Fire to Fire

"For the first decade of my working life, I taught in schools. A friend asked me to chaperone a group of her students who were going to a poetry festival. I reluctantly agreed. At the festival, Mark Doty read two or three poems. When he was finished, I thought, ‘I want to learn to do that!’ Doty is an exquisite image-maker. His language is so precise and lush. He allows himself to linger over his descriptions, and his poems emerge out of that careful attention. I have never written a poem as beautiful as any one of his poems. But his work is not all shine (or sequins, as he says in one poem addressed to his critics). I love even more than the rendered image, the engaged, inquisitive mind that animates his vision. The poems are not just conscious but self-conscious; they are inhabited by a soul that is not simply talking to some specific other or many others but also talking to itself. The body of Doty’s work is profoundly moving – many of the early poems having been written in the midst of the Aids epidemic – but the poems are also funny and self-deprecating. There is nothing Mark Doty does not do well!"