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When a friend told me that she wanted to read more poetry
and asked for recommendations, I didn't
have to think before I said Atlantis by Mark Doty.
I could have easily said anything by Mark Doty.
In the years since I first spent time with Doty's work,
I keep coming back to his writing,
because in it, I find the world distilled
and transformed by an engaged and an engaging mind.
In his prose meditation The Art of Description, Doty
writes, "Poetry concretizes the singular, unrepeatable moment.
It hammers out a speech of form for how
it feels to be one's self."
He writes this about Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish,"
but it so accurately describes his own writing.
To borrow another image from his prose,
Doty's poetry crystallizes the world
with the exactness of a Dutch still life, vividly
real and accurate, but also stamped
with personality and the unique vision of the artist.
This confluence of world and self
makes Doty's poems difficult to paraphrase or briefly quote.
They function fully as poems, as wholes
that draw us along through linked image
and idea, a continuous train of thought that
invites us to follow closely, to delay
our understanding until we can grasp the whole of it.
And yet it's often those brief, rich images
that linger after reading--
the eerily radiant blue inside of a crab shell, a burning
beauty parlor in the shadow of a highway, the carefulness
and fragility of a domesticated deer's
tongue exploring the speaker's outstretched hand.
Doty writes, "Description is an inexact, loving art,
and a reflexive one.
When we describe the world, we come
closer to saying what we are."
Doty's writing examines and illuminates
both what it observes and the self who observes.
It considers meanings precisely and loves our fleeting world
generously all at once.
A former student of Tucson's own Rincon High School
and the University of Arizona, Mark Doty
is the author of nine collections of poetry
and five volumes of prose.
He's been recognized with numerous grants and awards,
including the 2008 National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New
and Selected Poems and the UK's prestigious T.S.
Eliot Prize for My Alexandria in 1995.
His most recent collection of poetry
is Deep Lane, out earlier this year from Norton,
and we can look forward to a collection
of essays on Walt Whitman, titled What Is the Grass.
Please join me in welcoming Mark Doty.
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