Mark Doty Visits as 13th Westminster Poet

Award-winning poet Mark Doty visited Westminster April 15 and April 16 as the 13th Westminster Poet. He interacted with students in classroom settings and gave a reading in the Werner Centennial Center. Students and teachers had studied his National Book Award-winning “Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems” (2008) in preparation for his stay.
 

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.
 

During his reading in the Werner Centennial Center, Doty talked about what prompts him to write poems. “Poetry is a way of opening your life to somebody else,” he said. “Poets are most often moved to write when overcome by sorrow or grief.” He ended by reading from his new book, “A Swarm, a Flock, a Host: A Compendium of Creatures” with Darren Waterston, an acclaimed painter known for his silhouettes of animals.
 

During Doty’s visit to classes, students asked him about the origin and meaning of various poems and about his interest in writing. “Writing comes naturally from loving to read,” he explained. In high school, he said he kept a notebook of ideas “swirling inside of me” and “stumbled across poems” he liked. “The language of poetry gets beneath the surface of what if feels to be alive,” he added.” At age 16 after meeting a poet and visiting a poetry center, he said he was struck by how the poet lived and breathed poetry. “I felt like I was invited to join this community, and I did.”
 

Doty likes to write with no intentions in mind. “I write when I get a chance and that can be on a napkin, at the airport or on my cell phone. … I write and see where it takes me. … When starting with an image or an experience, often the writer has a discovery and, hopefully, that energy is communicated to the reader.” With an increased readership of his writing, he said, “It makes me proud people take my work seriously.”
 

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.
 

“Because Mark Doty’s poetry combines narrative accessibility with philosophical depth, his book “Fire to Fire” was a perfect text for high school students to explore,” said head of the English Department Michael Cervas, the holder of the Donald H. Werner Chair in English. “I’ve never had a more rewarding experience of teaching a book of contemporary poems in the two decades we’ve been doing this at Westminster.”
 

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 was born in Maryville, Tenn., and studied at Drake University and Goddard College. He has spent much of his adult life teaching in various colleges and universities as a visiting professor of creative writing. Currently, he teaches at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.
 

Doty’s Westminster visit was made possible through support from the Ford-Goldfarb Fund, which was established in 2005 by former trustee Maureen Ford-Goldfarb and her daughter Kirsten Ford ’00 to support English Department enrichment activities.