Poet Mark Doty to Read at Goddard College
January 6, 2016 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm EST
Haybarn Theatre at Goddard College, 123 Pitkin Rd., Plainfield, VT 05667
Praised by the New York Times for his “dazzling, tactile grasp of the
world,” award-winning poet, Goddard alumnus (MFA ’80) and former faculty
member Mark Doty reads from his work. Free and open to the public. Book
signing to follow. Presented by Goddard’s MFA in Creative Writing
Program’s Visiting Writers‘ Series.
Mark Doty is the author of three memoirs: the New York Times-bestselling Dog
Years (HarperCollins, 2007), Firebird (1999), and Heaven’s Coast (1997), as
well as a book about craft and criticism, The Art of Description: World Into
Word, part of the popular “Art of” series published by Graywolf Press.
Throughout his writings, he shows special interest in the visual arts, as is
evident in his poems and also in his book-length essay, Still Life with
Oysters and Lemon (2001). He is currently at work on a memoir that centers on
his poetic relationship with Walt Whitman, entitled What Is the Grass.
He is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Deep Lane (W.W.
Norton, 2015), a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into
the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through
the possibilities that sustain the speaker above ground: art and ardor,
animals and gardens, the pleasure of seeing, the world tuned by the word.
Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems was published in 2008 and won the
National Book Award for that year—in their citation, the National Book
Award judges wrote, “Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty’s
poems in Fire to Fire gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion.
With their praise for the world and their fierce accusation, their defiance
and applause, they combine grief and glory in a music of crazy excelsis.”
Doty is the first American poet to have won Great Britain’s T. S. Eliot
Prize, for My Alexandria (1993), which also received both the Los Angeles
Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other
collections of poetry include: Turtle, Swan (1987); Atlantis (1995); Sweet
Machine (1998); Source (2001); and the critically acclaimed volume, School of
the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005).
Former US Poet Laureate Philip Levine remarked, “If it were mine to invent
the poet to complete the century of William Carlos Williams and Wallace
Stevens, I would create Mark Doty just as he is, a maker of big, risky,
fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music.” And Mary
Oliver said: “One of the things that has been constant about Mark Doty’s
work, poetry and prose, is his intense search for the exact word or phrase,
of whatever issue, which lead him (and us) into the very furnace of meaning
within the human story.”
In addition to the National Book Award, Doty has also received two NEA
fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, a Lila
Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize. As the award
citation for the last of these noted, “Mark Doty’s poems extend the range
of the American lyric.” In 2011 Doty was elected a Chancellor of the
Academy of American Poets.
Doty is a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, and also teaches in
NYU’s low-residency MFA program in Paris.
Learn more at http://www.goddard.edu/event/mark-doty-poetry-reading/
United States