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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

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Mark Doty
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: August 10
Poet
Maryville
Tennessee
Thinking
Aspect
Speech
Outside
Common
Language
Stuff
Always
Freeing
Think
Grasp

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What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?
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I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing.
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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.
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No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins.
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Desire can make anything into a god.
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Poetry is an investigation, not an expression, of what you know.
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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.
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We love disasters that have nothing to do with us
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Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.
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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.
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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.
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Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process of knowing by means of language.
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All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes.
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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.
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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.
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We long to connect we fear that if we do, our freedom and individuality will disappear.
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Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.
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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
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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.
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