What Is the Grass Quotes

“This hour I tell things in confidence.
I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

To publish these lines is, of course, to tell everybody. Much as he wants to take us into his confidence, seduce with the warmth and directness of his voice, he's also making one of his sly jokes: he's created an intimacy with all the doors and windows open, in which you could be anyone at all. Even as I laugh at the line, I feel the gesture of his arm around my shoulder, drawing my ear nearer his mouth. What is the difference, in a poem, between performed intimacy and the real thing? What, in a work of art, is not performed? Whitman, perhaps more than any poet before him, explored and exploited poetry's strange duality. In the best poems, we feel the poet's breath, the almost-physical presence of the speaker created by all the tools at the writer's disposal. I sometimes feel that Walt has just walked into the room, as present now as he ever was, a sensual, breathing body that he somehow seems to have constructed of nothing but words.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“When the Self dissolves into a world of separate selves and death becomes real, love becomes a pact with grief; what is gained then is the inescapability poignant fact of individuality. There will never be another you, and I love the stubborn particularity of you because you will disappear.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“I imagine many urban dwellers love this feeling, that moment when you step out of your building and whatever has preoccupied you goes flapping away like a burst of pigeons rising all at once, wing and wind carrying them out into this pulsing, indifferent life.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“I need to be invited onto the back of a motorcycle and taken somewhere unfamiliar now and then; I welcome a degree of disruption, need a curtain pulled back, a hallway leading into some part of the world I've never seen.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“It makes you crazy, for something you know to be true, know from the very core or root of you, to remain unspeakable.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“Where on earth did it come from? You can ask that question of any poem, and one inevitable answer is a simple one: work. No made thing springs up unbidden, even those that seem to. The poem that announced itself to the intoxicated Coleridge, before a knock at the door banished most of it from his memory, or the composition that sprung full blown into the head of Mozart, as he stepped down from a carriage after a satisfying dinner, seemed to pour from the artist's hand, so long schooled those hands had become. But years of labor inform those spontaneous productions. Though a poem over which one struggles may seem labored, it often prepares the way for new writing in which what's been learned emerges with an effortless grace.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“The dead are not lost, but in circulation; they are involved in the present, in active participation. Bits of them are streaming through your hand and mine, just as language is circulating through us. Lexicon and materiality forever move onward and outward in the continuous wheeling expansion this world is. This is no mere philosophical proposition on Whitman’s part, not an intellectual understanding but a felt actuality. We are alive forever in the endless circulation of matter. Nothing luckier, stranger, or more beautiful could ever happen. There is no better place.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“What does being on earth ask of us? The world wants to be rescued from evanescence, to be translated into an immaterial realm that does not perish because it was never exactly alive. To become, in other words, poetry--either in the poem the poet writes out of engagement with things, or in the interior "poem" of anyone who loves the world, the never-said words we come, over time, to carry within us.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“And my work in this life?
None of this will go unrecorded. I will see and say all of it, as clearly and deeply as I can, re-entering, lifting experience in the direction of another dimension of time, where everything I have loved can be known again, more fully, that my joy in it might increase as I take the measure of what I have lost. And my grief may increase as well; Alex and I loved each other, and held together through a troubled and volatile relation as best we could, and in a while we ended it. I truly wish him every good in this life. Sweet hell? Maybe, but so be it.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“For a spirit that roamed restlessly, entering into every jot of the teeming life around him, stillness must have held a deep allure. If you are everything and everywhere, how restful it must seem to be no one and no where.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“Or, when an artist hungry for validation finally receives some, there's a temptation to play to those who offered it, and with that comes the risk of imitating oneself, producing paler, anemic versions of the vital art that you made with no notion of where it was headed, before you'd made anything to imitate.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“Those lists of men in Whitman's papers--a collector's catalog, a record of the body's travels? How else will I know the world, if not by touching as much of it as possible, finding in the bodies of my lovers and fellows my coordinates?”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“We were collectively defining our identities by what we would not do, and such an act of definition can be a strange, subtle sort of self-murder. I understand that such a radical act might be necessary, in the face of an intractable self-destructiveness, to save one's life. But I can't bring myself to embrace it, because in any such act of self definition (I'm Mark and I'm an addict) the other selves, some of whom are not named because they don't belong in this context, and some of whom aren't named because they cannot be, but remain phantoms, potentialities, shadows, little streams into the larger liquidity--well, all those aspects of oneself are more or less banished from the conversation, and they retreat a little farther away, and then a little farther again.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“I didn't judge; it was as if that were part of my purpose: I wanted to know the men who moved through my nights like passing comets, wanted them to feel the pleasure of being known.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“...you need to both remember where love leads and love anyway; you can both see the end of desire and be consumed by it all at once.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“It thrills me that I don't know why; the fact that poems do things they should not be able to do, through means not fully apprehensible--well, it makes me treasure them all the harder.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“Unspeakable"--unspeakability?--comes in three varieties.
First, that which cannot be said because one does not know it, and therefore cannot say it.
Second, that which cannot be spoken because it is culturally impermissible to do so.
And third, that which cannot be named because it is impossible, since the language provides no terms, no words to enable articulation.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“The life of the poem might be extended in ways you cannot know, and continue in a world so far from yours as to be nearly unimaginable. The circle that is the outer edge of your life extends, and goes on extending.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“We don't have a good vocabulary for these experiences. They come in variations and degrees, from a slight apprehension of the strangeness of being to the ravishing dissolution of boundaries called enlightenment. A mystical experience, a peak experience, a blurring or merge between self and other, a liberation from the limits of space and time.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“In the book, he said, the self is fixed, made concrete; the book is the intersection of the soul and time.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“As great poets do, he found a way to transmute the personal wound into something larger.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

“We know that energy cannot be destroyed, but goes shape-shifting through the world. What was once in some portion that star is me now, and later I may be some strong supporting cells in the neck of an August lily, or the glint in the stem of a new-blown piece of glass. If our lot is mutability of form, then why be surprised that our energies might not be refracted and recurrent in the world.”
― Mark Doty, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life