Mark Doty
Poet-in-Residence

Poetry Reading
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
7 p.m., Bucknell Hall

A Conversation with Mark Doty
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
4 p.m., Willard Smith Library, Vaughan Literature Building

 

 

Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His eight books of poems include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven's Coast, Firebird and Dog Years, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007. Doty's poems have appeared in many magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. Widely anthologized, his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections. Doty's work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Doty lives in New York City and on the east end of Long Island. He teaches at Rutgers University.

 

 

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Mark Doty

Theory of Marriage (The Hug)

 

Arden would turn his head toward the one

he loved, Paul or me, and look downward,

and butt the top of his skull against us, leaning forward,

hiding his face, disappearing into what he'd chosen.

 

Beau had another idea. He'd offer his rump

for scratching, and wag his tail while he was stroked,

returning that affection by facing away, looking out

toward whatever might come along to enjoy.

 

Beau had no interest in an economy of affection;

why hoard what you can give away?

Arden thought you should close your eyes

to anything else; only by vanishing

 

into the beloved do you make it clear:

what else is there you'd want to see?

 

 

from Fire to Fire (2008)