Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--



Mark Doty at The Academy of American Poets

Interview with Mark Doty in Poets and Writers:

One can try to make broad claims about the character of American poetry, but such attempts are always complicated by the wonderful contradictions of history and of individual character. If one thinks broadly of Whitman and Dickinson as the parents of American poetry-or perhaps, more accurately, its queer uncle and aunt?-then certain American characteristics come to the fore, predicting a poetry that could be expansive, exuberant, inclusive, skeptical, concerned with the possibility of personal revelation, and faithful that there is meaning to be found in experience. Both are interested in the forging of a voice, the creation and expression of a coherent character on the page, one who acts in the work, who does the work of inquiring into experience.

I, for one, am hungry to read poems of American life now, in all its messy complications, with its terrors and uncertainties and possible grounds for hope.

Mark Doty and Sharon Olds

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