No such thing, the queen said, as too many sequins. Mark Doty More Quotes by Mark Doty More Quotes From Mark Doty Intimacy, says the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, is the highest value. I resist this statement at first. What about artistic achievement, or moral courage, or heroism, or altruistic acts, or work in the cause of social change? What about wealth or accomplishment? And yet something about it rings true, finally—that what we want is to be brought into relationship, to be inside, within. Perhaps it’s true that nothing matters more to us than that. Mark Doty heroism achievement accomplishment I've been moving a little to the music while I worked ...and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I've been holding myself...Mostly I've been moving cautiously, numbly, steeled because I know, at any moment, I may be ambushed by overwhelming grief. You never know when it's coming, the word or gesture or bit of memory that dissolved you entirely...It happens every day at first, then not for a day or two, then there's a week when grief washes in every morning, every afternoon. Mark Doty morning memories moving It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language. Mark Doty speech stuff thinking What is healing, but a shift in perspectives? Mark Doty perspective healing 'Everything beautiful occurs when the body / is suspended,' Helena Mesa quotes a performance artist who hangs his own pierced body in the air. Mesa's poems are artfully suspended between lyric and narrative, between humans and animals, between Latin America and the U.S., between desire and the difficulty of its fulfillment. Horse Dance Underwater is an inventive, musical, and powerful debut. Mark Doty horse powerful beautiful In Judith Barrington's striking collection, Horses and the Human Soul, human emotions come ushered and accompanied by animal companions, especially the horses this speaker loves. Here they are witnesses, companions to the spirit, and as vulnerably mortal as human beings. Socially and politically alert, lamenting and celebrating, Barrington's passionate poems inscribe the broad range of her affections. Mark Doty horse soul animal ...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art. Mark Doty agency art moving Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce individuality of passion with the dulling universal certainty of platitude. Mark Doty passion pain inspirational We learn to treasure words that people call us; Mark Doty toss hurt people Poetry is ... the physical enactment of a process Mark Doty language knowing mean Desire can make anything into a god. Mark Doty desire ... the attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged here and there, then still don't fell accurate. Mark Doty intricacy here-and-there feels 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. Mark Doty fog play rain I want what everybody wants, that's how I know I'm still breathing. Mark Doty breathing stills want
