Quotessence
Home / Books / What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

Book by Mark Doty · 10 quotes · Intimacy, Love, Poem

Filter quotes by topic

AllIntimacyLovePoemPoetPoetryDualityGriefSexArtistAuthorDeathEndingHeartbreakIdentityIndividualityInspirationInvisibilityLetting GoLifeLoss

What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life Quotes

“And my work in this life? None of this will go unrecorded. I will see and say all of it, as clearly and deeply as I can, re-entering, lifting experience in the direction of another dimension of time, where everything I have loved can be known again, more fully, that my joy in it might increase as I take the measure of what I have lost. And my grief may increase as well; Alex and I loved each other, and held together through a troubled and volatile relation as best we could, and in a while we ended it. I truly wish him every good in this life. Sweet hell? Maybe, but so be it.”

LoveLossGriefLetting GoEnding
Book:What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
Create image

“This hour I tell things in confidence. I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you. To publish these lines is, of course, to tell everybody. Much as he wants to take us into his confidence, seduce with the warmth and directness of his voice, he's also making one of his sly jokes: he's created an intimacy with all the doors and windows open, in which you could be anyone at all. Even as I laugh at the line, I feel the gesture of his arm around my shoulder, drawing my ear nearer his mouth. What is the difference, in a poem, between performed intimacy and the real thing? What, in a work of art, is not performed? Whitman, perhaps more than any poet before him, explored and exploited poetry's strange duality. In the best poems, we feel the poet's breath, the almost-physical presence of the speaker created by all the tools at the writer's disposal. I sometimes feel that Walt has just walked into the room, as present now as he ever was, a sensual, breathing body that he somehow seems to have constructed of nothing but words.”

PoetryPoetPoemIntimacyDualityPerformanceWalt WhitmanWhitman
Book:What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
Create image

“Where on earth did it come from? You can ask that question of any poem, and one inevitable answer is a simple one: work. No made thing springs up unbidden, even those that seem to. The poem that announced itself to the intoxicated Coleridge, before a knock at the door banished most of it from his memory, or the composition that sprung full blown into the head of Mozart, as he stepped down from a carriage after a satisfying dinner, seemed to pour from the artist's hand, so long schooled those hands had become. But years of labor inform those spontaneous productions. Though a poem over which one struggles may seem labored, it often prepares the way for new writing in which what's been learned emerges with an effortless grace.”

WritingInspirationPoetryArtistPoetPoemAuthorOn Writing
Book:What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
Create image

“What does being on earth ask of us? The world wants to be rescued from evanescence, to be translated into an immaterial realm that does not perish because it was never exactly alive. To become, in other words, poetry--either in the poem the poet writes out of engagement with things, or in the interior "poem" of anyone who loves the world, the never-said words we come, over time, to carry within us.”

LifePoetryPoetPoem
Book:What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
Create image

“We were collectively defining our identities by what we would not do, and such an act of definition can be a strange, subtle sort of self-murder. I understand that such a radical act might be necessary, in the face of an intractable self-destructiveness, to save one's life. But I can't bring myself to embrace it, because in any such act of self definition (I'm Mark and I'm an addict) the other selves, some of whom are not named because they don't belong in this context, and some of whom aren't named because they cannot be, but remain phantoms, potentialities, shadows, little streams into the larger liquidity--well, all those aspects of oneself are more or less banished from the conversation, and they retreat a little farther away, and then a little farther again.”

IdentitySelf Definition
Book:What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
Create image