The Art of Description Quotes

“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, The Art of Description: World into Word

“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, The Art of Description: World into Word

“What is memory but a story about how we have lived?”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“It’s true that words are arbitrary things, assigned to their objects in slippery ways, and that we cannot rely on words to convey to another person what it is like to be ourselves.”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“Here are six principles of figurative speech:

1. To say what we see is to speak figuratively.
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2. Figures work together to form a network of sense.
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3. Figuration is a form of self-portraiture.
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4. Metaphor introduces tension and polarity to language.
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5. Metaphor's distancing aspect may allow us to speak more freely.
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6. Metaphor is an act of inquiry (not an expession of what we already know.”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“Poetry's project is to use every aspect of language to its maximum effectiveness, finding within it nuances and powers we otherwise could not hear. So the poet needs to be a supreme handler of the figurative speech we all use each day, employing language's tendency to connect like and disparate things to the richest possible effects. In poetry, figuration is at its most sophisticated: condensed, alive with meaning, pointing in multiple directions at once. And it's crucial to notice that simile and metaphor are. not simply ornamental devices, like frosting on the cake of sense. Far from being just ways to make meaning seem more attractive, figurative speed itself means, and means intensely. It's one of the poet's primary tools for conveying the texture of experience, and for inquiring into experience in search of meaning.”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“What descriptions - or good ones, anyway - actually describe then is consciousness, the mind playing over the world of matter, finding there a glass various and lustrous enough to reflect back the complexities of the self that's doing the looking..”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“When our imagination meets a mind decidedly not like ours, our own nature is suddenly called into question. We place our own eye beside that of the fish in order to question our own way of seeing. Consciousness can't be taken for granted when there are, plainly, varieties of awareness. The result is an intoxicating undertainty. ... Perhaps the dream of lyric poetry is not just to represent states in the mind, but to actually provoke them in the reader.”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“Self-forgetful concentration is precisely what happens in the artistic process- an absorption of the moment, a pouring of the self into the now. ... That is what artistic work and child's play have in common; both, at their fullest, are experiences of being lost in the present, entirely occupied.”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“In this lyric time we cease to be aware of forward movement; lyric is concerned. neither with impingement of the past nor with anticipation of events to come. It represents instead a slipping out of story and into something still more fluid, less linear: the interior landscape of reverie. This sense of time originates in childhood, before the conception of causality and the solidifying of our temporal sense into an orderly sort of progression.

Such a state of mind is "lyric" not because it is musical, but because we are seized by a moment that suddenly seems edgeless, unbounded.”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“Poetry concretizes the singular, unrepeatavle moment; it hammers out of speech a form for how it feels to be oneself”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word

“Who can even imagine what that would mean, for blue to be—well, more? All”
― Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word