Mark Doty Quotes

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Animals Grief Heart

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

Grief, Heart, Being In Love

Mark Doty (1996). “Heaven's Coast: A Memoir”, Harpercollins

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Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.

Mark Doty

Thinking, World, Gateways

Mark Doty (2009). “Dog Years: A Memoir”, p.8, Harper Collins

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

Mark Doty

Expression, Investigation, Poetry Is

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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

Grief, Heart, Thinking

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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

Thinking, Names, Ties

Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)

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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

Dog, Agreement, Long

Mark Doty (2009). “Dog Years: A Memoir”, p.1, Harper Collins

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

Mark Doty

World, Hours, Made

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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

Distance, Reality, Would Be

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We long to connect; we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.

Mark Doty

Long, Individuality, Disappear

Mark Doty (2002). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy”, p.7, Beacon Press

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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

Ambition, Mean, Silence

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

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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

Grief, Heart, Knowing

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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

Darkness, Looks, Stories

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We love disasters that have nothing to do with us

Mark Doty

Disaster

Mark Doty (1993). “My Alexandria: Poems”, p.1, University of Illinois Press

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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

Kissing, Gone, Ease

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Desire can make anything into a god.

Mark Doty

Desire

Mark Doty (2012). “Paragon Park: Turtle Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, Early Poems”, p.111, David R. Godine Publisher

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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

Moving, Light, House

Mark Doty (2001). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon”, Beacon Press (MA)

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Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce individuality of passion with the dulling universal certainty of platitude.

Mark Doty

Inspirational, Pain, Passion

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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 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

Grief, Home, Loss

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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

Animal, Eggs, Two

Mark Doty (2012). “Paragon Park: Turtle Swan, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, Early Poems”, p.100, David R. Godine Publisher

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I've been moving a little to the music while I worked ...and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I've been holding myself...Mostly I've been moving cautiously, numbly, steeled because I know, at any moment, I may be ambushed by overwhelming grief. You never know when it's coming, the word or gesture or bit of memory that dissolved you entirely...It happens every day at first, then not for a day or two, then there's a week when grief washes in every morning, every afternoon.

Mark Doty

Morning, Memories, Moving

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What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?

Mark Doty

Thinking, Joy

Mark Doty, “Visitation”

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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

Hurt, People, Toss

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

Mark Doty

Reading, Broken, Paradise

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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 there, then still don't fell accurate.

Mark Doty

Here And There, Intricacy, Feels

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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 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

Accomplishment, Achievement, Heroism

Mark Doty (2002). “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy”, p.6, Beacon Press

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Mark Doty

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Born: August 10, 1953
Occupation: Poet
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