Mark Doty

Biography

Mark Doty is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose. Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (Harper, 2008) won the National Book Award, and his earlier collection My Alexandria (Illinois, 1993) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His book of essays on poetic craft, The Art of Description: World into Word (Graywolf, 2010) is widely read and taught. His many other honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

See Work

ESSAYS / Spring 2005

Form, Eros, and the Unspeakable: Whitman’s Stanzas

By Mark Doty

Whitman did not number the fifty-two sections in the 1855 version of the great, free-flowing outpouring that is “Song of Myself,” or even separate them by much. But he must soon have realized the reader’s need for a helpful scaffolding...

POETRY / Winter 2005

School of the Arts

By Mark Doty

The spring the Methodist church 
lost its steeple—no pointy tip 
but a kind of cupola, octagonal