Mark Doty Named 13th Westminster Poet

Westminster’s English Department has announced that Mark Doty has accepted an invitation to become the 13th Westminster Poet. Students and teachers will read and study Doty’s National Book Award-winning “Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems” (2008) to prepare for his visit to campus next spring from April 14-16.
 

Following the success of last year’s visit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Doty will spend two days on campus interacting with students in classroom settings. His major reading will take place in Werner Centennial Center at 7:30 p.m. on April 15.
 

Doty is the highly acclaimed author of 12 books of poetry and three memoirs, including the New York Times-bestseller “Dog Years,” 2007, which won the American Library Association’s Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award in 2008.
 

From the very beginning with the publication of “Turtle, Swan” in 1987, Doty has struck readers as a very special poet, a poet who can look with unflinching honesty at the darkest aspects of life on earth, but a poet whose pitch-perfect language and graceful forms can also capture the beauty of earthly life. As Doty himself writes, “I have devoted myself to affirmation.”
 

W. S. Merwin writes of Doty, “A new book of poems—or of anything—by Mark Doty is good news in a dark time. The precision, daring, scope, elegance of his compassion and of the language in which he embodies it are a reassuring pleasure.” Doty’s poems often begin in clear, careful and startling observations of the ordinary world in which we all live. But almost always they end in sublime transformations, in big truths, and in pure music. As Philip Levine puts it, “The courage of [Doty’s poetry] is that it looks away from nothing; the miracle is that wherever it looks it finds poetry.”
 

Doty was born in Maryville, Tenn., in 1953, studied at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and Goddard College in Vermont, and has spent much of his adult life teaching in various colleges and universities as a visiting professor of creative writing, most recently at the University of Houston where he taught alongside of former Westminster Poet Tony Hoagland.
 

Doty was the first American poet to win the £10,000 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 1995 for his book “My Alexandria.” He has also won a National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Los Angeles Times Award for Poetry and the Whiting Writers’ Award. Currently, Doty teaches at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and lives in New York City and in Provincetown, Mass.
 

Doty’s Web page http://www.markdoty.org provides additional information about him and his work, including new poems and essays, and a number of video and audio links to readings and interviews.
 

The following sample poems provide a preview for what promises to be one of the best visits by a Westminster Poet ever.
 
 

In the Community Garden
 

It’s almost over now,

late summer’s accomplishment,

and I can stand face to face
 

with this music,

eye to seed-paved eye

with the sunflowers’ architecture:
 

such muscular leaves,

the thick stems’ surge.

Though some are still
 

shiningly confident,

others can barely

hold their heads up;
 

their great leaves wrap the stalks

like lowered shields. This one

shrugs its shoulders;
 

this one’s in a rush

to be nothing but form.

Even at their zenith,
 

you could see beneath the gold

the end they’d come to.

So what’s the use of elegy?
 

If their work

is this skyrocket passage

through the world,
 

is it mine to lament them?

Do you think they’d want

to bloom forever?
 

It’s the trajectory they desire—

believe me, they do

desire, you could say they are
 

one intent, finally,

to be this leaping

green, this bronze haze
 

bending down. How could they stand

apart from themselves

and regret their passing,
 

when they are a field

of lifting and bowing faces,

faces ringed in flames?
 
 

Golden Retrievals
 

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention

seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.

Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh

joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then
 

I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue

of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?

Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,

thinking of what you can never bring back,
 

or else you’re off in some fog concerning

—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:

to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,

my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark
 

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,

entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.
 
 

Brilliance
 

Maggie’s taking care of a man

who’s dying; he’s attended to everything,

said goodbye to his parents,
 

paid off his credit card.

She says Why don’t you just

run it up to the limit?
 

but he wants everything

squared away, no balance owed,

though he misses the pets
 

he’s already found a home for

—he can’t be around dogs or cats,

too much risk. He says,

She says, A bowl of goldfish?

He says he doesn’t want to start
 

with anything and then describes

the kind he’d maybe like,

how their tails would fan
 

to a gold flaring. They talk

about hot jewel tones,

gold lacquer, say maybe
 

they’ll go pick some out

though he can’t go much of anywhere and then

abruptly he says I can’t love
 

He says it like he’s had enough

of the whole scintillant world,
 

though what he means is

he’ll never be satisfied and therefore

has established this discipline,
 

a kind of severe rehearsal.

That’s where they leave it,

him looking out the window,
 

her knitting as she does because

she needs to do something.

Later he leaves a message:
 

Meaning: let me go, if I have to,

in brilliance. In a story I read,
 

a Zen master who’d perfected

his detachment from the things of the world

remembered, at the moment of dying,
 

a deer he used to feed in the park,

and wondered who might care for it,

and at that instant was reborn
 

in the stunned flesh of a fawn.

So, Maggie’s friend—

is he going out
 

into the last loved object

of his attention?

Fanning the veined translucence
 

of an opulent tail,

undulant in some uncapturable curve,

is he bronze chrysanthemums,
 

copper leaf, hurried darting,

doubloons, icon-colored fins

troubling the water?