Mark Doty

Going to the poetry reading by Mark Doty I was first surprised to see how many people were there for the event, with the room well above maximum capacity, and second I was definitely most surprised with how interesting a writer he turned out to be.  His poems spanned a variety of topics from one of the first ones he read about the writing in a used book and how the simple explanation for complex lines of poetry could really be the answer, to one of the later ones about being on a plane making an emergency landing.

However some of his strongest poems were the ones he had written about animals.  He said he really enjoyed writing poems about animals because, “it is the art of the poet to put words to the wordless,” and he found animals to be the best for this.  He read several poems about animals, from one about his dog to one about a baby mammoth.

One of the most interesting things was definitely when he was telling us about how he was publishing a new book and his editor asked to include some of his older poems from his earlier work.  Doty told us that it was hard for him to look at some of these poems because he was amazed at just how bad some of them actually were and he was embarrassed to actually release some of them.  Some how I found it nice to hear that even a poet of this guy’s caliber could be embarrassed at his work, because it showed we are all rookies at some point.