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Mark Doty is an American poet, a memoirist, and an essayist born in Maryville, Tennessee on August 10, 1953. His writings are seen as helping to revise the traditional AIDS narrative and expand, or even remove, the boundaries that limited the discussion of AIDS and homosexuality. Doty further brings in the themes of love, loss, beauty, and death to a wider and diverse audience.
Doty's father was as an army engineer. His profession and his negative temperament meant that the family had to move around to many different places, such as the suburbs of Florida, southern California, and Arizona. Doty received his B.A. degree from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa and continued on to receive his M.F.A. in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont. It was during this time that he met Wally Roberts, Doty's first serious love and an important presence in much of Doty's works, and they lived together in Manhattan, New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts for 12 years until Roberts passed away due to AIDS. Now Doty lives with his partner Paul Lisickly, a novelist, and is teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Turtle, Swan (1987) is Doty's first collection of poems which is “praised for its simple but lyrical language and candid treatment of gay subject matter” (“Mark Doty”). His second book, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991) was written after Roberts was tested positive for HIV in 1989, and the darker tone shows how this result affected Doty. This collection also won many praises from critics. Doty's style is described as “simple speech” and his poems are said to “work best when he finds his way back and forth between the vernacular and the elegant music of desire and loss" (qtd. in “Poet: Mark Doty”).
Doty's third book, My Alexandria (1993), won the National Poetry Series contest, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry in 1993, and the National Book Critic's Circle Award for Poetry in 1994. He also became the first American to win the T. S. Eliot Prize for best book of poetry published in the United Kingdom in 1995. In this collection, Doty deals with the failing health of Roberts along with his own sense of fear and inability to change the situation. Doty's next book, Atlantis (1995), continues to deal with Roberts' illness and death with a stronger focus on the natural environment of Cape Cod along with the ideas of ruin, death, destruction, and mutability. The collection won the Boston Review Poetry Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Bingham Poetry Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award. This was also the first time that Doty's work was published by a large commercial house.
Heaven's Coast (1996) is Doty's first memoir, and in this book, Doty writes about his relationship with Roberts and how he copes with life after Roberts' death. The book won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Doty's sixth book is Sweet Machine (1998), which tries to move on and explore new territories where he mainly deals with desire, body, and the power of art. Doty then published another memoir, Firebird (1999), which deals with his childhood and his homosexuality as he grew up. In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (2000), Doty further explores the power of art in this nonfiction.
Doty returned to poetry two years later and published Source (2002), which contains his reflections on social issues, as well as School of Arts (2005), which looks at the passage of time and its effects on everyday life. Next is Dog Years (2007), a memoir, in which Doty portrays the relationship between him, Roberts, and their dogs, Arden and Beau, focusing especially on what he learns from the complex bond between humans and their pets. This memoir won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award in 2008. In 2008, Doty published Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, a collection of poems from his previous seven volumes and new ones. This collection won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. Doty's latest volume is Theories and Apparitions (2008).
Works Cited
Hennessy, Christopher Matthew. “Doty, Mark.” glbtq.com. 2004. glbtq. 21 July 2009 <http://www.glbtq.com/literature/doty_m.html>.
“Mark Doty.” LitLinks. 2009. Bedford/St. Martin's. 21 July 2009 <http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/litlinks/Pages/Main.aspx>.
“Poet: Mark Doty.” Poetryfoundation.org. 2009. Poetry Foundation. 21 July 2009 <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=1842>.
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