Mark Doty Quotes

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

— Mark Doty

“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

“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

“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

“I want what everybody wants,
that's how I know I'm still
breathing ...”

— Mark Doty

“It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.”

— Mark Doty

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

— Mark Doty

And something else, of course; there's always more, deep in art's pockets, far down in the chiaroscuro on which these foodstuffs rest: everything here has been transformed into feeling, as if by looking very hard at an object it suddenly comes that much closer to some realm where it isn't a thing at all but something just on the edge of dissolving. Into what? Tears, gladness-you've felt like this before, haven't you? Taken far inside.

— Mark Doty

“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

In the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.

— Mark Doty

“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

“And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that's as old as I am but suddenly seems unfamiliar, light. I have felt so heavy for so long. At first I felt odd- as if I shouldn't be feeling this lightness, that familiar little catch of pleasure in the heart which is inexplicable, though a lovely passage of notes or the splendidly turned petal of a tulip has triggered it. It's my buoyancy, part of what keeps me alive: happy, suddenly with the concomitant experience of a sonata and the motion of the shadows of leaves. I have the desire to be filled with sunlight, to soak my skin in as much of it as I can drink up, after the long interior darkness of this past season, the indoor vigil, in this harshest and darkest of winters, outside and in.”

— Mark Doty

“No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.”

— Mark Doty

“This is the entrance
To the city of you ...”

— Mark Doty

“Say what you see and you experience yourself through your style of seeing and saying.”

— Mark Doty

“Maybe we should be glad, finally, that the word can't go where the heart can, not completely. It's freeing, to think there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language. Love is common, too, absolutely so-and yet our words for it only point to it; they do not describe it. They are indicators of something immense: the word love is merely a sign that means something like This way to the mountain.”

— Mark Doty

“After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin ... The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don't know how long I held his face and his shoulders and stroked him; as he began to cool I kept my hands on his belly, where the last of his warmth seemed to pool and concentrate. Here the fire of the body came to rest, smoldering longest, down to the last embers.”

— Mark Doty

“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

“A walk is a walk and must be taken; breakfast and dinner come when they are due. The routines of the living are inviolable, no hiatus called on account of misery, spiritual crisis, or awful weather.”

— Mark Doty

“In the museums we used to visit on family vacations when I was a kid, I used to love those rooms which displayed collections of minerals in a kind of closet or chamber which would, at the push of a button, darken. Then ultraviolet lights would begin to glow and the minerals would seem to come alive, new colors, new possibilities, and architectures revealed. Plain stones became fantastic, "futuristic ... " Of course there wasn't any black light in the center of the earth, in the caves where they were quarried; how strange that these stones should have to be brought here, bathed with this unnatural light in order for their transcendent characters to emerge. Irradiation revealed a secret aspect of the world.
Imagine illness as this light; demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible.”

— Mark Doty

Though there's something more
tender, beneath our vanity,
our will to become objects
of desire: we sweat the mark
of our presence onto the cloth.

— Mark Doty

What is memory but a story about how we have lived?

— Mark Doty

One last mystery: on one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They haven't all emerged yet, but new circles tattoo the water, here and there, a coppery red. When the wind lifted their edges, each would reveal a little shadowy spot, a dot of black which seemed to flash on the water, and so across the whole surface of the pond there was what could only be described as the inverse of sparkling; a scintillant blackness. Shining blackly, black but rippling, lyrical: the sheen and radiance of death-in-life.
Is that my work, to point to the world and say, See how darkly it sparkles?

— Mark Doty

“I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of the salt marsh. There was nothing to block the wind that had picked up speed and vigor from its Atlantic crossing. I'd study the stars in their brilliant blazing, the diaphanous swath of the milk Way, the distant glow of Boston backlighting the clouds on the horizon as if they'd been drawn there in smudgy charcoal. I felt, perhaps for the first time, particularly American, embedded in American history, here at the nation's slender tip. Here our westering impulse, having flooded the continent and turned back, finds itself face to face with the originating Atlantic, November's chill, salt expanses, what Hart Crane called the "unfettered leewardings," here at the end of the world.”

— Mark Doty

Under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts,
must have wondered at my impulse to touch her,
which was like touching myself,
the way your own hand feels when you hold it
because you want to feel contained.

— Mark Doty

“Concerning Some Recent Criticism of His Work
-Glaze and shimmer,
luster and gleam;
can't he think of anything
but all that sheen?
-No such thing,
the queen said,
as too many sequins.”

— Mark Doty

“It's a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.”

— Mark Doty

“You can know an animal - or a person, for that matter - in an instant, really, though your understanding can go on unfolding for years.”

— Mark Doty

But in a still life, there is no end to our looking, which has become allied with the gaze of the painter; we look in and in, to the world of things, in their ambiance of cool or warm light, in and in, as long as we can stand to look, as long as we take pleasure in looking.

— Mark Doty

“Christmas Eve, I give him packages which I open for him, since the bows and paper represent more labor than he could manage: music videos by the Nashville singers he thinks particularly sexy, fleece-lined slippers decorated with images of bacon and eggs, and a book about breeds of dogs. He says he wishes he had something for me to open, but I don't want anything except to have him here. There's nothing more he could give me than his life, right now, his being with me.”

— Mark Doty

“However much grief I carried, I liked the way my life was tending, these bright new directions. It's only human, to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once.”

— Mark Doty

“What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing.
It's the same with painting. All I can say of still life must finally fall short; I may inventory, weigh, suggest, but I cannot circumscribe; some element of mystery will always be left out. What is missing is, precisely, its poetry.”

— Mark Doty

“I don't know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or does it live in me?- at the same time as I'm sorrowing. The possibility of consolation, of joy even, does not dispel the sorrow. Sorrow is the cathedral, the immense architecture; in its interior there's room for almost everything; for desire, for flashes of happiness, for making plans for the future ...”

— Mark Doty

Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses. Against which I play out theories, doubts, certainties bright as high tide in sunlight, which shift just as that brightness does, in fog or rain.

— Mark Doty

“Don't go in fear of that which has been looked at again and again. Poets return to the MOON immemorially; it is deeply compelling and we probably won't ever get done with it. The challenge is to look at the familiar without the expected scaffolding of seeing, and the payoff is that such a gaze feels enormously rewarding; it wakes us up, when the old verities are dusted off, the tired approaches set aside.”

— Mark Doty

“What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making gestures from the other side of the glass, which I can't penetrate.
... people can speak out of anything, though the struggle takes years. The problem is, whatever I say about the present feels false-nothing contains it all, or catches the depth of things, or their terrible one-dimensionality.
What am I living on? Someone said the other day, "that old irrepressible-impossible- hope." And I thought no, this doesn't feel like hope. But maybe that's what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. How could we confuse this optimism, when it has nothing to do with expecting things to get better?
Hope has to do with continuing, that's all ... I can imagine now, where I couldn't before, this long erosion of faith, this steady drawing from one's strength, until what's left is tenuous, transparent.”

— Mark Doty

“I'd write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself- like a stairway down into a dark, intimate kiva- where the work of vigil is taking place, the necessary attending. I imagine there's a little fire burning in there, a few steadily glowing embers, and a quiet chant going on, from me, from some singer in me, honoring and accompanying W's soul, which is with him as he is making his passage..there's a leavetaking in process, a movement towards increasing simplicity, away from complexity, activity, expectation. The bout of paranoia, with a childlike quality of being threatened, seems part of that-like a day or two when he couldn't just let go and float on the energies of other people, who are bearing him up-but had to doubt them, struggle. So much better when he can trust and float. There's enough love around him to carry him now ...”

— Mark Doty

Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?

— Mark Doty

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

— Mark Doty

“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

“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

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

— Mark Doty

“'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa's poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. Horse Dance Underwater is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut.”

— Mark Doty

“Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process
of knowing by means of language.”

— Mark Doty

“Desire can make anything into a god.”

— Mark Doty

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

“In Judith Barrington's striking collection, Horses and the Human Soul, human emotions come ushered and accompanied by animal companions, especially the horses this speaker loves. Here they are witnesses, companions to the spirit, and as vulnerably mortal as human beings. Socially and politically alert, lamenting and celebrating, Barrington's passionate poems inscribe the broad range of her affections.”

— Mark Doty

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

What is healing, but a shift in perspectives?

— Mark Doty

“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