The Price of Gleaming

A poem by Mark Doty, which I have loved for a long time, has been used in a very ugly way. He's blogged about it here.

And, this morning, Mark posted a link to a fine post about the situation in the New Yorker blog, which included links to both the poem itself and to a gorgeous, illuminating essay by Mark about the writing of it.

All this has brought me back to his work (which wasn't hard, his amazing Fire to Fire: new and selected poems is one of those books that I keep sitting on the top of my filing cabinet behind me, so that I can easily reach it if I need to read poetry that will help wake up my language and clear my mind). I think that spending time with Mark's poetry is something that creates change in this chaotic world, or at least in the reader, in me. It's a good moment for that, for sure.

A while ago, I syndicated Mark's blog on lj, so if you'd like to read his posts on your friendslist, you can add it here.