Mark Doty's Blog, page 7

Nantucket, Maggie Conroy's tobacco barn, and Dean Young on the culture of creative writing

Paul and I got stuck on Nantucket (I know, the limerick possibilities immediately spring to mind) this week. Every boat off the island was cancelled due to the high seas and wild wind, but our friend Maggie Conroy graciously came to our rescue. I'd known Maggie a little in Iowa City, when I was teaching there; we used to go to great parties at her and Frank's house. We hadn't seen her for years, and she appeared as a rescuing angel, loaning us her Ford Explorer and welcoming Paul and Ned the ...

Three splendid announcements at once

Teachers have no right to pride, really, when it comes to their students' work. All I can claim to have done is ask questions and make some statements about what I saw in the poems before me. I try to be a friendly, interested advocate for what seems most alive in the work at hand. My ideal is for the writer I'm working with to feel thoroughly SEEN -- that someone (me) is looking very closely at what they've made and are trying to make, and attempting to articulate that project with them.

But ...

In a couple of hours I will be fifty-seven, which is a gi...

In a couple of hours I will be fifty-seven, which is a gigantic relief to me. Fifty-six has been a hard year in general, but it's acquired a particular dark charge because it's the age my mother was when she died, in 1976, of cirrhosis of the liver. At first I thought my aversion to the year was a a kind of magical thinking, but then I learned that if indeed it is I'm not alone with my folly; a number of friends have spoken of their own difficulty in passing through the age of a parent who'd ...

Deep Lane

I took this picture last week, in the late afternoon, in Amagansett, down the road a couple of miles south of our house here. Deep Lane is the most beautiful name for a road I've ever heard, I think: the two monosyllables, the two long vowels, with the higher pitched vibration of the 'e' and the more soothing relaxation of the throat required to produce 'a.' And then there are the suggestions of the words themselves: the road is deep because it dips, just before the patch you see here, but it...

From world to word

I'm happy to report that my little handbook for writers, THE ART OF DESCRIPTION, has just come out from Graywolf, and here's the first review -- a starred notice in PUBLISHERS' WEEKLY. I know it's immodest to pass along one's own reviews, but hey... this project has been a bit of a labor of love, and a while in the making, so I'm happy to see its first reviewer express pleasure in it, and happy to pass these words along:



The Art of Description: World into Word
Mark Doty, Graywolf, $12 (152p)...

In the old cemetery, Amherst

"And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves."

Yesterday my friend Phil Schultz gave a terrific reading ...

Yesterday my friend Phil Schultz gave a terrific reading at Guild Hall in East Hampton, a retrospective performance that moved through his new volume of selected poems -- and thus through a career -- offering a piece or two from each book, then concluding with a suite of new poems in which the breadth and spirit of the work that's come before felt both crystallized and amplified. It was really energizing.

Afterwards, dinner at Town Line Barbeque on Route 27 with a host of poets and artists, a ...

Ruthless furnace

Yesterday we heard that the first balls of tar had appeared on the shore of Key West, at Fort Zachary Taylor Beach, a place we've often been to swim -- as much as one can swim there, where the waves break steeply after traversing deep water and suddenly hitting a narrow shelf of sand. When Paul told me he'd read this -- that oil had moved into the current that would carry it to the Keys, and probably from thence around the tip of Florida and up the east coast, I had a physical response. A shu...

Paul took this picture when I wasn't paying attention yes...

Paul took this picture when I wasn't paying attention yesterday at the Audubon Zoo. We were in the elephant house; outside you can see Jean on the left and Panya on the right. Jean and Panya were wild-captured about forty years ago, when each was around one year old. Jean was a circus performer, Panya a pet; they wound up in the zoo, where they've lived together for more than thirty years. Just after this photo was taken, we fed them a snack -- apples, pears, carrots, and their favorite, corn...