Mark Doty

The author of thirteen books of poetry, Jean Valentine continues to delight and surprise new readers and adoring fans. As Adrienne Rich proclaimed, Valentine’s “is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way.” Hear these poems read by poets they continue to inspire, including Michael Burkard, Mark Doty, Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Jody Gladding, David Hinton, Joan Larkin, Anne Marie Macari, Jane Mead, Elizabeth Metzger, Dennis Nurkse, Mary Ruefle, Patrick Rosal, Gerald Stern, Brian Teare and Ocean Vuong. (rmharris)… (more)

Mark Doty's poetry has long been celebrated for its risk and candor, an ability to find transcendent beauty even in the mundane and grievous, an unflinching eye that, as Philip Levine says, looks away from nothing. In the poems of Deep Lane the stakes are higher: there is more to lose than ever before, and there is more for us to gain. "Pure appetite," he writes ironically early in the collection, "I wouldn't know anything about that." And the following poem answers: Down there the little star-nosed engine of desire at work all night, secretive: in the morning a new line running across the wet grass, near the surface, like a vein. Don t you wish the road of excess led to the palace of wisdom, wouldn t that be nice?

Deep Lane is 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 aboveground: gardens and animals, the pleasure of seeing, the world tuned by the word. Time and again, an image of immolation and sacrifice is undercut by the fierce fortitude of nature: nature that is not just a solace but a potent antidote and cure. Ranging from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights, these are poems of grace and nobility.

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 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. The Art of Description, a handbook for writers, appeared in 2011.

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 is Professor/Writer in Residence at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Location: Street: Porter Square Shopping Center Additional: 25 White Street City: Cambridge, Province: Massachusetts Postal Code: 02140 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

"'come celebrate with me:' The Work of Lucille Clifton" features poems—the first she ever wrote in the 1950s to her last in 2010—drafts and manuscripts, letters, previously unseen photographs, and other materials from the monumental poet’s archives, generously on loan to Poets House from Emory University.

"A Compendium of Creatures" exhibits the portfolio of A Swarm, A Flock, A Host: A Compendium of Creatures, the new collaboration from noted artist Darren Waterston and text plates featuring a poem by award-winning writer Mark Doty. The work is a contemporary version of a medieval bestiary, a literary and illustrative form in which a number of known animal species, as well as mythological creatures, are catalogued encyclopedically. Doty’s inspired poems take the place of traditional moralizing allegories. (rmharris)… (more)

The Northshire Poetry Reading Group will meet on Thursday, February 28th at 6pm in our conference room for a discussion of, The Best American Poetry 2012, by David Lehman and Mark Doty. There are so many fine poets to discuss from this collection - Sherman Alexie, Mary Oliver, Paisley Rekdal, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Bruce Snider, and Larissa Szporluk, to name but a few. Please pick up your book and email Claire with a note on some of the poets you'd like to explore at February's meeting!

For more information on the Northshire Poetry Reading Group, please email revclairenorth@mac.com.

Location: Street: 4869 Main St Additional: City: Manchester Center, Province: Vermont Postal Code: 05255 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

Mark Doty; Cathy Park Hong; Galway Kinnell; Philip Levine; Jean Valentine; Elizabeth Willis

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century, wrote more than two dozen books of poetry and seven volumes of essays. A committed feminist and outspoken lesbian, Rich’s poetry brought together the political and the personal. Join Rich’s family, friends and fellow poets for an evening of readings and remembrance. She had “one of the authentic, unpredictable, urgent, essential voices of our time,” wrote W. S. Merwin. W.W. Norton & Company is publishing a posthumous collection, Later Poems: Selected and New 1971–2012, which will be available at the reading. This event is co-sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, W.W. Norton & Company, the Poetry Society of America and the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center. Free (to claim your free tickets, visit www.92y.org/readings (rmharris)… (more)

Tina Chang; Mark Doty; Cornelius Eady; Nick Flynn; Marie Howe; Major Jackson ; Michael Klein; Donna Masini ; Tom Sleigh

Help us celebrate the end of a joyous and program-packed 25th anniversary year with an event honoring our co-founders Stanley Kunitz and Elizabeth Kray. Join us at 12 noon for tours of two current exhibitions: Bettissima: Treasures from the Elizabeth Kray Archives, and A Poet’s Circle (curated by Jason Andrew), featuring paintings by Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell and Jack Tworkov, among many others. Then stay for a reading of The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz from start to finish. Sign up at the event to read one of Kunitz’s poems yourself! With thanks to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Admission free (rmharris)… (more)

MARK DOTY discusses Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems.; ACHY OBEJAS discusses Ruins.

(NOTE: Tickets $5.00 EA / FREE for Educators & Students) DESCRIPTION: Lambda Literary Award–winning authors Doty and Obejas will read from and discuss their latest work. Doty, the celebrated poet and memoirist, has written movingly on love and loss in modern gay life. Obejas, an esteemed Chicago-based journalist, novelist, and translator, writes about the tension between public identity and private experience in the United States and her native Cuba.

Both will address the question: how do writers grapple with questions of social, political, and cultural resonance surrounding the LGBTQ experience? C. C. Carter, Lambda Literary Finalist for Best Lesbian Poetry and director of community and culture for the Center on Halsted, will moderate.

Generously sponsored by The Poetry Foundation and presented in partnership with the Center on Halsted (bookjones)… (more)

Jim Newton; Scott Simon; Ngugi Wa Thiong'o; Douglas Brinkley; Mark Doty; Dava Sobel; Francesca Lia Block; Ulin, David L.; Woods, Paula; Salter Reynolds, Susan

Please plan to join us at UCLA in April 2008 for the 28th annual presentation of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. We'll carry forward a proud tradition that has honored A. Scott Berg, Ray Bradbury, Robert Caro, Joan Didion, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gabriel García Márquez, Allen Ginsberg, Mark Haddon, Anthony Hecht, Seymour Hersh, Tony Hillerman, Christopher Isherwood, Ken Kesey, Milan Kundera, Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Robert Littell, Frank McCourt, David McCullough, Ian McEwan, Larry McMurtry, Tillie Olsen, Walker Percy, Ishmael Reed, Carl Sagan and W.G. Sebald, among many other authors. (claytonhowl)… (more)