Sofia & Herbert Reuner Library Writers Series & Ellen Robbins Poetry Forum
Sponsored by the Ulster Community College Foundation, The Poetry Forum is an annual event which brings well-known and award-winning poets to SUNY Ulster for intimate question and answer sessions, as well as a special reading of their poetry. In 2007, the program was renamed the Ellen Robbins Poetry Forum to honor the memory of Ellen Robbins (1952-2006) who was on the faculty at SUNY Ulster from 1994 until 2006, and Chair of the English department, 2002-2006.
The SUNY Ulster Herbert H. & Sofia P. Reuner Library Writers Series is a special program begun in 1998, sponsored by The UlsterCommunity College Foundation. Sofia shared her love of the theater, fine arts, and reading with numerous endowments at SUNY Ulster, including student scholarships in the performing and fine arts and the Herbert H. & Sofia P. Reuner Library Writers Series, which brings renowned writers to campus. Sofia passed on July 4, 2023, at the age of 105. Our fond memories of Sofia and the Reuners and their support of SUNY Ulster and our students live on through this writer's series.
Mark Doty
DISTINGUISHED POET & ESSAYIST - NY TIMES BESTSELLING MEMOIRIST - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
Thursday, April 18, 2024, 10:15 am
College Lounge, Vanderlyn Hall
Moderated by Rachael Pompeii, Assistant Professor of English
Mark Doty is the author of nine books of poetry, including Deep Lane (April 2015), Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2008 National Book Award, and My Alexandria, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize in the UK. He is also the author of four memoirs: the New York Times-bestselling What Is the Grass, Dog Years, Firebird, and Heaven’s Coast, as well as a book about craft and criticism, The Art of Description: World Into Word. Doty has received two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize.
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Mark Doty Books
Fire to Fire by
"Fire to Fire should solidify Doty's position as a star of contemporary American poetry. . . . The poems combine close attention to the fragile, contingent things of the world with the constant, almost unavoidable chance of transcendence." -- Publishers Weekly A landmark collection of new and published works by one of our finest poets that is a testament to the clarity and thoughtful lyricism of his poems Fire to Fire collects the best works from seven books of poetry by Mark Doty, acclaimed poet and New York Times bestselling author of two memoirs, Firebird and Dog Years. Doty's subjects--our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives--echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times.
ISBN: 9780060752514Publication Date: 2009
The Art of Description by
"It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see," Mark Doty begins. "But try to find words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf, or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning, or the very beginnings of desire stirring in the gaze of someone looking right into your eyes . . ." Doty finds refuge in the sensory experience found in poems by Blake, Whitman, Bishop, and others.The Art of Descriptionis an invaluable book by one of America's most revered writers and teachers.
ISBN: 9781555975630Publication Date: 2010
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by
"In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon Mark Doty offers a stunning exploration of our attachment to ordinary things - how we invest objects with human store, and why."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 0807066087Publication Date: 2001-01-19
What Is the Grass by
Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman's bold, perennially new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty--a poet, a New Yorker, and an American--keeps company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet's life and work. What is it then between us? Whitman asks. In search of an answer, Doty explores spaces--both external and internal--where he finds the poet's ghost. He meditates on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet's enduring work: a radical experience of transformation and enlightenment, queer sexuality, and an obsession with death, as well as unabashed love for a great city and for the fresh, rowdy character of American speech. In riveting close readings threaded with personal memoir and illuminated by awe, Doty reveals the power of Whitman's persistent presence in his life and in the American imagination at large. How does a voice survive death? What Is the Grass is a conversation across time and space, a study of the astonishment one poet finds in the accomplishment of another, and an attempt to grasp Whitman's deeply hopeful vision of human possibility.
ISBN: 9780393070224Publication Date: 2020-04-14
Deep Lane by
Mark Doty's poetry has long been celebrated for its risk and candor, an ability to find transcendent beauty even in the mundane and grievous, an unflinching eye that--as Philip Levine says--"looks away from nothing." In the poems of Deep Lane the stakes are higher: there is more to lose than ever before, and there is more for us to gain. "Pure appetite," he writes ironically early in the collection, "I wouldn't know anything about that." And the following poem answers: Down there the little star-nosed engine of desire at work all night, secretive: in the morning a new line running across the wet grass, near the surface, like a vein. Don't you wish the road of excess led to the palace of wisdom, wouldn't that be nice? Deep Lane is a book of descents: into the earth beneath the garden, into the dark substrata of a life. But these poems seek repair, finally, through the possibilities that sustain the speaker aboveground: gardens and animals, the pleasure of seeing, the world tuned by the word. Time and again, an image of immolation and sacrifice is undercut by the fierce fortitude of nature: nature that is not just a solace but a potent antidote and cure. Ranging from agony to rapture, from great depths to hard-won heights, these are poems of grace and nobility.
ISBN: 9780393070231Publication Date: 2015-04-06
Dog Years by
A Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year Winner of the Israel Fishman-Stonewall Book Award for Nonfiction "Tender and amusing. . . . Doty brilliantly captures the qualities that make dogs endearing." -- The New Yorker When Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he brings home Beau, a large, malnourished golden retriever in need of loving care. Joining Arden, the black retriever, to complete their family, Beau bounds back into life. Before long, the two dogs become Doty's intimate companions, and eventually the very life force that keeps him from abandoning all hope during the darkest days. Dog Years is a poignant, intimate memoir interwoven with profound reflections on our feelings for animals and the lessons they teach us about living, love, and loss.
ISBN: 9780061171000Publication Date: 2007-03-13
My Alexandria by
This is the first cloth edition of one of the most highly praised and touching collections of poems to appear in recent years. In selecting it for the National Poetry Series, Philip Levine said: "The courage of this book is that it looks away from nothing: the miracle is that wherever it looks it finds poetry. . . . Mark Doty is a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music."
ISBN: 9780252063176Publication Date: 1993-01-01
