes without saying, is not one of those. He is most comfortable on a broader scale.
The Question of Homoeroticism in Whitman's Poetry
“Unspeakable”—unspeakability? —comes in three varieties. First, that which cannot be said because one does not know it, and therefore cannot say it. Second, that which cannot be spoken because it is culturally impermissible to do so. And third, that which cannot be named because it is impossible, since the language provides no terms, no words to enable articulation.
Review: An American poet analyzes a forefather in 'What Is the Grass'
When my sons were younger, I would take them to the Brooklyn Museum to marvel at their favorite pieces: mummified cats, revered as sacred by Late Period pharaohs. These exact specimens had once caught the attention of Walt Whitman in the mid-19th century, when they were featured in a private collection owned by Dr. Henry Abbott, a British physician and amateur Egyptologist. The collection was open to viewing in a gallery on lower Broadway in Manhattan; Whitman was often the sole visitor there.
Apparition
Detail from George C. Cox, Walt Whitman. 1887. Library of Congress Walt Whitman spent his final years in a two-story, wood-frame house on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, less than half a mile’s walk from the Delaware River, though in those days, after his debilitating stroke, he’d have been pushed there in his wheelchair by an attendant.
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
Mark Doty’s prose has been hailed as “tempered and tough, sorrowing and serene” (The New York Times Book Review) and “achingly beautiful” (The Boston Globe). In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon he offers a stunning exploration of our attachment to ordinary things-how we invest objects with human store, and why.
Girl in a Library
. . . But my mind, gone out in tenderness, Shrinks from its object . . . —Randall Jarrell I want to find my way back to her, to help her, to grab her hand, pull her up from the wooden floor of the stacks where she’s reading accounts of the hatchet murders of Lizzie Borden’s harsh parents as if she could learn something about life if she knew all the cuts and slashes; her essay on Wordsworth or Keats only a knot in her belly, a faint pressure at her temples.
“In Time of Plague” by John McIntyre
In the summer of 1982, Tim Dlugos wrote a four-line poem entitled “My Death.” The summer prior, reports of a mysterious gay cancer spreading among gay men had begun appearing in major newspapers.
Poetry Please, Richard Scott
Roger McGough is joined by the poet Richard Scott, who shares a selection of his favourite poems from amongst listeners' requests. Show more Roger McGough is joined by Richard Scott (whose debut poetry collection Soho was shortlisted for the 2018 TS Eliot Prize), who shares a selection of his favourite poems from the Poetry Please archive of listeners' requests. His choices include poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Jane Yeh, Mary Ruefle, Denise Riley, Daljit Nagra and Mark Doty.
The Embrace
Mark Doty was born on August 10, 1953. He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Deep Lane (W. W. Norton, 2015); A Swarm, A Flock, A Host: A Compendium of Creatures (Prestel, 2013); Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008), which received the National Book Award; School of the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005); Source (HarperCollins, 2002); and Sweet Machine (HarperCollins, 1998).
Jill Abram presents Stablemates: Mark Doty, Andrew McMillan and Fiona Benson
We are delighted to present the first in a new series of the renowned Stablemates poetry series, with three poets from one press, curated by Jill Abram in partnership with Waterstones. This first event will feature readings from renowned poets Fiona Benson, Mark Doty and Andrew McMillan, each published by Jonathan Cape. Fiona Benson’s pamphlet was the first in the Faber New Poets series.
Expanding the Time We Have With Patients Through Poetry
At the Ninth Annual Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Symposium, convened in May 2018 at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois, physician-poet Rafael Campo, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, was joined in conversation by National Book award–winning poet Mark Doty, distinguished professor of English at Rutgers University.
Teaching Physicians Not to Be Afraid of Poetry
At the Ninth Annual Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Symposium, convened in May 2018 at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois, physician-poet Rafael Campo, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, was joined in conversation by National Book Award–winning poet Mark Doty, distinguished professor of English at Rutgers University. An excerpted transcript of the first half of their dialogue follows—condensed and edited for clarity and concision.
Spent
Late August morning I go out to cut spent and faded hydrangeas—washed greens, russets, troubled little auras of sky as if these were the very silks of Versailles, mottled by rain and ruin then half-restored, after all this time… When I come back with my handful I realize I’ve accidentally locked the door, and can’t get back into the house. The dining room window’s easiest; crawl through beauty bush and spirea, push aside some errant maples, take down the wood-framed screen, hoist myself up.
A Display of Mackerel
They lie in parallel rows, on ice, head to tail, each a foot of luminosity barred with black bands, which divide the scales’ radiant sections like seams of lead in a Tiffany window. Iridescent, watery prismatics: think abalone, the wildly rainbowed mirror of a soapbubble sphere, think sun on gasoline. Splendor, and splendor, and not a one in any way distinguished from the other —nothing about them of individuality.
Wisława Szymborska
Well-known in her native Poland, Wisława Szymborska received international recognition when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.
Ararat by Mark Doty
Wrapped in gold foil, in the search and shouting of Easter Sunday, it was the ball of the princess, it was Pharoah’s body sleeping in its golden case. At the foot of the picket fence, in grass lank with the morning rain, it was a Sunday school prize, silver for second place, gold for the triumphant little dome of Ararat, and my sister took me by the hand and led me out onto the wide, wet lawn and showed me to bend into the thick nests of grass, into the darkest green.
The Summons
Photo by Darren Gantt via Flickr. Suppose you made a taxonomy of kisses in their vast variety: the kiss on the cheek of a child heading out for the day, the kiss on the forehead you give a friend departing after she’s unburdened herself in a long conversation, the complex vocabulary of kisses between the long-coupled, who signal through them a host of things. But those aren’t the kisses you really want to study.
Poem by Mark Doty
When I heard he had entered the harbor, and circled the wharf for days, I expected the worst: shallow water, confusion, some accident to bring the young humpback to grief. Don't they depend on a compass lodged in the salt-flooded folds of the brain, some delicate musical mechanism to navigate their true course? How many ways, in our century's late iron hours, might we have led him to disaster?
bookSCREAM! September 7th, 2017 Newsletter
AUDIOBOOKS THE DUKE AND I $3.95was $27.99 BY JULIA QUINN Simon Basset has hatched a plan to keep himself free from the town's marriage-minded society mothers. He pretends to be engaged to the lovely Daphne Bridgerton.
Brian Age Seven by Mark Doty | Poetry Foundation
Grateful for their tour
of the pharmacy,
the first-grade class
has drawn these pictures,
each self-portrait taped
to the window-glass,
faces wide to the street,
round and available,
with parallel lines for hair. I like this one best: Brian,
whose attenuated name
fills a quarter of the frame,
stretched beside impossible
legs descending from the ball
of his torso, two long arms
springing from that same
central sphere. He breathes here,
on his page.
A Better Life
Find and share the perfect poems. It’s silly to think fourteen years ago I turned thirty. How I made it that far I’ll never know. In this city of hills, if there was a hill I was over it. Then. (In queer years, years are more than.) Soon it will be fifteen since the day I turned thirty. It’s so remote. I didn’t think I’d make it to fourteen years ago. Fear lives in the chest like results. You say my gray, it makes me look extinguished; you make me cringe.
20 Years of L.G.B.T.Q. Lit: A Timeline
Once you have read James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and Larry Kramer’s “Faggots,” both classic gay novels, here are 25 recent works that have shaped the L.G.B.T.Q. literary genre over the last two decades. At the time this series of monologues, performed as a one-woman show by the author, was released, they were viewed as revolutionary for their frank and sometimes disturbing discussion of topics like childbirth, rape and lesbianism.
Academy of American Poets
interrogates whoever walks this shadow-lane, this hour not reserved for you: who are you to enter it? Orion’s head over heels above the road, jewel-belt flinting starlight to fuel two eyes looking down from the air: until she wings her noiseless outline between our rooftop and the stars, over this door and all the doors wasps in the palace they’ve hollowed under the hill. Mole resting his face against his splayed hands. while the moon if there is one scatters islands on a field of ink.
The Best Books on The Dutch Masters
recommended by Adam Eaker Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture by Adam Eaker, An Van Camp, Bert Watteeuw, Stijn Alsteens & Xavier F Salomon The past may be a foreign country, but the world portrayed in the art of the Dutch Masters is not so very far from our own, says Adam Eaker of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For a society that struggles with materialism and consumption, there are a lot of lessons to be learnt from the 17th century Golden Age.
Five Books: Adam Eaker recommends the best books on the Dutch Masters
Adam Eaker is Assistant Curator in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He is a specialist in Northern European painting of the 16th through the 18th century and was previously a visiting scholar at the Rubenianum Research Institute for Flemish Art in Antwerp. Before joining the staff of The Met, he served as an Anne L.
Arts funding is not expendable
The budget outline the President has presented to Congress is strong on walls and weapons, low on diplomacy, and a downright disaster for the arts. It would reduce to zero the already minimal amount the federal government spends annually on the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Arts, humanities?
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