Quotes from Mark Doty

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.

Does the poem reside in experience or in self-consciousness about experience?

My mood settles around me, a wool coat that seems to grow heavier with the months in which I accomplish very little--and then, since the coat is too heavy to allow movement, accomplish nothing at all.

There is a Japanese word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating marks of time's passage: a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it.

Metaphor is a way of knowing the world, and no less a one than other sorts of ways of gaining knowledge.

Who can even imagine what that would mean, for blue to be—well, more? All

Christmas Eve, I give him packages which I open for him, since the bows and paper represent more labor than he could manage: music videos by the Nashville singers he thinks particularly sexy, fleece-lined slippers decorated with images of bacon and eggs, and a book about breeds of dogs. He says he wishes he had something for me to open, but I don't want anything except to have him here. There's nothing more he could give me than his life, right now, his being with me.

Isn't that it, to be yourself and somehow, to belong?

words can help us to see what is graceful or human where lovelines and humanity seem to fail...

We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us.

Like you, like stars, I am retreating year by year, and these rooms seem enough: midnight to north and south, and the mirror I study from this bed filled, in its upper reaches, with silvered light, vacant. bright Absentee Like a fontanel, Emily, like a door, my face, yours, closing. - Late Conversation

To tell a story is to take power over it.

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.

As great poets do, he found a way to transmute the personal wound into something larger.

In the book, he said, the self is fixed, made concrete; the book is the intersection of the soul and time.

Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses. Against which I play out theories, doubts, certainties bright as high tide in sunlight, which shift just as that brightness does, in fog or rain.

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.

Poetry exists to find words for what resists easy naming; we are most often driven to write it or read it when any other sort of language seems incapable of the work required.

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.

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.

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.

It makes you crazy, for something you know to be true, know from the very core or root of you, to remain unspeakable.

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.

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.