Saturday, July 21, 7:30pm
San Francisco Zen Center City Center
300 Page Street, San Francisco
Patricia Hampl, in Commonweal, writes that Doty is “poised on exact perception. When he sees the ocean–the salt spray hits you.”
Mark will read from his poems and discuss and read selections from What is the Grass, his forthcoming book-length prose meditation on Walt Whitman, desire, the ecstatic, and the limits of the body.
“With his clarity of vision and great heart, Doty stands among us an emblematic and shining presence.” – Stanley Kunitz
“It’s a poet’s job to show us what we knew but never saw before; and it’s a poet’s job to tell us over and over what love is. Doty is this poet.” – Gerald Stern
Mark’s reading is in conjunction with Deepening the Poem, a poetry retreat led by Mark and and Jeremy Levie at Tassajara from July 22-27.
Mark Doty is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, winner of the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry. His eight books of poems and four books of nonfiction prose have been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award and, in the United Kingdom, the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Doty has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
He lives in New York City and on the east end of Long Island. He is a Professor of English at Rutgers University.