Mark Doty
Acclaimed Poet & Memoirist
National Book Award Winner
"Doty's elegiac tendency is aided by his dazzling, tactile grasp of the world." —New York Times
“With his clarity of vision and great heart, Doty stands among us an emblematic and shining presence.” —Stanley Kunitz
“A new book of poems—or of anything—by Mark Doty is good news in a dark time. The precision, daring, scope, elegance of his compassion and of the language in which he embodies it are a reassuring pleasure.” —W. S. Merwin
"One of the things that has been constant about Mark Doty's work, poetry and prose, is his intense search for the exact word or phrase, of whatever issue, which lead him (and us) into the very furnace of meaning within the human story." —Mary Oliver
Mark Doty, the only American poet to have won Great Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, is the author of seven books of poems. The first, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. His collection, My Alexandria (1993), received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis (1995); Sweet Machine (1998); Source (2001); and the critically acclaimed volume of poems, School of the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005). Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems was published, and won the National Book Award for 2008.
Listen to Mark Doty discuss Fire to Fire
Doty is the author of three memoirs: Heaven's Coast (1996), Firebird (1999), and Dog Years (2007), as well as The Art of Description: World Into Word, a volume in the popular "Art of" series, a line of books intended to reinvigorate the practice of craft and criticism. His interest in the visual arts is evident not only in his poems but also in his book-length essay “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon” (2001).
In addition to the National Book Award, Doty has also received two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize. As the award citation for the last of these noted, "Mark Doty's poems extend the range of the American lyric." Doty was recently elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Gerald Stern says, "Mark Doty writes with absolute exactitude, with one eye on the ideal or absolute and one on the real; the ghost of Walt Whitman on one hand, and a laundromat on 16th Street in New York, on the other. There is not a finer, more delicate, more sublime poet writing today in the English language. It's a poet's job to show us what we knew but never saw before; and it's a poet's job to tell us over and over what love is. Doty is this poet." Philip Levine remarks, “If it were mine to invent the poet to complete the century of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, I would create Mark Doty just as he is, a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music.”
Doty teaches at Rutgers University, and is a frequent guest at Columbia University, Hunter College, and NYU.
About FIRE TO FIRE: NEW & SELECTED POEMS (2008)
National Book Award winner, Fire to Fire, collects the best of Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, the dignity of the powerless, the instructive presence of animals, and art's ability to give shape to human lives: Doty's subjects echo and develop across 20 years of poems that speak to the crises and possibilities of our times.
About DOG YEARS: A MEMOIR (2007)
"To be loved by Doty, as a human or a canine, is to be elevated into a realm of utter glory, where one is cherished and cradled, sheltered and supported, and, most of all, where one's very essence is acknowledged and appreciated in a manner both simple and sublime. In his latest elegant and elegiac memoir, poet Doty recounts how the love of two dogs, Arden and Beau, sustained him during times of his most grievous losses, and how he, in turn, came to nurse them through their inevitable years of failing health. On the brink of a life-threatening depression, Doty recognized the necessity of caring for his beloved dogs, which then metamorphosed into a life-affirming realization that he was, in fact, the one being attended. Sprinkled among poignant and merry anecdotes about typical and peculiar doggie behavior are Doty's tender yet cogent reflections on the underlying truths such conduct reveals about the canine species, observations that transcendently celebrate the essential connection between man and pet."—Carol Haggas, Booklist
