Award-winning poet and memoirist Mark Doty addressed students at an afternoon master class followed by an evening reading of his work at the College of Saint Elizabeth (CSE), on Monday, April 7, 2008. Mr. Doty’s visit to the College campus was sponsored by the CSE Sister Alice Lubin Fund and the 21st Century Fund.

Mark Doty (Photo by Margaretta Mitchell) 

Approximately 50 students and faculty members attended the master class session held in the Mahoney Library, Octagon. Mr. Doty shared with participants that poetry is more than one thing happening at once.  “Poetry wants to honor the complexity of feeling,” he explains.  Speaking as a writer but communicating as a teacher, Mr. Doty described that a poem comes from a secret place. In addressing revisions of a poet’s work, he received laughs from the students when he told them that “revision gets a bad rap with young writers,” he jokes, “let yourself keep changing, keep playing.”

CSE English professor Beatrice Kingston commented, “I thought Mark Doty was both engaging and inspiring as he guided the audience through the workings of his own mind in composing the poem ‘Signal,’ and then responded to questions from writers among us. I felt we were in the company of a master teacher and only wished we could have continued through other poems.”

The visit continued into the evening with CSE President Sister Francis Raftery welcoming 200 people in Dolan Performance Hall in Annunciation Center. In her introduction of Mr. Doty, CSE Professor of English Laura Winters said, “I find in Mark Doty’s work a mature wisdom about human suffering, personal responsibility, enchantment, glamour, beauty and the glory of the natural world.” The author of poems, memoirs and essays, Mr. Doty is the only American poet honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize from Great Britain.

Mr. Doty shared the mature wisdom of his work by serenely introducing, passionately reading, and eloquently commenting on each piece at the event’s conclusion.  The magnitude of his work includes beauty, suffering, death, courage and compassion.

CSE Women’s College English major Katy Hume, ’11, stated the evening’s affair was “absolutely beautiful.”  One of the several poems Mr. Doty read was “Charlie Howard’s Descent;” a poem about a homosexual boy thrown off a bridge and murdered by three teenagers.  Ms. Hume said, “There was so much emotion when he used the words ‘blesses his killers in a way that only the dead can afford to forgive.’” 

Mr. Doty’s work is obviously read, studied and appreciated by very young readers also.  Rose Porpora, English teacher at Chatham High School, brought 17 freshmen students to hear Mr. Doty because they are currently studying this particular poem.
When asked if he has a favorite work of his own, Mr. Doty commented that it is the one he is currently working on.

Story written by Valerie Martin for The Station newspaper.